Linux Format

It was a great experience to attend the Collabora Productivity Hackfest and talks in Cambridge. Not just to get up to speed on the latest online office technologies – which you can read about on page 90 – but to meet and encounter the depth of enthusiasm and experience from its startlingly wide array of developers from literally all over the world. That’s always been the strength of the open source community – it’s willing to draw upon the best and most active developers no matter where they may be working. Something that seems to have caught on in recent years… Equally, the spirit of hacking lives on in the truest sense, with hackfests still a key way of driving innovative, collaborative development. So, we come to our latest hacking…

David Rutland For Christmas 1997, my cousin John and I both found mobile phones under the tree. The networks used standard passcodes, and I exploited this flaw to abuse John’s voicemail – recording offensive messages, which got him into trouble with his parents. Les Pounder It was the 1990s and I had just transferred to a new school, which had a pool on the roof. Anyway, we tried to hack the planet with a rabbit; they fought back with a flu shot. Wait, no, this is the Hackers movie. Never mind. Mayank Sharma My favourite moment with the distro was back when it was called BackTrack; to crack a WPA2-PSK Wi-Fi password. Sure, it didn’t take much doing, but to see the Wi-Fi key pop up out of thin air…

Exciting developments have been taking place in the RISC-V camp. If you’re new to the world of open standards, RISC-V (pronounced “Risk Five”) is an ISA (instruction set architecture) based on RISC (reduced instruction set computer) principles. RISC-V ISA standards are open, meaning that anyone developing RISC-V compatible hardware doesn’t have to pay royalties, as they would to Intel or ARM. As David Patterson, vice chair of the RISC-V Foundation points out, RISC-V isn’t “open source” in the same way as Linux. He likens it instead to Ethernet, a specification for networking that was introduced to replace all the previous competing proprietary ones. Naturally, open hardware standards are only as good as the software that supports them, which may be why Canonical has announced its work with “silicon partners in…

Open source fans will be familiar with Collabara Online, which offers a cloudbased office suite based on LibreOffice apps. Collabora contributes code to LibreOffice but also bases its business model around offering its services to businesses who don’t necessarily want to trust private documents to the likes of Office365 and Google Workspace. Collabara offers its suite as an online service to businesses, billed on a per user basis. Its suite can also be installed on local servers. Deutsche Telekom has taken this a step further by offering its existing MagentaCLOUD users Nextcloud Office, which is built together with Collabara Productivity. Like MagentaCLOUD itself, Nextcloud Office is based in Deutsche Telekom’s own Open Telekom cloud. As this is based in the EU, all information held must comply with European GDPR (General…

In mid-March, Docker sent an email out to all users who had created an “organisation” announcing it would be “sunsetting” its Free Team plan. This didn’t affect users who had a free, personal account, but sparked a brief online panic that this would effectively mean open source organisations would be deleted if they couldn’t pay the requested $240 per year. The email contained a link to a PDF containing more info but it was thin on details of what would happen to teams who refused to pay. It also wasn’t clear if others would be able to squat on projects’ domains if their accounts were removed for non-payment. A week later on 16 March, an apologetic post appeared on the Docker blog admitting they did a “terrible job” of the…

"This column will be my last in these pages – for now, at least. For the past five years, I have written here about using Linux in business. My core message has been that we should design, build and maintain Linux systems that are secure and available. That focus shouldn’t change just because I’m no longer writing about it, of course. Those three words – “secure and available” – sum up what pretty much every business wants from its Linux servers. I’m extremely proud to be part of the open source revolution – and you should be, too. Back when I started working in IT, there was no such thing. The idea of legally sharing software without any charge was completely unheard of. Since then, open source has taken the…