This article is about type of application programming interface. For the web service specification, see OpenAPI Specification.

An open API (often referred to as a public API) is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.[1][2] APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can communicate and interact with another. APIs can also allow developers to access certain internal functions of a program, although this is not typically the case for web APIs. In the simplest terms, an API allows one piece of software to interact with another piece of software, whether within a single computer via a mechanism provided by the operating system or over an internal or external TCP/IP-based or non-TCP/IP-based network.[3] Currently, many APIs are provided by organizations for access with HTTP. APIs may be used by both developers inside the organisation that published the API or by any developers outside that organisation who wish to register for access to the interface.

Open APIs have three main characteristics:

A private API is an interface that opens parts of an organization's backend data and application functionality for use by developers working within (or contractors working for) that organization.[6] Private APIs are only exposed to internal developers therefore the API publishers have total control over what and how applications are developed. Private APIs offer substantial benefits with regards to internal collaboration. Using a private API across an organization allows for greater shared awareness of the internal data models. As the developers are working for (or contracted by) one organization, communication will be more direct and therefore they should be able to work more cohesively as a group. Private APIs can significantly diminish the development time needed to manipulate and build internal systems that maximise productivity and create customer-facing applications that improve market reach and add value to existing offerings.

In contrast to a private API, an open API is publicly available for all developers to access. They allow developers, outside of an organization's workforce, to access backend data that can then be used to enhance their own applications. Open APIs can significantly increase revenue without the business having to invest in hiring new developers making them a very profitable software application.[7] However, it is important to remember that opening back end information to the public can create a range of security and management challenges.[8] For example, publishing open APIs can make it harder for organisations to control the experience end users have with their information assets. Open API publishers cannot assume client apps built on their APIs will offer a good user experience. Furthermore, they cannot fully ensure that client apps maintain the look and feel of their corporate branding.

Open APIs can be used by businesses seeking to leverage the ever-growing community of freelancing developers who have the ability to create innovative applications that add value to their core business. Open APIs are favoured in the business sphere as they simultaneously increase the production of new ideas without investing directly in development efforts. Businesses often tailor their APIs to target specific developer audiences that they feel will be most effective in creating valuable new applications. However, an API can significantly diminish an application's functionality if it is overloaded with features.

For example,[9] Yahoo's open search API allows developers to integrate Yahoo search into their own software applications. The addition of this API provides search functionality to the developer's application whilst also increasing search traffic for Yahoo's search engine hence benefitting both parties. With respect to Facebook and Twitter, we can see how third parties have enriched these services with their own code. For example, the ability to create an account on an external site/app using your Facebook credentials is made possible using Facebook's open API.

Many large technology firms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, allow the use of their service by third parties and competitors.[10][11][12]

With the rise in prominence of HTML5 and Web 2.0, the modern browsing experience has become interactive and dynamic and this has, in part, been accelerated through the use of open APIs. Some open APIs fetch data from the database behind a website and these are called Web APIs. For example, Google's YouTube API allows developers to integrate YouTube into their applications by providing the capability to search for videos, retrieve standard feeds, and see related content.

Web APIs are used for exchanging information with a website either by receiving or by sending data. When a web API fetches data from a website, the application makes a carefully constructed HTTP request to the server the site is stored on. The server then sends data back in a format your application expects (if you requested data) or incorporates your changes to the website (if you sent data).

Read more here:
Open API - Wikipedia

Todays application development is a complex landscape of services, integrations and architectures. In fact, most developers today spend more time writing API calls and finding open-source projects and maintaining those applications once theyre created than they do writing code for innovative new features.

It looks nothing like your fathers app dev, which involved a code editor, compiler, and few other tools. In todays world, we see developers struggling under the weight of an ever-expanding toolbox now required to bring products to life.

According to Andrew Manby, AVP of Product Management of HCL Volt MX, among the drivers behind modern development are the needs of business to satisfy customers, and overcoming the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to be able to continue to deliver fixes and new features at speed.

We did a survey late last year with Forrester, and in our survey, 78% of respondents said theyre prioritizing improving the ability to innovate and really reach their customers, Manby said. And for businesses to survive the pandemic, businesses had to rely on that old Yankee spirit and ingenuity, he said. I think businesses could make do or innovate. Almost like having their own Apollo 13 moment, to fix the problem, to be able to continue to reach the customer, adding buy online, pick up in store, things like that. It was that sort of duct tape and air filter moment, for a lot of organizations.

Piecing together tools for collaboration, development and deployment to a remote workforce has been made a lot easier with cloud computing no more creating VPNs, unless organizations have specific regulations or security needs they must follow. However, the cloud doesnt really help address issues such as culture change and the move towards delivering products instead of projects.

Agile development is one of those areas where scaling up has been a thorny issue for many organizations. Agile, according to Forrester vice president and analyst Diego Lo Giudice, is not just a bunch of practices. Some think going to Scrum training and bringing what you know back to the organization will have everyone working in an Agile way. But Lo Giudice said shifts to Agile and other methodologies require a cultural and behavioral change. Think about your IT that has been owning the projects, and now suddenly they say were going to move to products and youre going to have a product owner from the business side. And he or she is going to tell you what are the most important things you need to implement. Its kind of losing power for project managers that used to manage these projects.

Another issue Lo Giudice pointed out is integrating all of it throughout the organization. Everybody thinks SAFe is saving the world. I get lots of clients who tell me, were replacing the old bureaucracy with a new type of bureaucracy here. Cultural and behavioral change is really tough for organizations.

Further, he said, these product owners from the business dont have the skills to think in terms of how project managers in modern development think about minimum viable features and minimum viable products. They still think in terms of big releases, he said. Also, he added, business-side product owners are not even committed to Agile. Its like, We want to do Agile, but you do it, Im not going to get involved. But thats not the way agile works.But because of this drive to modern application development, organizations are starting to think seriously about what agility, responsiveness and velocity really mean to them. It comes down to the business problem, HCLs Manby said. I think CIOs are still faced with the same thing at the end of the day, they still need to modernize their application inventory, they need to move to the cloud because they want to obfuscate some of the risks that they have in their data center. And they want to move that off to other vendors, they want to make the portfolio of applications more modern.

Another aspect of modern development to think about has nothing to do with tools or programming languages. Its the difficulty organizations are having in attracting and retaining developer talent. People, given this day and age, are more mobile not in the physical sense, but more willing to swap one job for another, Manby said. Developers want to do meaningful work, they want to be in an engaging work environment, and they want to use the cool tools. But they also want to use the stuff they learned in college, or in their experience. But theres the old guard who know how to do things in a certain way. Theyre used to using WebSphere and db2 and Oracle, and Siebel. And the new generation is coming in, and theyre all React and Angular and all container ready and Git friendly. Its not the culture clash, but the organizations that havent shifted are finding it more difficult to get to containers and the cloud. The smarter organizations are bringing in more of the influx of those newer developers and the new-wave IT people to help push that acceleration along, to use those new types of tools.

With different languages and platforms for creating or importing pieces of code to create modern applications, Manby said weve probably got as much fragmentation now from an application developer standpoint as weve ever had. He went on to say that the rate of change has gotten faster as well. Angular 1, Angular 2, React, Flutter. Its almost like theres a faster inertia, he said. And theres a concern about obsolescence. If you have to look after a piece of code thats got Dojo in it, when you give that to a new developer, they say, whats this stuff? Thats a challenge. But at the same time, in its day Dojo was modern and exciting for folks.

This, Manby believes, is where low code is trying to come from. The appeal of the platform is, whatever framework you may be using, if we as a vendor do this the right way, then whether its Angular or React or whatever, were going to insulate you from those sorts of challenges, he said. But were still going to give you something thats not going to dumb down the skills that youve learned but also allows you to be a superhero, and do some cool stuff without boxing you in.

Low code has become a modern de rigeur term, and represents a way to apply rigor to development and deployment, Manby said. Low code is applied to DevOps pipelines, its applied to data integration. You could apply the principles of anything, which gives you a visual model, a model-driven approach. You can say that no code or low code makes [development] go faster, when it comes back down to pure developer productivity.

When it comes to professional development, low code is not removing tools, Manby said. Its providing pieces to try and make those developers lives simple. If you can simplify how you aggregate data across multiple systems, or provide you with an orchestration layer so you can orchestrate a series, a more complex workflow with parallel looping. Do you want your developers to create that from scratch, and then have to maintain it? Or do you want to use a tool to enable you to do that?

As for testing, Manby said a low-code tool can generate the test case automatically and continually test the applications as they evolve, which saves developers time. Its not about removing things, he said. Its just trying to make you more productive.

The baseline activities of modern application development, as defined by research firm Forrester, are ideate, design, build and deliver. According to an August 2021 report on MAD, Forrester said organizations augment these activities with value stream management, collaborative work management, low code and continuous testing.

The design phase includes developing a prototype, then a minimum viable product. In its report, Forrester notes that experimentation can begin in this phase, using feature management (such as flags) to let developers turn those features on or off as the product makes its way toward full release.

But at the core of all this is business value, and Forresters MAD model says that everything developers create must ultimately be in service of value streams. Value streams and management of those streams is how organizations can raise their Agile and DevOps practices by gaining insights into the processes used to create and deliver quality software that customers want. Determining what the business wants, and why, should be the first step in the process of creating software products.

Collaborative work management, according to Forrester, supports the confluence of project and process work by allowing users to create personal and team workspaces, according to the report, while low code expands development outside of IT.

Meanwhile, continuous testing is required to ensure the accelerated pace of software creation and delivery does not impact the quality of the product.

Originally posted here:
Modern app dev is about more than tools, platforms and languages - SDTimes.com

So you've decided to start integrating more open source tools and applications into your life. Now what?

Whether you've decided to seek out open source tools because you're trying to cut costs over proprietary alternatives, because you want to become more involved in the direction of a project, or simply because you want to have more control over your digital world, there is an amazing collection of free and open source projects out there.

If you're coming from a Mac or Windows environment, the first thing you might want to understand when exploring open source is what the equivalents are to the closed source, proprietary programs that you may be used to.

To get you started, Opensource.com has compiled a collection of articles introducing you to some of the most popular and useful open source tools for a wide variety of common needs. Looking for a replacement for a tool not listed here? Let us know what you're interested in, and we'll consider it future additions to this series.

Do you use Basecamp, Microsoft Project, or Asana to help you with project management? There are many open source tools which provide the same functionality.

Are you keeping notes in Evernote, Google Keep, or OneNote? There are a ton of excellent alternatives with Joplin trending in the category.

Some teams, particularly in the software world, turn to kanban boards like Trello to manage their projects instead of a full project management suite. Open source Kanban projects are a good fit here, and in fact many offer better integration into large project management suites than what Trello offers.

Teams are more and more turning to chat tools for facilitating communication, both for remote employees and those who share a physical space. While tools like Slack and HipChat receive a lot of attention, there are open source chat tools that work just as well (in many cases, better).

If you have a large number of contacts to manage, theres a good chance youre using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Zoho to organize contacts. But open source CRM projects fit the bill as well, and several have commercial support.

Businesses need ways to balance pricing, product planning, accounting and finance, managing payroll, dealing with inventory, and more. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools like Oracle ERP, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP ERP are the big names in the space, but there are plenty of open source ERP solutions as well.

Did you use Dreamweaver or another visual editor for laying out web pages? Consider these alternatives for WYSIWYG and direct editing of HTML/CSS for your next web design project.

Think Photoshop is the only tool for graphic designers looking to make professional edits to photos or other graphics? Consider one of these tools instead.

Designing print layouts with InDesign, Publisher, or QuarkXPress? These three free tools might meet your needs.

For industrial designers, engineers, and others building things in the physical world, AutoCAD is the big name in the business for computer aided design. For many uses, an open source CAD program might work just as well.

Minecraft has proven a great tool for teaching kids the basics of logic and programming, but unfortunately, its a closed source program. The community has created many open source alternative Minecraft-like games.

MATLAB is an important learning and research tool for many people working in the physical sciences, but its far from the only tool for numerical computing. Scilab, NumPy, SageMath, and GNU Octave all offer similar functionality.

Are you a user of Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Windows Movie Maker, or Pinnacle Studio? Check out these alternative open source video editors.

Go here to see the original:
Open source alternatives | Opensource.com

The 6th Street Viaduct projects grand opening in Los Angeles will begin Saturday with a community celebration and continue through the weekend.

The four-lane bridge will connect Boyle Heights and the Arts District across a 3,060 foot-breadth that spans the Los Angeles River, 101 Freeway, railroad tracks and Metrolink tracks.

Dubbed the Ribbon of Light, the $588-million project is considered the most extensive bridge project in the citys history and took six years to complete, with delays due to COVID-19.

After more than six years of being closed, we are thrilled to reopen the newly built Sixth Street Viaduct and usher in a new era for Los Angeles, Councilman Kevin de Len said in a news release. This celebration will be a tribute to the years of dedicated work that went into creating one of the most inspiring public works projects in our Citys history.

To recognize completion of this project, the city will hold a weekend-long celebration. There will be a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony at the bridge Friday, at which city officials will hold a news briefing. The media event is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. and will include L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilman De Len and city engineer Gary Lee Moore.

The community celebration open to the public will kickstart on Saturday.

Roughly 15,000 residents are expected at Saturdays event, which will feature live music, food, a market, a vintage car display which includes a lowrider tribute and more, according to the 6th Street Viaduct Replacement Bureau of Engineering.

Saturday night will conclude with a fireworks show and the official lighting of the bridge.

As of June 22, tickets for the Saturday event sold out. Those who RSVPd will get priority access from 2 to 6 p.m. to enter the event. After 6 p.m., ticketholders will have to wait in line to get into the event.

Residents who couldnt get tickets can take part in Sundays community events, which will not require tickets. Gates will open at 11 a.m. to bikes and pedestrians only. Pedestrians are asked to walk along the sidewalks, while bikes will have access to the driving lanes.

The bridge will officially open to cars at 7 p.m. Sunday.

The original 6th Street Viaduct, built in 1932, was a structural landmark in Los Angeles featured in films including Grease and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The new viaduct has been built to replace the original, which was deemed seismically deficient and irreparable and demolished in 2016.

The new bridge was designed by architect Michael Maltzan, who focused on creating something that could knit the city together in a more consequential way. The design of the bridge was selected by the Bureau of Engineering through an international design contest.

Starting in 2023, the Bureau of Engineering will begin constructing a 12-acre park below the bridge. Sixth Street Park is estimated to cost $40 million and will provide access to the Los Angeles River, public art, recreational programming and much more, according to a news release.

Go here to see the original:
Los Angeles' 6th Street Viaduct opens to the public this weekend - Los Angeles Times

The content generated by users is a trend that we are used to seeing on the Internet and that we see every day on social media. In the world of IT, it is also possible to create or improve applications, tools or programs using the same collaborative model.

Explained in a very simple way, a software program is a set of computer instructions needed for our electronic devices to perform the tasks they are designed for. These instructions, which are written in a programming language, are known as source code. Although we tend to associate the word software with computers or smartphones, most of the devices we now have at home or in the office have integrated software: televisions, video game consoles, cleaning robots, smartwatches, etc.

You have probably had to call for technical support when one of these devices has stopped working properly but, can you imagine being able to fix it yourself? In the 80s, US programmer Richard Stallman worked in an office where the printer often had paper jams. His colleagues would only notice the problem when finding that the documents they had sent to the printer hadnt been printed. He decided to modify the printers source code so that whenever there was a paper jam, the users would receive a notification alerting them of the error so that they could fix it.

After a while, the office replaced the printer with a new one and the problems caused by the paper jams returned. This time, Stallman was unable to do the same thing he had done with the previous printer, because access to the source code had been restricted by the manufacturer. That was when he started a "free software movement", which sought to give users the freedom to view, modify and distribute the source code to adapt it to their needs.

See original here:

What is the difference between free software and open source software? - rea corporativa Banco Santander

Sasha Medvedovsky

Sasha is a software engineer with over 20 years experience, and a co-founder of Diversion, which offers open source source control management software. He has been around long enough to have seen quite an evolution of programming languages and developer tools. Hes passionate about building the next generation of tools for developer productivity and collaboration, leveraging current technologies to create a world in which software is developed faster and with ease.

GitHub has been an important part of the software development world, and of open source software in particular. It has provided free hosting for open source projects (the Apache Software Foundation moved its entire operation to GitHub a few years ago), and played a large part in turning the open source git into the popular source control management (SCM) system it is now.

However, it seems that the cooperation is now coming to an abrupt and ugly ending, with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) joining Free Software Foundation in a recommendation to cut ties with GitHub over the creation of GitHub Copilot.

GitHubs recently commercialized offering of Copilot (which was free until very recently), which delivers AI-powered code composition/auto-completion, was built upon the sourcing of code from the millions of open source projects hosted in GitHub. Needless to say, not all open source projects were created equal, with many different licenses (learn more about OSS licenses), some of which DO NOT enable the reuse or copyleft of code, despite being publicly available on GitHub.

Its true that using the code for training an AI model is somewhat different from simply using the code as it is. But shouldnt the codes creators at least be consulted whether they agree to this use of their creation?

To many open source developers, this constitutes unauthorized use of their work, and a breach of their trust. Obviously, Copilot wouldnt work without ingesting millions of code samples from GitHub, so its safe to say that the open source code is an integral part of it. Moreover, any code created by Copilot could be considered a derivative of this open source code (in some cases whole snippets of open source code could find their way into a closed-source codebase).

Its true that using the code for training an AI model is somewhat different from simply using the code as it is. But shouldnt the codes creators at least be consulted whether they agree to this use of their creation?

If this recent divorce between GitHub and open source organizations may seem surprising, it shouldnt be. It really stems from a misalignment of goals and ideals.

From the beginning, GitHub has been a commercial organization that has turned open source software git into a business. While theres nothing wrong with doing so plenty of companies have built thriving businesses through commercial offerings of open source technology its imperative we dont get confused and consider GitHub an open source company or project. Its neither. This confusion lies in its business model, where production-grade, hosted git was provided for a fee to commercial organizations, and free for open source projects.

As someone once said, if the product is free, YOU are the product. Never has this sentence been more correct than in the case of GitHub. In 2018 Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion The common understanding was that the high price (for 2018) was paid not for GitHubs technology (again, it didnt develop git, and there were many competitors, e.g. BitBucket and GitLab); but rather for its developer community, which at that time was 28 million strong.

If Microsoft paid for the OSS community, Microsoft was ultimately going to use the community to make profit. Microsoft is a commercial entity with shareholders and has an obligation to make as much profit as possible. Copilot is just the perfect example of that. Microsoft owns both GitHub, and a large stake in OpenAI, the AI company that trained the Copilot AI model. The cooperation makes so much corporate sense that can be summarized as: they have all of the most popular OSS projects in the world that they are hosting, alongside amazing AI capabilities. It just makes sense to use the synergies to make a commercially successful product.

Theres just one problem with this line of thought: hosting the code doesnt mean that Microsoft owns the code. And this is not the first time this company has made this mistaken assumption.

One illustrative exchange that took place recently points at the potential dangers.

A developer, who goes by the handle of Marak, intentionally broke the code of his open source Faker mock data generator, because he allegedly felt his work was thankless. He complained about the lack of funding for his popular projects, including Faker, which are used by hundreds of companies.

This opened the whole Pandoras Box of who really owns open source code. What if companies are using the code in production? The developer can just break the code And thats it?

GitHub got involved, and reverted the changes, and denied Marak access to his own projects (around 100).

NPM (incidentally, owned by Microsoft as well) has also reverted his repo to a previous version effectively taking control of his code.

Imagine the situation: a programmer has created a very useful open source project. They have maintained and provided it for free for hundreds of companies. Then they decide to make a change that the companies did not like. Then Microsoft (through GitHub and NPM) took over their code repositories and reverted their changes.

Does this look like Microsoft understands that the developer owns the code, or do they think that Microsoft owns the code?

I dont think the open source movement should cut all ties with commercial organizations, or stop using commercial products. Cooperation is a good thing. Its not a zero-sum game, and it helps to benefit humanity as a whole.

But the boundaries should be clearly set. If a developer doesnt want their code to be used in commercial applications, they should be given a right to refuse. If they are ok with it, then theres no problem. But companies (be it Microsoft, Google or Amazon Web Services) shouldnt just assume that if they give something for free they can take something else in return.

At the company I co-founded, Diversion, we have developed our own SCM. We plan to release it as open source (on our own platform, not on GitHub), and we hope it will become useful to millions of developers.

We will also offer free hosting for open source and indie developers, as our thanks and giveback to the amazing people whove given their time and effort for the betterment of all humankind, without asking for anything in return.

In light of these recent developments, I feel that theres a need to make a promise: we pledge, right here, to honor the software creators license agreements, and to not use their code in ways they do not agree with.

To me its something that should go without saying; but apparently, it needs to be said explicitly.

Note: Sharone Zitzman contributed to this post.

Follow this link:

GitHub Copilot and Open Source: A Love Story That Won't End Well? - thenewstack.io

PX4 is an open source flight control software for drones and other uncrewed vehicles, hosted by Dronecode, a Linux Foundation non-profit. The project provides a flexible set of tools for drone developers to share technologies to create tailored solutions for drone applications. Annually, the Dronecode Foundation hosts the PX4 Developer Summit, a flagship conference for the drone development community. DroneLife contributor Dawn Zoldi attended the event and provided coverage of a few takeaways about the latest technologies in the PX4 ecosystem.

PX4 Drone Code Top 4 Benefits and Needs

The Drone Code Foundation, a non-profit organization administered by Linux Foundation, leads the development efforts for PX4, the leading open source autopilot software for uncrewed vehicles.

Continue reading below, or listen:

PX4 provides a standard to deliver a scalable hardware support and a software stack. It evolves through a collaborative ecosystem of over 10,000 developers and commercial adopters that both build and maintain the software.

The drone community uses PX4 for a wide variety of use-cases ranging from recreational flight, research and development to commercial and industrial applications. PX4 has changed the game for drone operators globally. As the drone game itself continues to change, so too do end user needs. This article provides perspectives from two industry leaders on how the drone industry benefits from open source software and what it needs from the developer community, going forward.

Open Source Drone Code Benefits Today

Ryan Johnston, CEO and Co-Founder of Austin, Texas-based Applied Aeronautics, manufacturers of long-range fixed wing uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) such as the flagship Albatross, uses PX4 for its commercial enterprises, service providers and military customers. He believes this open source autopilot software has propelled the industry in terms of accessibility, flexibility, transparency and cyber security.

PX4 removes barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, small businesses and researchers by providing widespread accessibility. Open source coding provides a foundation for everyone, lowering barriers to entry and evolving with industry needs.

It specifically removes financial barriers to entry and affords everyone, including new entrants, with ready access. This levels the playing field and propels the innovation, refinement and adoption that, in turn, propels the drone industry.

Applied Aeronautics first engaged with PX4 in 2014, when the company needed to find a way to slow down its large aircraft, which had a 30:1 glide ratio like a sailplane. At that time, no autopilot software could do this. Johnston flew to Zurich to spend time with PX4 developers, who got the autonomous takeoff and landing to work successfully on the first try. The iteration from challenge identification, to communication with the community, experimentation and resolution took just a matter of days, he said. I immediately became a believer in open source coding.

Johnston opined that open standards and software will be key to ensuring OEMs can deliver solutions that meet the ever-changing needs of the user base and regulators. Its an adaptable ecosystem, he explained. Its a great foundation and starting point, which can be modified and adapted to suit ones own objectives. Customers can add new software modules, external sensors or a companion computer to achieve their goals.

That adaptability applies, not just just during the planning stage of a project, but throughout a projects life cycle. PX4 allows customers to ask questions and gain invaluable insights from experts in various fields, who troubleshoot in real time with tech support. Johnston said. Without the foundation PX4 provided, many of our customer projects, both military and commercial, would literally and figuratively not have been able to get off the ground.

The PX4 community also creates a living record of these shared challenges and holistic expert community feedback. This results in vetted foundational standards that enable innovation and interoperability.

No one company or piece of hardware will be able to solve all existing industry or customer challenges, Johnston noted. This is why interoperability among subsystems is so important to moving the industry forward. PX4 opens up these pathways because it can work with almost anything, including a wide variety of hardware, sensors, and user interfaces with varying levels of risk tolerance.

As an added bonus, open source software also helps to mitigate cyber threats. The fact that multiple parties access and edit the code base on an ongoing basis leads to increased accountability. This level of code auditing is impossible in closed systems, according to Johnston

What The Industry Needs From Developers Next

According to Michael Blades, Senior Director of Platforms for DroneUp, a leading contract drone services provider network and last-mile delivery system, PX4s ability to continue to evolve will be key to operating at scale in the future. Like so many companies, DroneUp also uses PX4. Blades believes high operational tempos will require upgraded software to keep pace. To do this, he said, developers must keep the following four key goals in mind.

While DroneUps story is unique, it provides an example of what others in the drone industry will likely also require for wide scale repeatable operations.

DroneUp originated in 2016 using drones to assist emergency services during a natural disaster. In just four years it has grown to a network of more than 22,000 pilots and partnered with the nations #1 retailer, Walmart, for drone delivery.

Last November, DroneUp opened its first drone airport, called The DroneUp Hub, Farmington, Arkansas. So far in 2022, it has launched two more Hubs in the state. By this July, it will open additional Hubs in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Virginia and Utah, as part of its nationwide expansion with Walmart. The ultimate goal is to have enough operational Hubs to service more than four thousand Walmart stores across. This will require about 34 hubs with a total of 40,000 80,000 drones.

Tens of thousands of drones will ultimately require one-to-many remote pilot operations and beyond visual line of sight operations. Autopilot software will need to account for this.

This same software must support dissimilar fleets, across multiple domains. Flight distances and cargo loads will vary, as will the environments in which drones will operate. This will necessitate the use of a wide variety of drones. At some point, drones may deliver to autonomous ground fleets for last mile deliveries. Software will need to plug-and-play across all of these vehicles.

As discussed above, PX4 development accounts for cyber security by virtue of its own processes. Even so, according to Blades, additional hardening against cyber attacks remains a critical software requirement. This becomes even more crucial when operating at scale.

Finally, the need to rapidly test and field foundational source code updates becomes even more amplified when a company utilizes large fleets in wide ranging operations.

Ramn Roche, the General Manager of the Dronecode Foundation, 2021 Airwards Industry Impactor Award recipient, and active contributor, advocate and leader in open-source code for drones for more than a decade, noted, At the Dronecode Foundation, during the past seven years, when the drone industry faced multiple challenges, our community pitched in to help solve even the most complex aspects of managing aerial vehicles. We plan to continue to support the industry by keeping open technologies aligned with current industry needs, looking beyond what lies ahead, and providing new opportunities and solutions.

To do this, The Dronecode Foundation plans to expand its efforts on open standards. Roche said, We are doubling down on the work we have been carrying out over the last two years. We strongly believe standards are the way forward for our industry, and we want to open the doors to any organization to collaborate with us.

The Foundation just concluded a successful PX4 Developer Summit at the end of June. There, Roche alluded to upcoming announcements on additional face-to-face meetings this year to share in-depth plans and progress in the ecosystem. So, stay tuned for whats next.

In the meantime, to learn more about The Dronecode Foundation visit: https://www.dronecode.org/

Read more about open source software for drones, and the Dronecode Foundation:

Dawn M.K. Zoldi (Colonel, USAF, Retired) is a licensed attorney with 28 years of combined active duty military and federal civil service to the U.S. Air Force. She is the CEO & Founder of P3 Tech Consulting and an internationally recognized expert on uncrewed aircraft system law and policy. Zoldicontributes to several magazines and hosts popular tech podcasts. Zoldi is also an Adjunct Professor for two universities, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2022, she received the Airwards Peoples Choice Industry Impactor Award, was recognized as one of the Top Women to Follow on LinkedIn and listed in the eVTOL Insights 2022 PowerBook. For more information, follow her on social media and visit her website at:https://www.p3techconsulting.com.

Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.For drone industry consulting or writing,Email Miriam.

TWITTER:@spaldingbarker

Subscribe to DroneLife here.

Read the rest here:

Dronecode and the PX4 Open Source Drone Platform: the Benefits of Open Source, and What Comes Next - DroneLife

Open Source Hub (OSH) is a new open source project from code visibility company CodeSee. Previously it existed as OSS Port, but with the new name comes several updates and changes to the platform.

Similar to OSS Port, OSH is a development community for finding, exploring, and contributing to open source projects.

According to CodeSee, many existing open source communities only aggregate projects, while OSH provides tools for onboarding developers and helping them understand the code in a project.

Developers will be able to use OSH to see the impact of their contributions, build personal profiles, search for projects that fit their needs, access engaging content and programs, and participate in events.

We need more developers learning from and contributing to open source so that all of our codebases are more maintainable and resilient. Every codebase is affected by open source so we need to help each other ramp up in these codebases quickly and support one another right now, said Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO at CodeSee. Open Source Hub is more than a product or network, it is a movement. A movement for developers at all skill levels to come together, learn, collaborate, and contribute to and support open source with the code visibility tools and manpower it desperately needs.

Learn more about the project here.

Read more here:

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Open Source Hub - SDTimes.com

Red Hat Inc. Chief Executive OfficerPaul Cormierrecently offered two key points at the start of the companys Summit in May: Companies will have to adopt a hybrid model whether desired or not, and open-source code is driving the future of information technology.

Cormiers post captured the essence of Red Hats innovation game plan. As he noted, Red Hat had been on the hybrid bandwagon for a long time and its product portfolio has been geared to architect, develop and operate applications in the modern hybrid enterprise environment.

The hybrid model is extending deeply into major sectors of the economy, including the automotive industry. The companys product announcements in May included an in-vehicle operating system that will support the software platform for General Motors Co.

Thats a mini data center in every car, Cormier said during an interview with SiliconANGLE at the Summit event. You have to update in such a way that you stay within the safety protocols. Thats what hybrid is all about; its tying all of those pieces together.

Tying pieces together requires a common bond, and Linux is the foundation for Red Hat. A hybrid model where critical infrastructure must run in a wide range of environments needs an operating system that can work anywhere, and the companys latest release for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, during the Summit underscores the evolving role that Linux is playing in compute deployment outside of the datacenter.

Red Hat made a number of enhancements for RHEL 9 designed to address operational consistency in multiple infrastructures and provide stronger security. These included new features to manage RHEL from a single interface and detection protocols for failed updates to software containers. Additional tweaks involving RHEL 8.6 bolstered security through a jointly vetted RHEL and SAP HANA configuration that enabled SELinux, offering privilege escalation attack protection.

Another noteworthy step that Red Hat recently took with Linux is to join the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project in June. Launched by the Linux Foundation, OPI is an initiative to standardize software and APIs in support of data processing units, or DPUs, and intelligent processing units, or IPUs, for enterprise datacenters.Red Hat was joined by Intel Corp., Nvidia Corp., Marvell Technology Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., F5 Inc. and Keysight Technologies Inc. as founding members.

DPU- and IPU-like devices can enable a broad range of services across network and storage domains. OPIs goal is to bring greater consistency across multiple platforms, an increasingly important role for Linux.

You can take Linux any place, from the public cloud out to the edge,Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat, said during a Summit media briefing in May. Its like continuing to build a beautiful house on a solid piece of ground. Its the land that matters.

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE

An increasingly valuable piece of real estate in 2022 is the telco edge. Research firm International Data Corp.forecasts that worldwide spending on edge computing will reach $176 billion this year, a 14% increase over 2021.

Red Hat has been especially active in the 5G/telco space over the past nine months with the announcement of several new deals, including partnerships with Ericsson, Mavenir and Vodafone Ziggo.

In March, Red Hat shared details of its collaboration with Verizon Communications Inc. using OpenShift to manage the telecommunications providers 5G edge deployments. Verizon customers can use OpenShift as a single platform to control different types of infrastructure and build applications across multiple clouds.

The real opportunity around 5G is the industrial applications, things like the connected car automotive driving, factory floor automation, how you actually interface digitally with your bank,Darrell Jordan-Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat, explained during an interview with SiliconANGLE. Were doing all sorts of things more intelligently at the edge of the network, using artificial intelligence and machine learning. All of those things are going to deliver a new experience for everyone that interacts with the network. And the telcos are at the heart of it.

In late June, Red Hat announced a joint development pact with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. to offer pay-per-use OpenShift on HPE GreenLake, an edge to cloud platform. The agreement brings OpenShift pay-per-use to an on-premises cloud service for the first time, according to Red Hat. Perhaps more significantly, it positions Red Hat to capitalize on expected growth in 5G and the edge.

There is a great deal of growth in the market right now around edge, edge AI, and telco and the 5G rollout,Ryan King, senior director of the global hardware partner ecosystem for Red Hat, said in a recent interview with CRN. Those are all areas of growth that we are looking at with this model.

Along with Linux and the edge, Red Hat has been focused over the past year on the field of high-performance computing, or HPC. The use of AI at scale and increased enterprise reliance on data-driven decision-making have created a need for processing complex calculations at high speed across multiple servers.

Linux runs on all of the worlds top 500 supercomputers, and Red Hat has been focused on extending its hybrid expertise to encompass massive-scale HPC deployments. This has included adapting container technologies, such as Podman, to handle workloads in highly demanding HPC environments.

Red Hats work signals the move of HPC into the cloud and container ecosystem, and the company is beginning to see evidence of that in its customer base. Near the end of 2021, Ghent University in Belgium adopted Red Hats HPC technology to create a developer-friendly environment with massively scalable data storage.

HPC is a bit slow in adopting new technologies,Kenneth Hoste, HPC system administrator at Ghent University, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. But were definitely seeing some impact from cloud, especially things like containers and Kubernetes, and were starting to hear these things in the HPC community as well.

Red Hats collaboration with customers such as Ghent is creating ripples of interest elsewhere, including the U.S. federal government. In June, the company announced that it would collaborate with multiple U.S. Department of Energy labs to support cloud-native standards in HPC environments, such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. The work will include an intriguing effort at Sandia to explore deployment scenarios of Kubernetes-based infrastructure at extreme scale.

Until recently, the South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. had never partnered with a company in the open-source space. That changed when Red Hat and Samsung jointly announced a collaboration in May to develop software for next-generation memory hardware.

The field of next-gen memory has become more significant in recent years as enterprises seek to bridge the gap between storage hierarchies and an ability to deliver data. Memory storage is a key component in a wide range of aerospace and defense applications, in addition to mobile phones, internet of things and AI functions that rely on massive amounts of data.

Red Hat and Samsung will focus on development of open-source software for nonvolatile memory express solid-state drives computer express link or CXL technology computational memory, such as AI-tailored HBM-PIM or Smart SSD solutions, as well as fabrics. Samsung also announced the launch of a cloud-based research initiative that Red Hat will participate in for development and verification of software in server environments.

Like most businesses, Red Hat is navigating a post-pandemic world where the phrase new normal has taken on new meaning. In his May blog post, Cormier challenged the enterprise community to think differently about what the new normal will mean by emphasizing that it is anything but pre-determined and static.

You get to define your new normal, Cormier said. How will you drive your technology strategies closer to innovation? The only way you get closer to this innovation and the only way you can use this innovation to keep pace with changing demands is by adopting open-source developed technology. Thats what is going to get you to the new normal.

Go here to see the original:

Red Hat follows open-source game plan to drive the enterprise hybrid future - SiliconANGLE News

Alibaba's financial services affiliate, Ant Group, has open sourced its "privacy-preserving Computation Framework."

The goal of the release, according to an Ant announcement, is "to make the technologies more accessible to global developers and speed up the framework's application."

The Framework, called SecretFlow, can be found on both GitHub and China's analog Gitee. In the repos you'll find code for:

SecretFlow, which is designed to promote privacy during data analysis and machine learning efforts, was under development for six years and has been used internally at Ant Group already, as well as a few external organizations.

Ant Group's privacy computer general manager, Lei Wang, billed the endeavor as a zero-cost shortcut to privacy for developers.

The Alibaba affiliate is no stranger to open-sourcing it placed its low-latency service registry SOFARegistry on GitHub in 2019 and its interface design language Ant Design in 2015.

The financial services company also announced that it was investing over $600,000 in a newly launched fund. The endeavor, titled the CCF-Ant Group Privacy Computing Special Fund, is in collaboration with professional organization China Computer Federation.

The cash will go to researching privacy computing, including post-quantum multiparty computation, and will be available worldwide.

Ant's announcement of the code release reminded world+dog it topped the list of patent applications for privacy-preserving computation technologies in 2022 and therefore fancies itself an expert in a field it expects will continue growing.

Read the original:

Alibaba affiliate Ant Group open sources its privacy software and a 'Secure Processing Unit' - The Register