Practical Technology

When I was a kid, I went to a science camp, and one of the instructors showed us a few inches of fiber optic cable. I remember thinking it was so neat that you could light it up at one end, and no matter how you twisted the cable, you could see the…Read More

It all started when Andres Freund, a Microsoft principal software engineer, became curious about why the SSH remote security code in the Debian Linux beta was running slowly. Freund did some digging and discovered the problem: A chief programmer and…Read More

Thanks to hardware vendors working hand-in-glove with Microsoft, many people never realize there are alternatives to Windows and Office. But that’s not the case in the European Union (EU) and China, where computer users know all about Microsoft’s…Read More

You may never have heard of the xz data compression code, but it’s vital to numerous programs, and we now know someone has planted malicious code in it. When Red Hat first broke the news that the latest version of the xz data compression libraries…Read More

Mirantis is putting more effort into its open source programs while changing its business model. Usually, a company’s press release tells you all you need to know about what it wants you to consider for its next quarter. Not this time. Not Mirantis.…Read More

First, they build programs with open source. Then they build their business with open source. Then they abandon it and cash out. Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys’ count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source…Read More