Open Source - and Goldman Sachs??

Goldman Sachs has open sourced some of its code.

Zulip

Zulip is an open source chat platform to help distributed teams communicate effectively. The Lean community used Zulip to collaborate.

The Apache Incubator

The Apache Incubator services projects seeking to enter the almighty Apache Software Foundation. Projects (called "podlings") are "ingested" and become subject to Apache-style governance and operation.

The name Apache was taken from the Apache Indian people, a Native American tribe known for their warrior spirit and inexhaustible endurance, and was first used in the context of the cross-platform Apache Web Server (launched in 1995; despite being cross-platform most instances run on Linux distributions).

AI Attribution

"The user is interested in context".

Thus begins the AI analyser as it looks for the provenance of the code it has expertly suggested. When provenance is found, attribution must follow.

Papers with Code

Papers with Code is a Meta AI initiative that organizes machine learning papers under various themes including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Reasoning, Time Series and Knowledge Representation. Some of these papers are written by corporate researchers contributing to open source.

GitHub Desktop

GitHub Desktop enables you to work with projects hosted on GitHub. 

It is an open source application based on Electron (software framework to create desktop applications with web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a Chromium browser engine front end and a Node.js backend, used in Visual Studio Code). 

Roughly speaking it is a visual version of the CLI. 

From BIOS to UEFI and Project Mu

UEFI is the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

It is a specification for a software program to connect a computer's firmware to its operating system.  Its origins came from Intel's Itanium days (64 bit microprocessor family launched in 2001, originally known as IA-64, with clock speeds ranging from 733MHz to 2.66GHz), where BIOS was found to be too restrictive for the larger server platforms being targeted by Itanium. It was then called Intel Boot Initiative and later EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface.

The first open source implementation of UEFI was released by Intel in 2004 and named Tiano. In December 2018, Microsoft forked Tiano and created Project Mu.

UEFI is expected to eventually replace BIOS.

Is FOSS all its cracked up to be?

Dr Mark Tarver has written a great article on the downsides of FOSS.

Edge Browser Aligns with Chromium

Development of the Edge browser is now aligned with Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome and Chrome OS (a Linux kernel based operating system sponsored by Google).

Cleaning up Files

Windows tends to fill your system up with useless files.

These include System Error memory dump files, temporary Internet files, temporary files (filling up the Windows temp directory) and Downloaded Program Files.

Several gigabytes of space can be wasted. To deal with this problem, go to Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup.

Another useful tool to analyze where your maximum disk usage is is WinDirStat, based on Stefan Hundhammer's KDE program KDirStat, and is available under GPL v2.