Open Source Computing

Intro

OSS dependencies

Overview

Some Python examples

data-flair.training/blogs/python-open-source-projects

github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners#python

Try searching, if this is what you're interested in.

Open Source News

Elastic changed their license because they are really annoyed with Amazon: elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS. Amazon since introduced their own version of ElasticSearch, called Amazon Elasticsearch.

Github Copilot: Github fed more or less their entire codebase into a machine-learning system, and taught it how to generate small snippets of code, given a natural-language description. But a lot of that codebase was covered by the GNU license (GPL), which requires that any works that incorporate any part of the content have to also be licensed under the GPL. Other parts were covered by various Creative Commmons licenses, which sometimes forbid commercial use and usually require attribution for any use.

Stockfish v ChessBase: Stockfish makes an open-source chess engine. Chessbase GmbH allegedly used it without making its added code public, contrary to the GPL. Stockfish sued, in Germany. The parties have now settled (https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/chessbase-stockfish-agreement). This kind of lawsuit is routine in the GPL world, but what makes this interesting is that a lot of the "code" is machine-learning training models.

Awful OSS Incidents (some of which don't involve security issues): https://github.com/PayDevs/awful-oss-incidents

Open-source software vs. the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act: https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act. The EU wants to make all commercial software used in the EU subject to mandatory security-compliance rules. This is an impossible burden for most smaller open-source projects.