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Monthly Archive:: April 2024

Redis’ license change and forking are a mess that everybody can feel bad about

Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from an open source BSD license to both a Source Available License and a Server Side Public License (SSPL). The software project and company supporting it were fairly clear in why they did this. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote on March 20 that while Redis and volunteers sponsored the bulk of the project’s code development, “the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community.” Clarifying a bit, “cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.” This generated a lot of discussion, blowback, and action. The biggest thing was a fork of the Redis project, Valkey, that is backed by The Linux Foundation and, critically, also Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. Valkey is “fully open source,” Linux Foundation execs note, with the kind of BSD-3-Clause license Redis sported until recently. You might note the exception of Microsoft from that list of fork fans. ↫ Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica Moves like this never go down well.

Fedora change proposal suggests switching the main Fedora Workstation release to KDE Plasma

Update: the proposal has now been formally announced on the devel mailing list and Fedora Discussions. I have been assured by the main author of the proposal itself that this is very much not an April Fools joke, but of course, there’s still the very real possibility we’re being led on here. Still, I’m taking the risk and treating this as a serious change proposal for Fedora, even though it’s likely to cause some controversy in the wider Fedora community. The proposal is written by Joshua Strobl, the lead developer of Budgie. Yes, this is a change proposal to make KDE the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation. The reasoning is that KDE is more approachable for new users than GNOME, it supports standards better, the industry seems to be making moves to KDE (see the Steam Deck), and so on. KDE also has more advanced features people have come to expect from a desktop, like HDR, VRR, and more, and it’s the more advanced Wayland desktop. The important note here is that in the highly unlikely event this proposal would be accepted, it’s not like current Fedora GNOME users will be ‘upgraded’ to KDE when Fedora 42 gets released. The idea is to promote the current Fedora Plasma spin to the main Fedora Workstation release, and demote the Fedora GNOME release to a mere Fedora spin, like KDE is now. While I would personally support this change, it’s pretty much 100% unlikely this change proposal will make it through. Red Hat and Fedora are entirely GNOME-first, and no matter how much I believe that’s misguided when looking at the state of the two primary open source desktops today, that’s not going to change. Still, it’s an interesting discussion point, if only to highlight that the frustrations with GNOME run a lot deeper than people seem to think.

GCC 10 ported to QNX 6.5 SP1

Way back in the day, back when I wasn’t even working at OSNews yet, I used to run QNX as my desktop operating system, together with a small number of other enthusiasts. It was a struggle, for sure, but it was fun, exciting, and nobody else was crazy enough to do so. Sadly, the small QNX desktop community wasn’t even remotely interesting to QNX, and later Blackberry when they acquired the company, and eventually the stand-alone Neutrino-powered version of QNX disappeared behind confusing signup screens and other dark patterns. It meant the end of our small little community. Much to my utter surprise and delight, I saw a post by js about how he ported GCC 10 to QNX – in this case, to QNX 6.5 SP1, released in 2012 – and submitted it to pkgsrc. His ultimate goal is to port one of his other projects, ObjFW, to QNX. He makes use of pkgsrc to do this kind of work, which also means he had to make pkgsrc bootstrap and a lot of other software work on QNX. We’re at QNX 8.0 by now, and as much as I bang my head against QNX and BlackBerry’s wall of marketing and corporate speak, I just can’t find out if it’s even still possible to download QNX Neutrino and install it on real generic hardware today.

libmui: classic Mac OS and GS/OS widget library for Linux

This is a contender for the World Record for Feature Creep Side Project. It is pretty high in the contender list as it’s a bolt on to another contender for the World Record for Feature Creep Side Project (the MII Apple //e emulator). It is a library that duplicate a lot of a Macintosh Classic “Toolbox” APIs. It is not a complete implementation, but it is enough to make a few simple applications, also, all the bits I needed for the MII emulator. ↫ libmui GitHub page This is absolutely wild.

A deep dive into email deliverability in 2024

On October 3, 2023, Google and Yahoo announced upcoming email security standards to prevent spam, phishing and malware attempts. Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) is also enforcing these policies. With the big 3 Email Service Providers (ESP) in agreement, expect widespread adoption soon. Today’s threats are more complex than ever and more ESPs will begin tightening the reigns. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in emails being blocked beginning April 2024. In this article, we’re going to cover these guidelines and explain what senders must do in order to achieve and maintain compliance. ↫ XOMedia Some of these changes – most of them impact bulk senders and spammers – should’ve been implemented ages ago, but seeing them being pushed by the three major email providers, who all happened to be owned, of course, by massive corporations, does raise quite a few red flags. Instinctively, this makes me worried about ulterior motives, especially since running your own email server is already fraught with issues due to the nebulous ways Gmail treats emails coming from small servers. With the rising interest in self-hosting and things like Mastodon, I hope we’re also going to see a resurgence in hosting your own e-mail. I really don’t like that all my email is going through Gmail – it’s what OSNews uses – but I don’t feel like dealing with all the delivery issues people who try self-hosting email lament about. With a possible renewed wave of interest in it, we might be able to make the process easier and more reliable.

Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny

Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine. The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack. ↫ Foo Yun Chee at Reuters I honestly misread this as Microsoft selling Teams off, which would’ve been far bigger news. Unbundling Teams from Office globally is just Microsoft applying its recent European Union policy to the rest of the world. All we need now is Microsoft to stop trying to make Teams for families and friends happen, because nobody will ever want to use Teams for anything, let alone personal use.

The hearts of the Super Nintendo

Every computer has at least one heart which beats the cadence to all the other chips. The CloCK output pin is connected to a copper line which spreads to most components, into their CLK input pin. If you are mostly a software person like me, you may have never noticed it but all kinds of processors have a CLK input pin. From CPUs (Motorola 68000, Intel Pentium, MOS 6502), to custom graphic chips (Midway’s DMA2, Capcom CPS-A/CPS-B, Sega’s Genesis VDP) to audio chips (Yamaha 2151, OKI msm6295), they all have one. ↫ Fabien Sanglard I’ve watched enough Adrian Black that I already knew all of this, and I’m assuming so did many of you. But hey, I’ll never pass up the opportunity to link to the insides of the Super Nintendo.