In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the new IoT project from the Linux Foundation, three big corporations releasing open source, and more.
News roundup for February 21 - 26, 2016
Linux Foundation unveils the Zephyr Project
The Internet of Things (IoT) is shaping up to be the next big thing in consumer technology. At the moment, most IoT solutions are proprietary and closed source. Open source is making numerous in-roads into the IoT world, and that's undoubtedly going to accelerate now that the Linux Foundation has announced the Zephyr Project.
The Zephyr Project, according to ZDNet, "hopes to bring vendors and developers together under a single operating system which could make the development of connected devices an easier, less expensive and more stable process." The Project "aims to incorporate input from the open source and embedded developer communities and to encourage collaboration on the RTOS (real-time operating system)," according to the Linux Foundation's press release.
Currently, Intel Corporation, NXP Semiconductors N.V., Synopsys, Inc., and UbiquiOS Technology Limited are the main supporters of the project. The Linux Foundation intends to attract other IoT vendors to this effort as well.
Releases from Facebook, IBM, Yahoo
As we all know, open source isn't just about individuals or small groups hacking on code and hardware. Quite a few large corporations have significant investments in open source. This past week, three of them affirmed their commitment to open source.
Yahoo again waded into open source waters this week with the release of CaffeOnSpark artificial intelligence software under an Apache 2.0 license. CaffeOnSpark performs "a popular type of AI called 'deep learning' on the vast swaths of data kept in its Hadoop open-source file system for storing big data," according to VentureBeat. If you're curious, you can find the source code on GitHub.
Earlier this week, Facebook "unveiled a new project that seeks not only to accelerate the evolution of technologies that drive our mobile networks, but to freely share this work with the world’s telecoms," according to Wired. The company plans to build "everything from new wireless radios to nee optical fiber equipment." The designs, according to Facebook, will be open source so any telecom firm can use them.
As part of the Open Mainframe Project, IBM has open sourced the code for its Anomaly Detection Engine (ADE) for Linux logs. According to IBM, "ADE detects anomalous time slices and messages in Linux logs using statistical learning" to detect suspicious behaviour. You can grab the source code for ADE from GitHub.
European Union to fund research
The European Research Council, the European Union's science and technology funding body, is funding four open source research projects to the tune of about €2 million. According to joinup.ec.europa.eu, the projects being funded are:
- A code audit of Mozilla's open source Rust programming language
- An initiative at INRIA (France's national computer science research center) studying secure programming
- A project at Austria's Technische Universitat Graz testing "ways to secure code against attacks that exploit certain properties of the computer hardware"
- The "development of techniques to prove popular cryptographic protocols and schemes" at IST Austria
In other news
- Infosys' newest weapon: open source
- Intel demonstrates Android smartphone running a Linux desktop
- BeeGFS file system goes open source
A big thanks, as always, to the Opensource.com moderators and staff for their help this week.
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