Open source news for your reading pleasure.
April 26 - May 2, 2014, 2014
In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the open source Facebook animation library Pop, Red Hat's acquisition of Ceph, and more.
What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section and follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.
Facebook open sources Paper animation library
At yesterday's F8 Conference, Facebook engineering manager Scott Goodson discussed the company's practice of sharing its learnings with the open source community. This included a look at the Pop animation engine, used to power the social network's news-centric mobile app Paper. Pop joins Facebook's other open source libraries, so that developers can now utilize its smooth card-flipping visuals in their own apps. Check it out on GitHub.
Ceph finds a new home
Ceph, the distributed object, block, and file system storage solution that underlies many public and private cloud offerings, is under a new roof. Inktank, the company behind Ceph, was acquired this week by Red Hat. The acquisition puts Ceph and GlusterFS, another distributed file system with a somewhat different technical underpinning, together in the same house. While a convergence of the two technologies won't be overnight, the two open source filesystems' complimentary strengths will almost certainly advance software-defined storage in the datacenter in coming years, an important component for open source clouds like OpenStack.
AMD and Mentor Graphics join Yocto Project Advisory Board
The Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation project focused on creating Linux-based systems for embedded computing products, announced that AMD and Mentor Graphics Corporation are becoming "gold-level" members and will sit on the project's advisory board. What does that mean, exactly? For starters, it means that more AMD processors will meet the Yocto Project Compliance Program, providing more streamlined workflows, standards, tools, and practices for developers. Access to Sourcery CodeBench, a toolkit from Mentor Graphics that includes an integrated development environment, compiler, and debugging tools, will be provided.
Libre Designer marketplace to support FOSS development
Graphic designer Roberto Delgado is hoping to crowdsource a royalty-free design and graphics repository, but with a twist: 20% of the sales will be donated back to the free and open software used to create the artwork. In addition to supporting tools like Inkscape, GIMP, and Scribus, the Libre Designer project will also include tutorials on using the software to create and publish new artwork.
Mozilla revamps Firefox with a brand new design
The non-profit company released Firefox 29, and with it a sleek new design, more customization options, and additional cross-browser syncing functionality. This post at ReadWrite outlines some of the major differences between versions, including the Firefox menu's move over to the right corner of the toolbar and the minimalistic curved tabs. The open source browser has fallen to third place in desktop market share behind Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer, though concerns this week about a major security flaw in IE caused many people to seek alternatives.
Hat tip to Opensource.com moderator Robin Muilwijk and staffer Jason Baker for sharing some of these news articles with me this week.
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