2025-07-31 09:15:15
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
2025-07-30 23:39:57
GitHub director of developer policy, Felix Reda, has published
a blog post about a GitHub-commissioned study by Open Forum Europe, Fraunhofer ISI and
the European University
Institute. The study finds, not surprisingly, "a profound
mismatch between the importance of open source maintenance and the
public attention it receives
"; it calls for a European sovereign
tech fund (STF) modeled after Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency.
The study proposes two alternative institutional setups for the EU-STF: either the creation of a centralized EU institution (the moonshot model), or a consortium of EU member states that provide the initial funding and apply for additional resources from the EU budget (the pragmatic model). In both cases, to make the fund a success, the minimum contribution from the upcoming EU multiannual budget should be no less than €350 million. This would not be enough to meet the open source maintenance need, but it could form the basis for leveraging industry and national government co-financing that would make a lasting impact.
The European Union is currently starting negotiations for its 2028-2034 budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework; GitHub and others hope to persuade EU legislators to include a European STF in that framework.
2025-07-30 23:39:46
There are a lot of things people expect the Linux kernel to do correctly. Some of these are checked by testing or static analysis; a few are ensured by run-time verification: checking a live property of a running Linux system. For example, the scheduler has a handful of different correctness properties that can be checked in this way. Nam Cao posted a patch series that aims to extend the kinds of properties that the kernel's run-time verification system can check, by adding support for linear temporal logic (LTL). The patch set has seen eleven revisions since the first version in March 2025, and recently made it into the linux-next tree, from where it seems likely to reach the mainline kernel soon.
2025-07-30 21:34:03
In the first keynote at EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Savannah Bailey described her path to becoming a CPython core developer in November 2024. She started down that path a few years earlier and her talk was meant to inspire others—not to slavishly follow hers, but to create their own. In the talk, entitled "You don't have to be a compiler engineer to work on Python", she had lots of ideas for those who might be thinking about contributing and are wondering how to do so.
2025-07-30 21:06:37
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, icu, kernel-rt, libtpms, redis:6, redis:7, and sqlite), Fedora (chromium and cloud-init), Oracle (icu, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, nodejs:22, perl, and sqlite), SUSE (docker, java-1_8_0-openj9, libxml2, python-starlette, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cloud-init, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and perl).
2025-07-29 23:42:30
The HeliumOS project has announced the release of HeliumOS 10. It is relatively new image-based ("atomic") desktop distribution based on packages from CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux, with a goal of providing 10 years of support. HeliumOS 10 uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, Zsh as its default shell, and Btrfs as its default filesystem.