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Articles
137 articles, newest first.
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Netflix Releases Maestro as Open Source
Netflix has open sourced Maestro, the workflow orchestrator that runs its data and machine learning pipelines, half a million jobs a day. What a workflow orchestrator is, what makes Maestro different from Airflow and…
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Open Source vs. Proprietary AI Models
Yesterday Meta released Llama 3.1 405B and called it open source. It's a remarkable model, and it isn't open source by any definition the term used to have. What "open" means for AI models, how open-weight models…
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Switzerland Mandates Open Source Software for Government
Since January, Swiss law has required the federal government to publish the software it develops as open source. It's not quite "all government software must be open source," as some headlines put it, but it's one of…
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Deep Dive into Zero Trust Security Model
The practical companion to my zero trust primer. The architecture as NIST defines it, what a single request looks like when it's verified end to end, how devices and services prove who they are, and a realistic order to…
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CrowdStrike’s History of Releasing Software That Breaks Operating Systems
Friday's Windows outage wasn't the first time this year a CrowdStrike update took down machines. Linux administrators running Debian and RHEL had already been through it, months earlier and with far less attention. What…
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Join the Fediverse: Your Guide to Decentralized Social Networking
The fediverse is social media that works like email. Pick a server, talk to anyone on any other server, and take your followers with you if you move. How it works, how it differs from Bluesky and Threads, how to choose…
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OPINION: Why Webmin is Bad
Webmin puts a root-privileged web server on port 10000 and edits your configuration files with its own parsers. It has shipped a backdoor, it hides what it changes, and it keeps people from learning the system…
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The Vital Role of Linux and Open Source Software in FinTech
Two days after a security update grounded banks and brokerages, it's worth looking at what the financial system actually runs on. Exchanges, trading firms, payment processors and banks run overwhelmingly on Linux and…
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MariaDB vs. MySQL: Understanding the Differences
MariaDB began in 2009 as a drop-in replacement for MySQL, forked by MySQL's own creator out of worry about Oracle. Fifteen years later they've drifted apart in ways that matter. Where they came from, how they differ in…
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Open Source Alternatives to Crowdstrike: Ensuring Resilience Against Global Outages
After today's outage, a lot of people are asking whether open source security tools could replace CrowdStrike. Some can do parts of the job, and some do them very well. None of them is a drop-in replacement, and open…
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The Legacy of Early Microprocessors
Last month Zilog took its last orders for the standalone Z80, a chip designed in 1976 and still in production nearly fifty years later. The Z80, the 6502, the 8086 and 8088, and the Motorola 68000 built the personal…
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Understanding Open Source Licensing
Open source licenses are short, readable and enforceable, and companies still get them wrong. What the main licenses actually require, what triggers those requirements, and the court cases that proved the GPL has teeth…