open source

315 Articles

Et Tu, Red Hat?

June 23, 2023 by 94 Comments

Something odd happened to git.centos.org last week. That’s the repository where Red Hat has traditionally published the source code to everything that’s a part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to fulfill the requirements of the GPL license. Last week, those packages just stopped flowing. Updates weren’t being published. And finally, Red Hat has published a clear answer to why:

Red Hat has decided to continue to use the Customer Portal to share source code with our partners and customers, while treating CentOS Stream as the venue for collaboration with the community.

Sounds innocuous, but what’s really going on here? Let’s have a look at the Red Hat family: RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora.

RHEL is the enterprise Linux distribution that is Red Hat’s bread and butter. Fedora is RHEL’s upstream distribution, where changes happen fast and things occasionally break. CentOS started off as a community repackaging of RHEL, as allowed under the GPL and other Open Source licenses, for people who liked the stability but didn’t need the software support that you’re paying for when you buy RHEL.

Red Hat took over the reigns of CentOS back in 2014, and then imposed the transition to CentOS Stream in 2020, to some consternation. This placed CentOS Stream between the upstream Fedora, and the downstream RHEL. Some people missed the stability of the old CentOS, and in response a handful of efforts spun up to fill the gap, like Alma Linux and Rocky Linux. These projects took the source from git.centos.org, and rebuilt them into usable community operating systems, staying closer to RHEL in the process.

Red Hat has published a longer statement elaborating on the growth of CentOS Stream, but it ends with an interesting statement: “Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement.” What exactly is in that subscription agreement? Well according to Alma Linux, “the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.” Continue reading “Et Tu, Red Hat?” →

Too Much Git? Try Gitless

June 18, 2023 by 48 Comments

Git has been a powerful tool for software development and version control since the mid ’00s, gaining widespread popularity since then. Originally built by none other than Linus Torvalds for handling Linux kernel development, it’s branched out for use with all kinds of other projects. That being said, it is not the easiest thing to learn how to use, with tons of options, abstract ideas, and non-linear workflows to keep track of. So if you’re new to the system or don’t need all of its vast swath of features, you might want to try out an alternative like Gitless.

Thanks to the fact that the original Git is open source, it’s free to modify and use as any user sees fit, and there are plenty of options available. This one aims to simplify many of the features found in the original Git, implementing a tracking system which somewhat automates commits. It also includes a simplified branching system, making it easier to switch between branches and keep better track of all that’s happening in a project. The command line interface is simplified as well, and the entire system is backwards-compatible with Git which means that if you find yourself needing some of the more advanced tools it’s possible to switch between them with relative ease.

For those of us keeping track of our own software projects, who don’t necessarily need the full feature set that the original Git has to offer, this could be a powerful tool that decreases the steep learning curve that Git is known for. It’s definitely a system work diving into, though, regardless of whichever implementation you choose. It’s an effective tool for everything from complex, professional projects to small hobby projects on the Arduino.

Fly Like You Drive With This Flying RC Drift Car

May 26, 2023 by 9 Comments

So it’s 2023, and you really feel like we should have flying cars by now, right? Well, as long as you ignore the problem of scale presented by [Nick Rehm]’s flying RC drift car, we pretty much do.

At first glance, [Nick]’s latest build looks pretty much like your typical quadcopter. But the design has subtle differences that make it more like a car without wheels. The main difference is the pusher prop at the aft, which provides forward thrust without having to pitch the entire craft. Other subtle clues include the belly-mounted lidar and nose-mounted FPV camera, although those aren’t exactly unknown on standard UAVs.

The big giveaway, though, is the RC car-style remote used to fly the drone. Rather than use the standard two-joystick remote, [Nick] rejiggered his dRehmFlight open-source flight control software to make operating the drone less like flying and more like driving. The lidar is used to relieve the operator of the burden of altitude keeping by holding the drone at about a meter or so off the deck. And the video below shows it doing a really good job of it, for the most part — with anything as complicated as the multiple control loops needed to keep this thing in the air, it’s easy for a sudden input to confuse things.

We have to admit that [Nick]’s creation looks like a lot of fun to fly, or drive — whichever way you want to look at it. Either way, we like the simplification of the flight control system and translating the driving metaphor into flying — it seems like that’ll be something we need if we’re ever to have full-size flying cars.

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Vehicle-to-Grid Made Easy

May 25, 2023 by 37 Comments

As electric cars continue to see increased adoption, one associated technology that was touted long ago that still hasn’t seen widespread adoption is vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home. Since most cars are parked most of the time, this would allow the cars to perform load-levelling for the grid or even act as emergency generators on an individual basis when needed. While this hasn’t panned out for a variety of reasons, it is still possible to use an EV battery for use off-grid or as part of a grid tie solar system, and now you can do it without needing to disassemble the battery packs at all.

Normally when attempting to use a scrapped EV battery for another use, the cells would be removed from the OEM pack and reorganized to a specific voltage. This build, however, eliminates the need to modify the packs at all. A LilyGO ESP32 is used to convert the CAN bus messages from the battery pack to the Modbus communications protocol used by the inverters, in this case a Fronius Gen24, so the inverter and battery can coordinate energy delivery from one to the other automatically. With the hard part out of the way, the only other requirements are to connect a high voltage DC cable from the battery pack to the inverter.

[Dala], the creator of this project, has taken other steps to ensure safety as well that we’d recommend anyone attempting to recreate this build pays close attention to, as these battery packs contain an extremely large amount of energy. The system itself supports battery packs from Nissan Leafs as well as the Tesla Model 3, which can usually be found for comparably low prices. Building battery energy storage systems to make up for the lack of commercially-available vehicle-to-home systems isn’t the only use for an old EV battery, though. For example, it’s possible to use Leaf batteries to triple the range of other EVs like [Muxsan] did with this Nissan van.

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Industrial Robot Gets Open-Source Upgrade

May 14, 2023 by 15 Comments

Industrial robots are shockingly expensive when new, typically only affordable for those running factories of some sort. Once they’ve gone through their life cycle building widgets, they can be purchased for little more than scrap value, which is essentially free compared to their original sticker price. [Excessive Overkill] explains all of this in a video where he purchased one at this stage to try to revive, but it also shows us how to get some more life out of these robots if you can spend some time hunting for spare parts, installing open-source firmware, and also have the space for a robot that weighs well over a thousand kilograms.

This specific robot is a Fanuc R2000ia with six degrees of freedom and a reach of over two meters. Originally the plan was to patch together a system that could send modern gcode to the Fanuc controller, but this was eventually scrapped when [Excessive Overkill] realized the controller that shipped with this robot was for an entirely different machine and would never work. Attempts to find upgraded firmware were frustrated, and after a few other false starts a solution was found to get the robot working again using LinuxCNC and Mesa FPGA cards, which have built-in support for Fanuc devices like this.

More after the break…

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Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google And OpenAI

May 5, 2023 by 37 Comments

In the world of large language models (LLM), the focus has for the longest time been on proprietary technologies from companies such as OpenAI (GPT-3 & 4, ChatGPT, etc.) as well as increasingly everyone from Google to Meta and Microsoft. What’s remained underexposed in this whole discussion about which LLM will do more things better are the efforts by hobbyists, unaffiliated researchers and everyone else you may find in Open Source LLM projects. According to a leaked document from a researcher at Google (anonymous, but apparently verified), Google is very worried that Open Source LLMs will wipe the floor with both Google’s and OpenAI’s efforts.

According to the document, after the open source community got their hands on the leaked LLaMA foundation model, motivated and highly knowledgeable individuals set to work to take a fairly basic model to new levels where it could begin to compete with the offerings by OpenAI and Google. Major innovations are the scaling issues, allowing these LLMs to work on far less powerful systems (like a laptop or even smartphone).

An important factor here is Low-Rank adaptation (LoRa), which massively cuts down the effort and resources required to train a model. Ultimately, as this document phrases it, Google and in extension OpenAI do not have a ‘secret sauce’ that makes their approaches better than anything the wider community can come up with. Noted is also that essentially Meta has won out here by having their LLM leak, as it has meant that the OSS community has been improving on the Meta foundations, allowing Meta to benefit from those improvements in their products.

The dire prediction is thus that in the end the proprietary LLMs by Google, OpenAI and others will cease to be relevant, as the open source community will have steamrolled them into fine, digital dust. Whether this will indeed work out this way remains to be seen, but things are not looking up for proprietary LLMs.

(Thanks to [Mike Szczys] for the tip)

The Cyber Resilience Act Threatens Open Source

April 21, 2023 by 60 Comments

Society and governments are struggling to adapt to a world full of cybersecurity threats. Case in point: the EU CRA — Cyber Resilience Act — is a proposal by the European Commission to enact legislation with a noble goal: protect consumers from cybercrime by having security baked in during design. Even if you don’t live in the EU, today’s global market ensures that if the European Parliament adopts this legislation, it will affect the products you buy and, possibly, the products you create. In a recent podcast, our own [Jonathan Bennett] and [Doc Searles] interview [Mike Milinkovich] from the Eclipse Foundation about the proposal and what they fear would be almost a death blow to open source software development. You can watch the podcast below.

If you want some background, you can read the EU’s now closed request for comments and the blog post outlining the problems from opensource.org. At the heart of the issue is the need for organizations to self-certify their compliance with the act. Since open source is often maintained by a small loose-knit group of contributors, it is difficult to see how this will work.

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