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Enterprise level open source conferences, and conferences centered around single open source projects, are a great way to learn open source -- with one caveat. Most conferences don't offer much for those new to open source. Most workshops are for folks who are already working in the field and who are attending the conference to increase their skill sets. There might be a few entry level workshops on open source business models or licensing issues, but the vast majority of technical workshops are designed for folks who already have hands-on experience.

Open source startup SiFive introduces a single board computer running Linux on the open RISC-V architecture. Is the data center next?

I think one of the things that was clear to us right from the get go is that for it to really succeed and achieve its full potential it had to be legitimately open. It couldn't be something where we inside Google just held on to every line of control, because ultimately that would limit its applicability to its use on Google. For it to become something that was widely and richly embraced by the community, it had to be a legitimately open technology.

Modern mainframes definitely aren't your father's punch card-driven machines that filled entire rooms. These days, they most often run Linux and have found a renewed place in the data center, where they're being called upon to do a lot of heavy lifting. Want to know where the largest instance of Oracle's database runs? It's on a Linux mainframe. How about the largest implementation of SAP on the planet? Again, Linux on a mainframe.

Although XenServer has found a substantial user base, it's never really seen much of a developer community form around it. Most development still comes from Citrix, which retains skin in the game from its commercial support program and from its paid version of the platform containing features not available in the free version. The failure to attract a healthy developer community isn't surprising, because open source developers often have an aversion to projects using such an "open core" business model.

These new teams of employees, which includes CoreOS's founder and CEO Alex Polvi and CTO Brandon Philips, will be doing some of the heavy lifting as the technology they developed is rolled into Red Hat brands. They will continue to work out of CoreOS offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Berlin.

The security company SentinelOne has released a free-to-use monitoring tool that will alert when attackers attempt to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability.

Cumulus is credited with developing the first Linux operating system for data center network hardware. Over the last four years the company has partnered with Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Mellanox to bring its operating system to their network switches.

Azure hopes its expansion of open source patent protection to include on-premises as well as cloud use will help efforts to attract enterprise customers.

Red Hat got into a bit of a PR snafu this week after it pulled from distribution a CPU microcode update meant to address the Spectre Variant 2 CPU design flaw. The Register, the tech news site that broke the story about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in processors earlier this month, characterized the move as Red Hat washing its hands of the responsibility to provide customers with firmware patches to address the vulnerability by instructing them to get firmware updates from their hardware vendors instead.

SourceForge, tired of being the forgotten GitHub alternative, has been busy redesigning its website. Normally such a cosmetic solution might seem a little underwhelming -- the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" comes to mind -- but in this case it's a necessary step in the site's efforts to return to relevance, especially in light of changes that have already been made.

It might be called the little engine that could -- or maybe the little engine that does. Whatever you call it, Austin, Texas based WP Engine web hosting company just got a big payoff with a $250 million investment from the private equity giant Silver Lake partners.

If you've got MySQL or MariaDB running on any of your machines -- and you probably do -- then there's a good chance you're also running phpMyAdmin, a popular free and open source MySQL administration tool. That means you might have a problem.

Those reading media accounts published Wednesday and Thursday are probably under the impression that while Spectre affects Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs, that Meltdown affects only Intel products -- or perhaps all Intel CPUs and some ARM chips. Not so, says Red Hat's Jon Masters. Both vulnerabilities are basically architecture agnostic.

Contrary to some beliefs, Linux distros are rarely just carbon copies of other distros. As is evident in this look at five of the most popular Linux server distributions, each is different, with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Are you ready for a new operating system for your Android phone? An operating system that's totally free and that's main purpose isn't to get you to consume? How about an operating system that, although based on Android, brings to the table some of the best aspects of Linux -- like (eventually) it's own repository of apps? Well, get ready, Gaël Duval is working to bring eelo to the table.

As 2017 draws to a close, we look at some of the reasons why the use of open source software is growing and will continue to grow in the year ahead.

By this time next year Amazon will be competing with itself as far as Kubernetes on AWS goes. The world's largest public cloud recently announced it's embracing Kubernetes and that sometime in 2018 it will make a new service, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, or EKS, available. Currently all instances of Kubernetes on AWS are user installed.

It's not the first time one of Heptio's tools has found favor with a major cloud provider. In late November, when Amazon Web Services announced its upcoming Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, it revealed that a single sign on solution it would implement had been developed in partnership with Heptio.

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, with usage numbers that far outweigh other platforms such as Docker's Swarm, Mesos and the like. The platform has become so popular with users that Docker recently integrated Kubernetes alongside Swarm in its container suite, and on November 29, Amazon Web Services announced the platform will be fully supported in its cloud sometime in 2018.