Blog | Linux Foundation

Linux Foundation Newsletter: March 2024

Written by The Linux Foundation | Mar 13, 2024 4:57:22 PM

We are excited to present the latest updates and highlights from the Linux Foundation in our March newsletter. This month’s edition is packed with information--a new project announcement, an important survey, exclusive training discounts, upcoming event details, and much more. Another month brimming with opportunities for learning, growth and vibrant community engagement!

Contents

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KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: Merci, Paris!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 - Keynote session

The cloud native community came out in record numbers for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, which took place 19-22 March in Paris, France, setting a bar for the largest KubeCon ever. The sun shone on conference goers all week long, with the view from the top of the Porte de Versaille being magnifique! Conference highlights included incredible keynotes on the intersection of cloud native and AI, recognition of end user innovation, with awards going to Cern, Shopify, and Expedia. A new contest was announced to design the 10th anniversary logo for Kubernetes, awards from CloudNativeHacks went to leading innovations to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and a new Udemy partnership was announced to supercharge the next wave of cloud native developers. And with a buzzing sponsor showcase, it made for a memorable week. 

Next up: Meet us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, taking place November 12-13 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Registration is now open, with early rates available through April 22. Reduced rates are available for individuals and academics. View all pass types here.

Additionally, the Call for Proposals is open through June 9. View full details here.

New project announcement: LF Charities welcomes Tazama

On the 28th of February, Linux Foundation Charities (LF Charities), with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, welcomed a groundbreaking project to advance financial inclusion through real-time fraud prevention. The Tazama project is the first-ever open source software solution to enhance fraud management in digital payments, representing a significant shift in how financial monitoring and compliance have been approached globally. By helping to mitigate fraudulent transactions and scams, more money stays with the people it rightly belongs to! This is truly an inspiring initiative, and we are excited to play a role in nurturing its impact.

LF Research: New agenda, and a very important survey 

LF Research announces its 2024 agenda. Support our efforts by becoming a sponsor! 


LF Research is excited to announce a suite of new research studies on open source trends and opportunities across various industries, geographies, and technology domains. To aid this effort, we are seeking support from organizations to help fund our activities, generate a statistically significant survey sample, and maximize the impact of this research. Research provides organizations with valuable data and is a great opportunity to engage with, and hear from, the open source community at large. Influence outcomes, receive brand recognition, and a host of other benefits for your organization by sponsoring research.

 

Influence the evolution of software security education by taking an important survey.


LF Research and OpenSSF are partnering on a study to identify where organizations and IT professionals want to improve their security posture across the design and development of software development, and what educational tools are needed to get to that point. Your experience and perspective is invaluable to this project! As a thank you for completing the survey, you will receive a 30% discount on any Linux Foundation e-learning training course or certification exam.

 

LF Europe: Community highlights 

The Linux Foundation Europe team had a bustling month, actively participating in various talks, events, and engaging with industry experts. Within this dynamic landscape, we contributed significantly to key discussions and initiatives within the open source community.

Mirko Boehm, Senior Community Director at Linux Foundation Europe, alongside Jory Burson, Vice President of Standards at The Linux Foundation, participated in a thought-provoking webinar titled “Standardization and Open Source." Delving into the intricate relationship between standardization and open source, they explored the implications of EU Regulations on Software, including the AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the Data Act. Emphasizing the importance of open source software compliance with evolving standards, they highlighted available technologies within open source to address regulatory requirements.

During KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Paris, LF Europe not only contributed to engaging discussions but also hosted a booth, attracting a diverse array of visitors from around the world. Mirko's engagement extended to KubeCon, Paris, where LF Europe convened a Birds of a Feather session titled "Stewarding Open Collaboration and Governance for a Trusted Digital World." Alongside Dana Wang from OpenSSF, Mirko led discussions on enhancing the security and sustainability of the open source ecosystem. With global cybersecurity regulations looming, the panel stressed the importance of collaborative frameworks to ensure trust, security, and compliance across jurisdictions.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 - can’t get enough of that LF Europe swag!

Notably, LF Europe's project Sylva celebrated a successful Sylva Dev Day during KubeCon, providing a platform for participants to delve into the project's intricacies and chart a course for future development. With 70 participants from 20+ companies, including telecom operators, NF vendors, integrators, and more, this event celebrated achievements while outlining a roadmap for future growth, exemplifying LF Europe's dedication to nurturing vibrant open source communities in the telco industry.

In addition to the webinar and the KubeCon, Mirko also took part in the FOSS Backstage event in Berlin. Delivering a talk on "EU Cybersecurity Regulation and Open Source Governance," he shed light on the impact of the EU Cyber Resilience Act on the open source community. Mirko discussed how individual developers and communities adapt to the new regulatory environment, addressing challenges and emphasizing the need for refined governance structures within FOSS projects to align with legal requirements.

Stay tuned for more updates as LF Europe remains committed to fostering collaboration and driving innovation within the open source ecosystem. Subscribe to LF Europe’s newsletter today!

Linux Foundation Projects: Featured news

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 - Project Pavillion.

Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD)

  • Alliance for OpenUSD launched Materials and Geometry Working Groups, formed a new liaison relationship with Academy Software Foundation, and grew by 8 new general members: Ansys, Bright Machines, Intel, Maxon, Siemens, Trimble, Worley, and WPP. Read the announcement. 
  • OpenUSD has become a universal 3D standard for industrial digitalization. It's accelerating time-to-market for everything a company builds, from products to physical facilities. Read this VentureBeat article featuring AOUSD. 
  • As an extensible framework and ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating, and collaborating within 3D worlds, OpenUSD enables developers to build interoperable 3D workflows, unlocking a new era of industrial digitalization. Read this NVIDIA technical blog about the new OpenPBR material model, a MaterialX-based uber-shader model co-developed by Adobe and Autodesk. 
  • The first OpenUSD release of 2024 is here! Check out some of the key features & improvements of v24.03 in this blog post. 
  • We are excited to announce OpenUSD's recognition with a prestigious Academy Scientific and Engineering Award, a testament to the technology’s groundbreaking contribution to the film industry. Read more. 

Confidential Computing Consortium 

  • Upcoming Events:
    • Confidential Computing Consortium Sessions at OSS NA, Seattle (Apr 16-18)
      • HARDWARE in SPACE! The Kernel at the Edge of the Universe - Sen Hastings, Gadfly AI & Sal Kimmich
      • Decoding Trust in Confidential Computing: Foundations and Open Source Perspectives - Sal Kimmich & Mike Bursell, Confidential Computing Consortium

Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF)

eBPF Foundation

Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA)

FinOps Foundation

  • FInOps X is the global FinOps conference. Register to take advantage of the FinOps X early bird sale and save $200.
  • We’ve updated the FinOps Framework to simplify the Domains and expand the Capabilities to emphasize the business value, accountability, and data-driven decision-making concepts that are central to modern FinOps practices. Read more about the updates. 
  • The State of FinOps is an annual survey conducted by the FinOps Foundation to collect information about challenges, priorities, and the future of FinOps. Read the FinOps Foundation Insights article for our analysis of the survey results.

FINOS

Hyperledger Foundation

  • Hyperledger Foundation announced Citi and the Brazilian Development Bank as new members and unveiled a Hyperledger Besu Financial Services Working Group chaired by DTCC with more than a dozen founding members, including Banco Central do Brasil, Citi, Japan Securities Clearing, Mastercard, Santander and Visa. Read more in CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CoinTrust and Ledger Insights.
  • The post Why Hyperledger Besu is a Top Choice for Financial Use Cases, penned by Besu maintainer Matthhew Whitehead of Kaleido, outlines the characteristics of the Ethereum client that are paramount for financial applications. 
  • As a follow-up to Hyperledger Foundation’s 8th Anniversary celebration, Governing Board Representatives provided their take on the success and value of Hyperledger Foundation as well as the technical priorities they see for the community in a Q+A blog post.
  • Hyperledger Foundation published a post that introduced a new Hyperledger Lab, Aries Agent Controller, to the community.
  • On April 15, Hyperledger Foundation will host Decentralized Innovations of Today, a half-day symposium focusing on the pivotal themes of decentralization, identity and multi-party systems, at Open Source Summit North America. For more details or to register, go here. 
  • Forbes India spotlights the work of India's National Informatics Centre (NIC), a government agency under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, that is currently hosting nearly eight million verifiable government-issued documents relying primarily on three blockchains platforms, including Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth. 
  • For more updates from Hyperledger Foundation, check out the current and past issues of Hyperledger Horizons.

LF AI & Data

  • Gen AI Commons launched the LF AI & Data Outreach Survey which is designed to help better understand the community’s insights and perspectives on open-source and generative AI. The landscape of generative AI is rapidly evolving, and with it, the opportunities and challenges in the open-source realm grow. Take the survey.
  • Join us in welcoming Vini Jaiswal as the newly elected Chairperson of the Linux Foundation – AI & Data Technical Advisory Council (TAC)! Read the full announcement.
  • Dive into the heart of GenAI in the new GenAI Commons Education & Outreach blog series! In this inaugural blog post, we aim to introduce you to the Gen AI Commons Education & Outreach group and our goals, shed light on GenAI, and emphasize the pivotal role of an open-source approach in shaping the future and responsible use of GenAI. Read here.
  • This month, the LF AI & Data Foundation announced Microsoft as its newest Premier Member. Microsoft’s inclusion as a Premier Member promises to catalyze significant advancements in the domains of AI and data. Learn more.
  • Open Voice TrustMark authored the whitepaper, Conversational AI Technology and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM). This paper – with respect to the technologies and processes that have blazed RPM’s trail to date – points to the need for industry-wide recognition that conversational AI technology can and will play an important role in the future of RPM worldwide. 

LF Energy

  • LF Energy and Johns Hopkins University announced the agenda of speakers and sessions for the upcoming Open Sustainability Policy Summit, May 2-3 in Washington, DC.
  • LF Energy and Texas Instruments are hosting the all new Open EV Charging Summit in Dallas, May 15-16.
  • The Centre for Net Zero contributed the new OpenSynth project to LF Energy, which generates synthetic data to achieve rapid, widespread and global access to smart meter datasets.
  • LF Energy announced its inaugural batch of six Ambassadors who will evangelize the benefits of open source to energy sector stakeholders.
  • LF Energy and CRESYM announced a partnership to enhance digitalization of energy systems through research and new open source projects.
  • The Super Advanced Meter open specification has released an initial list of major use cases.

Linux kernel

  • The 6.8 kernel was released on March 10th, 2024. Summary of Development statistics for 6.8 article on LWN:
    • The 6.8 kernel was released on March 10 after a typical, nine-week development cycle. Over this time, 1,938 developers contributed 14,405 non-merge changesets, making 6.8 into a slower cycle than 6.7 (but busier than 6.6), with the lowest number of developers participating since the 6.5 release. Still, there was a lot going on during this cycle; read on for some of the details.
    • All CVEs against the kernel must now only be issued by kernel.org.
    • Done in response to years of abuse by other CNAs assigning bogus CVEs.
    • The number of kernel CVEs is going to greatly increase because of this.
    • Quality of kernel CVEs is going to greatly increase.
    • Documentation on how the process now works.
    • linux-cve-announce mailing list to see all assigned CVEs as they happen.
    • Email cve@kernel.org if you wish to have a CVE assigned for anything.
    • Security bugs are still handled by security@kernel.org as before. Linux kernel community is now responsible for issuing CVEs.

LFX Mentorships

Open Mainframe Project 

  • Open Mainframe Project and the OpenTelemetry project is excited to annouce the recently established Special Interest Group (SIG) OpenTelemetry on Mainframe. The SIG is focused on enabling OpenTelemetry on the Mainframe for an improved end-to-end observability. Rudiger Schulze, Senior Technical Staff Member, Observability and OpenTelemetry for IBM Z and LinuxONE, offers insight on how to get involved.
  • Caroline McNamara, Content developer at IBM and Galasa Contributor, pens a tutorial that showcases how to get the Galasa pre-requisite software installed on a laptop. She shares the commands, the software, and how to set up the environment variables. Get the steps. 
  • Michael Bauer, Software Engineering Supervisor at Broadcom, and Sudharsana Srinivasan,IBM Z Technical Enablement Manager, share how the Open Mainfrmae Project’s COBOL Programming Course bridges the skills gap. Learn more.
  • Open Mainframe Project honored Women’s History Month with a live discussion for Women in IT and blogs from several thought leaders in the community. Read their stories: 
  • Open Mainframe Project would like to thank BMC’s Arshind Kaur, Broadcom’s Allyson Cook and Ruchi Saxena, IBM’s Dr. Rebecca Gott and Phoenix Software’s Donna Hudi for sharing their challenges and unique experiences of being women in the tech industry. We’d also like to thank moderator Dr. Gloria Chance for sharing research and weaving these personal insights together. The breadth of perspectives from these panelists makes it more important than ever to build, support and maintain a safe work environment that will make the ecosystem stronger for everyone. 
  • Connect with the Making Our Strong Community Stronger on LinkedIn to never miss an update, ask questions or share DEI-B articles, events or even your experiences and perspectives.

OpenJS Foundation

  • Say hello to the new mascot for Node.js, Rocket Turtle!
  • Welcome to our newest silver members CarGurus and Greyshore Associates.
  • The first beta release of Node-RED 4.0 is out! Updates include auto-complete in flow/global/env inputs, timestamp formatting options and better, faster, more compliance CSV node. More to come in the full release next month.

OpenSSF

Overture Maps Foundation

  • Introducing Amy Rose, Overture's new Technical Director. Discover her vision and the future of open map data in her recent Linux Foundation talk. Read the full story.
  • Overture 2024-03-12-alpha.0 is now available. This release includes a schema change from camelCase to snake_case in the Admins theme, an expansion of GERS IDs across several themes, and incremental updates to schema and datasets. Read the release notes. 
  • Over two dynamic days in Ghent, Belgium, the Overture Maps community united for enlightening sessions and vibrant discussions. We blended team alignment on 2024 goals with focused task force breakouts, diving deep into our collaborative work. Ready to join our journey? Become a member today. 

PyTorch Foundation

  • PyTorch Conference 2024 is happening September 18-19 in San Francisco, CA! More details to come.
  • TorchServe 0.10 release is now available! Highlights include enhanced support for PyTorch 2.x inference, AOTInductor, CPP backend, GenAI *fast series torch.compile showcase examples + more.
  • The PyTorch teams at IBM and Meta demonstrate the scalability of FSDP with a pre-training exemplar and share various techniques to achieve rapid training speeds.
  • Intel AI shares insights on how they are using PyTorch to support sustainability practices. Watch the webinars on our YouTube channel!

RISC-V

  • RISC-V Summit Europe takes place in Munich on the 24th - 28th June, connecting the European ecosystem, from industry and government, to research, academia and support, that are building the future of innovation on RISC-V. We hope to see you there!

  • The SHD Group has released their RISC-V Market Report, a deep dive into the evolving landscape of the RISC-V market, providing insight into current RISC-V adoption.

  • Join us at embedded world 2024 in Nuremberg, Germany, April 9 – 11, 2024 as we bring the community together to show the power of open collaboration on innovation, product successes across the ecosystem, and the technical strength of RISC-V.

  • Find out the latest news from our Horizontal Committees, ISA Committees, Task Groups, and Special Interest Groups in our latest Technical Newsletter. 

  • Discover our continuously updated RISC-V Landscape, a living document that provides invaluable insights into the diverse RISC-V ecosystem.

  • RISC-V International is hosting a Video Contest with a chance to win great prizes: up to €500 vouchers up for grab! To participate you will want to create a short video (no longer than 3 minutes!) explaining one of the following topics:

    • Why RISC-V? Explain to the audience why they should use or transition to RISC-V.

    • What is RISC-V?

    • Explain RISC-V to a non-technical audience.

  • After receiving your feedback, we updated the “Introduction to RISC-V” course! To get acquainted with the technical and organizational aspects of RISC-V, check out the revised version.

Ultra Ethernet Consortium

  • Since November 2023, when UEC began accepting new members, the consortium has experienced remarkable growth, reaching an impressive 450% by March 19, 2024. In October 2023, UEC boasted a distinguished membership comprising 10 steering members, marking the initial steps toward fostering collaboration in the high-performance networking sector. Now, the community is flourishing with the addition of 45 new member companies, reflecting an extraordinary expansion that underscores the industry's recognition of UEC's commitment. This month, UEC has issued a press release highlighting this exponential growth, featuring membership testimonials, and introducing the UEC 1.0 Overview white paper. You can read the press release here.
  • This month, we launched our testimonial page showcasing quotes from steering, general, and contributor members, illustrating their commitment to supporting UEC and being integral to the initiative. Explore our testimonial page to learn more.
  • UEC is steadily advancing towards its v1.0 set of specifications. These specifications will offer implementers a roadmap for deploying cutting-edge innovations in data center network technologies, tailored to optimize AI and HPC workloads. View UEC 1.0 Overview White paper.

Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation:

Zephyr

  • Renesas Electronics Corporation, STMicroelectronics and Ac6 recently joined the Zephyr Project ecosystem as Silver members. Read more about why they joined. 
  • The Zephyr Project will be at embedded world, which takes place in Nuremberg, Germany on April 9-11. The project will host a booth (Hall 4-170) that will showcase a wide variety of demos and products running on Zephyr. Members Analog Devices, Antmicro, Nordic Semiconductor and NXP as well as Ac6, AVSystem, Ezurio, Golioth, Infineon, IRNAS, Memfault, Percepio, Renesas, Sternum and Synopsys will have demos and ambassadors on-site to answer questions. Get a preview of the demos.
  • If you weren’t on-site in Bangalore, India, for the first-ever Zephyr meetup, you can view the presentation videos here.
  • Zephyr recently announced its 3.6 release. Read about the new features and updates in this blog or watch the release video here. You can also watch the Tech Talk featuring a Q&A with Zephyr RTOS contributors, maintainers and release managers here.  
  • Learn about scalable edge AI benchmarking and optimization with Zephyr runtime for Kenning in this blog.

Check out the technical updates from Benjamin Cabe, Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project, here.

LF Events

Upcoming Events

To register for in-person attendance or virtual LF events, please view our full calendar of events here, and be sure to subscribe to our events newsletter. Check out our Flickr stream for photos of past events!

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