In August 2016, the United States government announced a new federal source-code policy, which mandates that at least 20% of custom source code developed by or for any agency of the federal government must be released as open-source software (OSS). The memo of this policy also states that the Federal Government spends more than $6 billion each year on software through more than 42,000 transactions. Obviously, this is a huge business for all open-source developers.

Winter is rolling in (for those in the Northern Hemisphere at least). Long summer evenings are on hold for now. In these colder months, it can be difficult to get back into work and feel efficient. But whether you are feeling tired, unorganised, or demotivated, there may be an application here to help you refocus and re-energise. Here are a few that have given us the boost we needed to get back on track.

October went fast, full of news and packed with interesting robotics applications. This month certainly doesn’t need an intro, so we will let the news take all your attention.

Object storage has by far the most simplistic interface out there, with no need for complicated SCSI drivers, HBA drivers, multipathing tools, or volume managers embedded into your Operating System. All you need to do is point your application at an HTTP endpoint, and use a simple set of verbs to describe what you want to do with a piece of data. Do you want to PUT it somewhere for safekeeping? Do you want to GET it so that you can do some work with that piece of data?

Intel and Canonical collaborate to build and publish OpenVINO™ container images based on the Ubuntu ecosystem. This work aims to provide trusted, secure, and developer-friendly container images for AI/ML applications in many industries.

CIS Benchmarks are best practices for the secure configuration of a target system. The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®) is the authority backing CIS Benchmarks. Ubuntu Pro is entitled to be CIS compliant and packaged with CIS toolings from Canonical. Let’s SSH into your Ubuntu Pro virtual machine. If you haven’t yet upgrade your Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu Pro, please follow this tutorial.

November 9th London, UK: On the heels of Apple’s announcement of a new line of game-changing M1 MacBooks, Canonical is bringing fast and easy Linux to the M1 platform. Multipass, the quickest way to run Linux cross-platform, received an update last week allowing M1 users to run Ubuntu VMs with minimal set-up. Multipass can download and launch a virtual machine image with one command, and developers on M1 can now get running on Linux in as little as 20 seconds.

Few computing concepts are as ubiquitous as identity and access management. There isn’t a single day that goes by without us being asked for credentials, passwords or pin codes. Yet very few know the origins and the evolution of the technologies behind them. This is the first of two blog posts where we will look at the history of open-source identity management. We will cover the main open-source protocols and standards that shaped it, from its origins to the modern days.