From the Editor—Doc Searls

From the Editor: How Wizards and Muggles Break Free of the Matrix  

First we invented a world where everyone could be free. Then we helped build feudal castles on it, where everyone now lives. Now it's time to blow up those castles by giving everybody much better ways to use their freedom than they ever would enjoy in a castle.

UPFRONT

Readers' Choice  

Why Do We Do It?  by Petros Koutoupis

FOSS Project Spotlight: Ravada  by Francesc Guasch

The Road Less Traveled: Certifications Can Chart a Great Career in Linux and Open Source  by Taz Brown

A Good Front End for R  by Joey Bernard

News Briefs  

Columns

Kyle Rankin's Hack and /   Simple Cloud Hosting  

Reuven Lerner's At the Forge   Multiprocessing in Python  

Shawn Power's The Open-Source Classroom   Smart-Home Lightning Hacks  

Zack Brown's diff -u   What's New in Kernel Development  

Dave Taylor's Work the Shell   Tackling L33t-Speak  

Glyn Moody's Open Sauce   How EU's Copyright Reform Threatens Open Source—and How to Fight It  

Deep Dive: Into the Cloud

Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part I  by Petros Koutoupis

An in-depth breakdown of the technologies involved in making up the cloud and a survey of cloud-service providers.

Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part II  by Petros Koutoupis

How to get started with AWS, install Apache, create an EFS volume and much more.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Cloud Billing  by Corey Quinn

Cloud billing is inherently complex; it's not just you.

Vendor Lock-in: Now in the Cloud!  by Kyle Rankin

Vendor lock-in has moved from corporate infrastructure into the cloud, only this time many are all too happy to embrace it. 

Articles

OSI's Simon Phipps on Open Source's Past and Future  by Christine Hall

With an eye on the future, the Open Source Initiative's president sits down and talks with Linux Journal about the organization's 20-year history.

Create Dynamic Wallpaper with a Bash Script  by Patrick Whelan

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning.

Creating an Adventure Game in the Terminal with ncurses  by Jim Hall

How to use curses functions to read the keyboard and manipulate the screen.

ONNX: the Open Neural Network Exchange Format  by Braddock Gaskill

An open-source battle is being waged for the soul of artificial intelligence. It is being fought by industry titans, universities and communities of machine-learning researchers world-wide. This article chronicles one small skirmish in that fight: a standardized file format for neural networks. At stake is the open exchange of data among a multitude of tools instead of competing monolithic frameworks.

Oracle Patches Spectre for Red Hat  by Charles Fisher

Red Hat's Spectre remediation currently requires new microcode for a complete fix, which leaves most x86 processors vulnerable as they lack this update. Oracle has released new retpoline kernels which completely remediate Meltdown and Spectre on all compatible CPUs, which I show to install and test on CentOS here.

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