Motherboard: The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?. “On the surface, the open source software community has never been better. Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would’ve been unfathomable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are cutting their teeth on developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use. Go a little deeper, however, and the cracks start to show. The ascendancy of open source has placed a mounting burden on the maintainers of popular software, who now handle more bug reports, feature requests, code reviews, and code commits than ever before. At the same time, open source developers must also deal with an influx of corporate users who are unfamiliar with community norms when it comes to producing and consuming open source software. This leads to developer burnout and a growing feeling of resentment toward the companies that rely on free labor to produce software that is folded into products and sold back to consumers for huge profits.”
open source
Hackaday: Open Source Biological Gear For The Masses
Hackaday: Open Source Biological Gear For The Masses. “At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Hackaday exists because people are out there building and documenting open source gadgets. If the person who built a particular gizmo is willing to show the world how they did it, consider us interested. Since you’re reading this, we’ll assume you are as well. Over the years, this mentality has been spreading out from the relatively niche hacker community into the greater engineering world, and we couldn’t be happier.”
ThreatPost: LabKey Vulnerabilities Threaten Medical Research Data
ThreatPost: LabKey Vulnerabilities Threaten Medical Research Data. “A trio of vulnerabilities in a popular open source medical data collaboration tool leaves important healthcare research data and potentially subject information open to multiple cross site scripting (XSS) attacks. The flaws are serious as they allow an attacker to retrieve user credentials once a user clicks a malicious link.”
MIT Technology Review: Crowdsourced maps should help driverless cars navigate our cities more safely
MIT Technology Review: Crowdsourced maps should help driverless cars navigate our cities more safely. “Our current street maps aren’t much good for helping driverless cars get around. Although we’ve mapped most roads, they get updated only every couple of years. And these maps don’t log any roadside infrastructure such as road signs, driveways, and lane markings. Without this extra layer of information, it will be much harder to get autonomous cars to navigate our cities safely. Robotic deliveries, too, will eventually require precise details of road surfaces, sidewalks, and obstacles.”
Julia Reda: In January, the EU starts running Bug Bounties on Free and Open Source Software
Julia Reda: In January, the EU starts running Bug Bounties on Free and Open Source Software. “In January the European Commission is launching 14 out of a total of 15 bug bounties on Free Software projects that the EU institutions rely on. A bug bounty is a prize for people who actively search for security issues. The amount of the bounty depends on the severity of the issue uncovered and the relative importance of the software.”
State Scoop: California launches new online repository to share open-source code
State Scoop: California launches new online repository to share open-source code. “The California Government Operations Agency last week launched a new website that will eventually host the state’s open-source software projects, allowing agencies, the technology industry and citizens to collaborate on the development of software used by the state government.”
Ars Technica: Widely used open source software contained bitcoin-stealing backdoor
Ars Technica: Widely used open source software contained bitcoin-stealing backdoor. “A hacker or hackers sneaked a backdoor into a widely used open source code library with the aim of surreptitiously stealing funds stored in bitcoin wallets, software developers said Monday. The malicious code was inserted in two stages into event-stream, a code library with 2 million downloads that’s used by Fortune 500 companies and small startups alike.”
