open source

309 Articles

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.

Continue reading “The Cyber Resilience Act Threatens Open Source” →

Building An Electron Microscope For Research

April 14, 2023 by 10 Comments

There are a lot of situations where a research group may turn to an electron microscope to get information about whatever system they might be studying. Assessing the structure of a virus or protein, analyzing the morphology of a new nanoparticle, or examining the layout of a semiconductor all might require the use of one of these devices. But if your research involves the electron microscope itself, you might be a little more reluctant to tear down these expensive devices to take a look behind the curtain as the costs to do this for more than a few could quickly get out of hand. That’s why this research group has created their own electron detector.

Specifically, the electron detector is designed for use in a scanning electron microscope, which is typically used for inspecting the surface of a sample and retrieving a high-resolution, 3D image of it compared to transmission microscopes which can probe internal structures. The detector is built on a four-layer PCB which includes the photodiode sensing array, a series of amplifiers, and a power supply. All of the circuit diagrams and schematics are available for inspection as well thanks to the design being licensed under the open Creative Commons license. For any research team looking to build this, a bill of materials is also included, as is a set of build instructions.

While this is only one piece of the puzzle surrounding the setup and operation of an electron microscope, its arguably the most important, and also greatly lowers the barrier of entry for anyone looking to analyze electron microscope design themselves. With an open standard, anyone is free to modify or augment this design as they see fit which is a marked improvement over the closed and expensive proprietary microscopes out there. And, if low-cost microscopes are your thing be sure to check out this fluorescence microscope we featured that uses readily-available parts to dramatically lower the cost compared to commercial offerings.

Enjoy An Open-Source Espresso

March 24, 2023 by 15 Comments

One of the core principles of the open-source movement is that anyone who wants to build on a piece of work, in whatever way they want, is easily able to. With source code freely available, the original project can be expanded upon, modified, updated, or simply looked at and used as inspiration. Usually we think about this in the realm of software freedom, but hardware is an important component as well. And not just electronics hardware, either. [Norm] demonstrates this espresso machine which was built on these open-source foundations.

The project takes some inspiration from the open-source Gaggiuino project, which was another build that modified an entry-level espresso maker with finer control over temperature and pressure. [Norm] was not willing to sacrifice his espresso machine for this cause, though, which is how this machine with its cobbled-together hardware came to be. An older machine with some worn parts was sacrificed to the coffee gods instead, making use of its pumps, boiler, and a few other bits of hardware especially from the hydraulics system. The software control is built around the Gaggiuino project, and includes a custom control board for user interface.

Right now the coffee maker does indeed work, but [Norm] hopes to make some improvements to the device including adding an enclosure of some sort, both to prevent accidental contact with the boiler and to give it a sleek, professional look. We kind of like it the way it is, while acknowledging that it isn’t quite ready for commercial production like this. It has a similar industrial feel as this espresso machine we featured a few years ago that is made out of old engine components.

Classic Gaming With FPGA And ATX

March 14, 2023 by 5 Comments

Playing classic games, whether they are games from the golden age of arcades or simply games from consoles that are long out of production, tends to exist on a spectrum. At one end is grabbing a game’s ROM file, finding an emulator, and kludging together some controls on a keyboard and mouse with your average PC. At the other is meticulously restoring classic hardware for the “true” feel of what the game would have felt like when it was new. Towards the latter end is emulating the hardware with an FPGA which the open-source MiSTer project attempts to do. This build, though, adds ATX capabilities for the retrocomputing platform. Continue reading “Classic Gaming With FPGA And ATX” →

FOSDEM 2023: An Open-Source Conference, Literally

March 1, 2023 by 6 Comments

Every year, on the first weekend of February, a certain Brussels university campus livens up. There, you will find enthusiasts of open-source software and hardware alike, arriving from different corners of the world to meet up, talk, and listen. The reason they all meet there is the conference called FOSDEM, a long-standing open-source software conference which has been happening in Belgium since 2000. I’d like to tell you about FOSDEM because, when it comes to conferences, FOSDEM is one of a kind.

FOSDEM is organized in alignment with open-source principles, which is to say, it reminds me of an open-source project itself. The conference is volunteer-driven, with a core of staff responsible for crucial tasks – yet, everyone can and is encouraged to contribute. Just like a large open-source effort, it’s supported by university and company contributions, but there’s no admission fees for participants – for a conference, this means you don’t have to buy a ticket to attend. Last but definitely not least, what makes FOSDEM shine is the community that it creates.

FOSDEM’s focus is open software – yet, for hackers of the hardware world, you will find a strong hardware component to participate in, since a great number of FOSDEM visitors are either interested in hardware, or even develop hardware-related things day-to-day. It’s not just that our hardware can’t live without software, and vice-versa – here, you will meet plenty of pure software, a decent amount of pure hardware, and a lot of places where the two worlds are hard to distinguish. All in all, FOSDEM is no doubt part of hacker culture in Europe, and today, I will tell you about my experience of FOSDEM 2023. Continue reading “FOSDEM 2023: An Open-Source Conference, Literally” →

Copyright Data, But Do It Right

February 4, 2023 by 33 Comments

Copyright law is a triple-edged sword. Historically, it has been used to make sure that authors and rock musicians get their due, but it’s also been extended to the breaking point by firms like Disney. Strangely, a concept that protected creative arts got pressed into duty in the 1980s to protect the writing down of computer instructions, ironically a comparatively few bytes of BIOS code. But as long as we’re going down this strange road where assembly language is creative art, copyright law could also be used to protect the openness of software as well. And doing so has given tremendous legal backbone to the open and free software movements.

So let’s muddy the waters further. Looking at cases like the CDDB fiasco, or the most recent sale of ADSB Exchange, what I see is a community of people providing data to an open resource, in the belief that they are building something for the greater good. And then someone comes along, closes up the database, and sells it. What prevents this from happening in the open-software world? Copyright law. What is the equivalent of copyright for datasets? Strangely enough, that same copyright law.

Data, being facts, can’t be copyrighted. But datasets are purposeful collections of data. And just like computer programs, datasets can be licensed with a restrictive copyright or a permissive copyleft. Indeed, they must, because the same presumption of restrictive copyright is the default.

I scoured all over the ADSB Exchange website to find any notice of the copyright / copyleft status of their dataset taken as a whole, and couldn’t find any. My read is that this means that the dataset is the exclusive property of its owner. The folks who were contributing to ADSB Exchange were, as far as I can tell, contributing to a dataset that they couldn’t modify or redistribute. To be a free and open dataset, to be shared freely, copied, and remixed, it would need a copyleft license like Creative Commons or the Open Data Commons license.

So I’ll admit that I’m surprised to have not seen permissive licenses used around community-based open data projects, especially projects like ADSB Exchange, where all of the software that drives it is open source. Is this just because we don’t know enough about them? Maybe it’s time for that to change, because copyright on datasets is the law of the land, no matter how absurd it may sound on the face, and the closed version is the default. If you want your data contributions to be free, make sure that the project has a free data license.

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ADS-B Exchange Sells Up, Contributors Unhappy

January 26, 2023 by 62 Comments

In the news among aviation enthusiasts, the ADS-B data aggregation and aircraft tracking site ADSB-Exchange has been sold by its founder to JETNET for a reported $20,000,000. This type of routine financial news is more at home in the business media than on Hackaday, but in this case there’s something a little different at play. ADS-B Exchange is a community driven site whose data comes from thousands of enthusiasts worldwide connecting their ADS-B receivers to its feed API. The sale to a commercial flight data company has not gone down well with this community who are unsurprisingly unimpressed that their free contributions to the website have been sold.

This certainly isn’t the first time a site built on community data has flipped into big business, and while it’s unclear whether JETNET will do a full CDDB and boot out anyone not paying to play, we can understand the users feeling that their work has been sold from under them. On the other hand, how many of us can truly claim their open source beliefs wouldn’t start to buckle once somebody slides a $20m check across the table?

It’s evidently too late for anyone aggrieved by their ADS-B data being sold, but perhaps there’s something else to think about here. We have an established way to recognize open source software in the many well-known software libre licences, but we don’t for crowd-sourced data. Perhaps it’s time for the open-source community to consider this problem and come up with something for future sites like ADS-B Exchange whatever field they may be in, a licence which clearly defines the open terms under which contributors provide the data and those under which site owners can use it. Otherwise we’ll be here again in a few years writing about another aggrieved community, and we think that doesn’t have to happen.