Open source is not a business model, but there sure are a lot of businesses running on open source these days. This is a quick round-up post of Opensource.com’s top 5 articles on the topic for 2019.

The Xfce desktop has a specific, self-stated goal: to be fast on a system with low resources while being visually appealing and user-friendly. It’s been the de facto choice for lightweight Linux distributions (or remixes) for years and is often cited by its fans as a desktop that provides just enough to be useful, but never so much as to be a burden.

I’ve never used Xfce myself, but I’ve heard plenty of my fellow devs sings its praises over the years.

When people see me use these shortcuts, they often ask me, “What did you do there!?” There’s minimal effort or intelligence required, but to really learn them, I recommend using one each day for a week, then moving to the next one. It’s worth taking your time to get them under your fingers, as the time you save will be significant in the long run.

Good advice on how to adopt these. Habit formation requires persistence.

Tidelift CEO, Donald Fischer:

Today’s generation of entrepreneurial open source creators is leaving behind the scarcity mindset that bore open core and its brethren. Instead, they’re advancing an optimistic, additive, and still practical model that adds missing commercial value on top of raw open source.

(Tidelift is a frequent sponsor of ours here at Changelog)

After I wrote about Stein earlier today, I got to wondering about open source alternatives to Google Sheets. Coincidentally, this article popped up in my RSS reader.

EtherCalc can be self-hosted or there are hosted offerings, including one at EtherCalc.org. It looks a bit rough around the edges, but that’s often the case with open source GUIs. Maybe kick the tires and blog about your experience? We’d happily log the results here on Changelog News.

It’s great to read RMS and other GNU developer’s perspective on how we got past the UNIX days. I’m particularly interested in a conversation around this statement from the author:

Open source discourse typically encourages certain practices for the sake of practical advantages, not as a moral imperative.

I’m fascinated by the different perspectives. There’s one where F/OSS is a human right, and another where it’s a business opportunity. They’re not mutually exclusive, but which is more prevalent these days?

My thought is that we wouldn’t be where we are today if the former didn’t dominate in the ‘90s, but we’re significantly more capitalistic with our OSS these days.

What’s your take on it?

In the early days of computing, hardware was expensive and programmers were cheap.

I thoroughly enjoy Erik’s look back at the history that brought us here and the technology we rely on everyday whether it’s visible or not.

There are two fun angles coming from this article.

1. The team over at CHAOSSEARCH has built ElasticSearch-like functionality on top of a AWS S3 buckets. It looks compelling for anyone who’s managed a large ES cluster and is looking at other ways to get search functionally out of a lot of data.
2. Explore GitHub data shows a ton of interesting insights around popular and unpopular licenses, programming languages, and the libraries available to explore them.

WebAssembly is a powerful tool for bringing command line utilities to the web and giving people the chance to tinker with tools.

Yet another excellent use case for Wasm.

DJ hits the “why should I care” question of Spark SQL on the head. It’s a fun dive into a classic query language that has new value when mixed with the DataFrames API.

The intersection of service mesh and distributed tracing is exciting to me. This quick Kubernetes-based tutorial is a great way to see how it works in practice.

This write up is a mindbending and informative view of the “everything is a file” philosophy of Linux. Alison does an exceptional job of making filesystem internals feel approachable. It’s a must read for those who love to understand how things work.

Many developers have the misconception that “if a project is on GitHub or GitLab, it’s open source.” However, without a license, the source code is, by default, subject to copyright and not open source. Even if a project has a LICENSE file, it could still be an imposter if it doesn’t provide the rights outlined in the open source definition. This is why open source has established an umpire for open source licenses.

If you don’t know the difference between “open source” software and “source available” software, it’s time to fix that.

An easy guide to the top open source continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment tools. It highlights some of the key differentiators of each project, and provides links to additional resources to learn more.

Go beyond pandas, scikit-learn, and matplotlib and learn some new tricks for doing data science in Python.

I was surprised (and confused) to see wget on this list, but aside from that there are some goodies in here. Gym looks pretty rad, to name just one.

Choosing the right open source database is an important decision. Start by asking the right questions. All too often, people put the cart before the horse, making decisions before really understanding their needs.

Solid tips by Barrett Chambers. Here’s another one courtesy of yours truly: Start your database selection journey by asking yourself, “Why not use PostgreSQL?” 😉

Dan Barker:

In this new series, we’ll focus on DevOps monitoring and observability tools. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore metrics aggregation and monitoring, log aggregation, alerting and visualizations, and distributed tracing. Alternatively, you can download the entire open source guide to DevOps monitoring tools now.

I use the history command all the time, but I’ve never really dug in to it to see what all is possible. If you’re in a similar spot, this article by Steve Morris is a good primer. 👌

Corroborated here and here (kinda).

This quote from Christine Peterson is like a mic drop.

The introduction of the term “open source software” was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users.

The problem with the main earlier label, “free software,” was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept. The first term that came along at the right time and fulfilled these requirements was rapidly adopted: open source.

Thank you Christine for sharing this much needed history of how we got here.

After people get over seeing a DeLorean driving down the street, their next surprise is that it has an in-dash computer written in Perl.

Believe it or not, this project began all the way back in 2010 with C++. If you like to nerd out about cars and/or Perl, this is a great read.

If you’re new to or learning more about blockchain, this is a great post that breaks down the semantics of what a blockchain smart contract is and is not.

Mike Bursell:

The first thing to know about blockchain smart contracts is that there isn’t a contract, they aren’t smart, nor are they necessarily on a blockchain.

Smart contracts could, I suppose, be smart, but for me, that means complex and able to react to unexpected or unlikely situations. I think that people call them “smart” because they’re embodied in code.