This year that just ended a few days ago, gave a lot to talk about and it is that in the world of opensource many movements were made during the course of 2018 which set new guidelines and above all generated important changes.
And it is not for nothing, but this 2018 Microsoft had a change of its vision towards the opensource in a very drastic way, because he was one of the greats who made many important changes.
The main movements in 2018
Of which one of The most important was the acquisition of the year, as Microsoft bought GitHub for $ 7,5 billion.
Another important change was la decision to transfer the Edge browser to the Chromium engine. As well as the opening of WPF, Windows Forms and WinUI codes.
The release of Mu, an open platform for UEFI firmware. The opening of the code of the game Minecraft: Java Edition.
The creation of the Azure Sphere IoT platform based on the Linux kernel, publishing code to adapt Linux distributions to run on WSL.
Most of all, what impressed many was that Microsoft joined the initiative to protect Linux from patent claims and entered the LOT Network, which protects against patent trolls.
On the other hand, speaking of the great ones I also emphasize quite that IBM will buy Red Hat for $ 34 billion and EQT will buy SUSE for $ 2,5 billion.
The Handshake community and the Pineapple Foundation have awarded significant grants for the development of free projects, including $ 2 million received by the ACT Foundation, $ 500 thousand KDE, $ 400 thousand GNOME, $ 1 million - Electronic Frontier Foundation, $ 1 million - Apache Software Foundation, $ 50 thousand OpenBSD Foundation, and t .p.
As well as the resumption of the court case related to a VMware charge for violating the GPL license and mercenary financial sanctions from companies that use the Linux kernel.
Openings to technology
Of the companies that made movements opening projects or technology to the public, we can rememberr Intel's new open development in machine learning "nGraph" and the NLP Architect system to process information in natural language.
Another important one is that of Facebook "Detectron" (object recognition in photos), Horizon (reinforcement learning platform) and code libraries to accelerate machine learning applications.
On Google's side we have “BERT” for natural language information processing and gVisor (a hybrid of virtualization and containers) as well as Cilium (a network system for Linux-based containers based on BPF).
Even that one of which I stood out a lot was the one from NVIDIA that released the code for the PhysX physics simulation engine and Valve, who founded the Proton project to run Windows games on Linux.
On the other hand, Intel is developing an open source firmware for sound chips, has released an open firmware for hardware initialization and operating system loading, is developing a new driver for its graphics cards, and has started work on creating of a highly reliable Linux distribution.
The main problems that were generated in 2018
And as for the problems that last year left us, leaving aside the conflict between Richard Stallman and the Glibc development team. One of LLVM's lead developers left the project in disagreement with the new code of conduct.
This year, a new class of hardware vulnerabilities were revealed due to the use of shared cache when performing speculative instructions on modern CPUs: Meltdown, Specter v2, Specter v3a and v4, LazyFP, Specter v1.1 and v1.2, SpecterRSB, NetSpectre, MeltdownPrime, SpecterPrime, SgxPectre, BranchScope, Specter-NG, Meltdown-PK, Meltdown-BR, Specter-BTB, Specter -PHT, Foreshadow (L1TF) and PortSmash.
Finally, also highlights the detection of malicious software in the Ubuntu Snap Store catalog.
As well as the detection of containers with mining code and back doors in Docker Hub. Malicious packages in the Arch Linux AUR repository.
And the intrusion to the repositories additions to the Kodi media center.