News briefs for November 2, 2018.
Creative Commons is working with Flickr and SmugMug, Flickr’s parent
company, to protect the Commons following
Flickr’s recent announcement that it will
be limiting free accounts to 1,000 images.
Ryan Merkley, Creative Commons CEO, writes, “We want to ensure that
when users share their works that they are available online in
perpetuity and that they have a great experience.” But he also admits
that “the business models that have powered the web for so long are
fundamentally broken. Storage and bandwidth for hundreds of millions
(if not billions) of photos is very expensive. We’ve all benefited
from Flickr’s services for so long, and I’m hopeful we will
find a way forward together.”
The Open Source Initiative announces a $200,000 donation from Handshake, “the largest single donation in organizational
history”. Patrick Masson, the OSI’s general manager, says “Handshake’s
funding will allow us to extend the reach and impact of our Working
Groups and Incubator Projects, many which were established to confront
the growing efforts to manipulate open source through ‘fauxpen source
software’ and ‘open-washing’.”
Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center (OTC) has adopted the Contributor
Covenant for all of its open-source projects. Phoronix
reports that it chose the Contributor Covenant because
“it’s well written and represented, provides a clear expression of
expectations, and represents open-source best practices.” You can read
the Contributor Covenant here.
Valve’s digital card game Artifact is scheduled to be released
November 28th with Linux support. According to Gaming
on Linux, the new game will also have a built-in tournament
feature. See the official Artifact site for more details.
Facebook recently announced it’s open-sourcing a new suite of Linux
kernel components and related tools “that address critical fleet
management issues. These include resource control, resource
utilization, workload isolation, load balancing, measuring, monitoring,
and much more”. According to the Facebook blog post, “the kernel
components and tools included in this release can be adapted to solve a
virtually limitless number of production problems.”