Automated Compliance Tooling project announced, Code California launches, Tor funding, and more news

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In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look open source compliance projects coming together, California launching an open source code site, the Tor Project opening its books, and more.

Open source compliance projects join up

When you think of open source projects, the first thing that comes to mind is probably code. There's more to it than that. One vital aspect of open source that doesn't get a lot of attention is license compliance. That could change, thanks to the ACT project that the Linux Foundation is launching.

Short for Automated Compliance Tooling, ACT brings together four compliance projects: FOSSology, QMSTR, SPDX Tools, and Tern. The goal of ACT, according to the Linux Foundation, is to "consolidate investment in, and increase interoperability and usability of, open source compliance tooling." In the end, this will help users and companies more easily "find up-to-date and current compliance documentation."

Code California open source site launched

The state of California is embracing open source with its recently announced Code California platform. Billed as "central platform for finding California government open source software projects," Code California aims to foster reuse of code developed by state departments. It also aims to make "open source software publicly available to developers who can also contribute to more stable and secure products."

The site is currently sparse, as the state is compiling an inventory of the software that can be reused. Once that's done, the code will be posted to "to a public-facing open-source code-sharing platform" and catalogued on the Code California site for easier access.

You can learn more at platform's website or at the project's GitHub repositories.

Tor Project details its funding

And almost half of the project's budget comes from the private sector, according to their latest report. That's good news for some in the free and open source software world, since Tor "has been financed primarily through US government funds," which has raised red flags in certain circles.

The report points out that Mozilla and search engine DuckDuckGo have been major contributors to Tor's $4.2 million in funding. But the project has also received "donations in the form of in-kind services worth $806,372." Those in-kind services include hosting and legal services, along with volunteers time spent on coding and translations.

It's not all smooth sailing. While the Tor project has used its funding wisely, it's "still scraping by, mainly because its costs have also gone up." As Roger Dingledine, the Tor Project's co-founder said, Tor's budget is "modest considering the number of people involved and the impact we have. And it is dwarfed by the budgets that our adversaries are spending."

Open sourcing MIPS

On the heels of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) going open source, Wave Computing has announced that it's open sourcing both the MIPS ISA and the latest MIPS core. Both will be "available in the first quarter of 2019."

Art Swift, who heads Wave Computing's MIPS licensing division, stated that open sourcing MIPS is "critical to accelerate the adoption of MIPS in an ecosystem." He added that chip designers will soon "have opportunities to design their own cores based on proven and well tested instruction sets for any purposes."

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what's happening next week in open source.

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That idiot Scott Nesbitt ...
I'm a long-time user of free/open source software, and write various things for both fun and profit. I don't take myself all that seriously and I do all of my own stunts.

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