• Cutting Slack: When open source and team chat tools collide

  Founded in 2011, Mattermost targets enterprises with various self-managed and hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) options. The Palo Alto, California-based company has raised around $70 million since its inception and claims some major customers, including Samsung, SAP, Deloitte, Nasdaq, and BNP Paribas, with a typical “large enterprise deployment” of between 10,000 and 40,000 users.

  Mattermost offers various plans covering most potential use cases, including its foundational free and open source Mattermost Team edition. It also has a commercial self-managed free edition called Mattermost Enterprise Edition EO, which provides the added ability to upgrade to more feature-rich paid versions. And if a customer on a hosted enterprise plan is concerned about their data becoming locked into commercial software, they can “downgrade” to the open source Mattermost Team edition without losing any data.

• Notepad++ 8.1

  Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

• What is open source?

  This is not to be confused with freeware, which is simply just software that does not come with a direct financial cost attached to it, but which likely won’t have any of the freedoms associated with open source software. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, famously helped define what is meant by “free” in FOSS when he said:

  Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in free speech, not as in free beer.

  To emphasize that the “free” denotes liberty rather than financial cost, the term FLOSS (“free/libre open source software”) is often used instead. But for all intents and purposes, FOSS and FLOSS mean the same thing.

  [...]

  MySQL, for example, is an open source relational database management system that Oracle releases under a dual license — one a GNU General Public License (GPL), the other proprietary. The former affords most of the freedoms one would expect from FOSS, though the license is what is known as copyleft, which means that any derivative software must be issued under similar license terms. In other words, new software built from the open source software must be released under a similar open source license.

  Oracle’s secondary license is how it commercializes MySQL, selling it under the MySQL Enterprise Edition banner, which offers additional services not included in the GPL license, such as a fully managed database service; an enterprise-grade data backup service; a document store; and security smarts such as encryption and a firewall. Also, companies holding the commercial license are allowed to sell MySQL-based products without making the derivative product open source.

  In contrast to copyleft licenses such as GPL, so-called permissive software licenses such as the MIT License, GNU All-permissive License, and the Apache license don’t impose derivative software restrictions, making it easier for a private company to repurpose it as part of a proprietary product. In fact, they could also re-license their new software under a GPL license if they wish.

• Samvera Advances Community-Sourced Repository Solutions as OASIS Foundation-as-a-Service Partner

  OASIS Open, the international open source and open standards consortium, and Samvera, an international open source community with best in class digital asset management solutions, are pleased to announce their Foundation-as-a-Service partnership. The program streamlines the process of forming and running foundations by letting groups operate independently while enjoying the benefits of the OASIS nonprofit corporate structure and expertise.

  [...]

  From its beginning in 2008, Samvera (originally called Hydra) set out to build a community to support and sustain its software, which is free and open source

• CTCFT Social Hour

  Hey everyone! At the CTCFT meeting this Monday (2021-06-21), we’re going to try a “social hour”. The idea is really simple: for the hour after the meeting, we will create breakout rooms in Zoom with different themes. You can join any breakout room you like and hangout.

  The themes for the breakout rooms will be based on suggestions. If you have an idea for a room you’d like to try, you can post it in a dedicated topic on the #ctcft Zulip stream. Or, if you see somebody else has posted an idea that you like, then add a emoji. We’ll create the final breakout list based on what we see there.

• A white-knuckle ride of open COVID drug discovery

  Nearly 15 months ago, a large, fast-moving and unscheduled experiment began: probing a key protein of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to find chemical starting points for drug discovery. The end point was to develop pills that people could take to treat COVID-19 and related diseases.

  This experiment pulled together a spontaneous, open, global, Twitter-fuelled collaboration called the COVID Moonshot. Urgency and a commitment to working openly recruited more than 150 active participants, spanning a huge range of expertise and technology across academia, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and more, all working without claiming intellectual property. Open drug-discovery efforts are invariably super slow — ours has been an express train on tracks we have laid down as we go. It is a way of working that none of us realized was possible.

• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Open Voice Network

  The Open Voice Network aims to bolster consumer trust through communally-developed standards and governance that developers, designers, strategists and makers can go by to give users more data ownership and control.

  It also aims to provide these core tenets to any ecosystem and architecture that developers prefer.

  The association operates on the directed fund of the Linux Foundation and is independently funded and governed.

Looking for a lightweight photo editor and management app for Linux? Try Fotoxx, a free and open-source software which is super fast.

Fotoxx is a GTK application to organize and manage a large image collection, edit and optimize photos, and perform batch operations.

Unlike other image editor, Fotoxx has app menus in the left pane with ability to toggle file view, and edit photos. While providing many functions to meet the needs of serious photographers, it remains fast and easy to use.

Htop is a process manager that allows us to see the processes in execution and the usage of system resources using the Linux terminal. With its text-based interface that supports the mouse, we can easily operate it and perform various functions such as it is very easy to kill any process on htop. In short, it has all functions we required to monitor and manage system processes using the command terminal. Further, easy to understand due to the simple fields of CPU, Mem, PID, and Command when opening htop.

At the top of htop, the usage rate of each CPU will be listed. It is worth noting that the number of logical cores of the CPU is displayed there. However, htop is no the only way on Linux to monitor process and hardware resources there are other good options as well. Thus, that’s why we decided to come with some good htop alternative tools in this list.

An HTML editor is computer software for creating web pages. As this type of editor helps to remove the frustration out of creating web pages, it represents an indispensable tool for graphic and web designers. Specialized HTML editors provide convenience and added functionality.

There are three main types of HTML editors. The most common type is the WYSIWYG HTML editor. Here the editor provides an editing interface which resembles how the page will be displayed in a web browser. This is achieved by embedding a layout engine. For example, in the case of BlueGriffon, the layout engine that is used is Gecko, which is also used in the Firefox web browser. The other types of editor are text source editors and object editors.