Admina 0.9.1: public release of the AI governance framework
Admina 0.9.1 release notes ā SDK, proxy, plugin system, CLI and dashboard in a single install. Apache 2.0 licence, hybrid Python + Rust engine.
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Posts tagged Open Source.
Where the open part ends in NVIDIA's DGX stack
In NVIDIA's DGX platforms the interconnect silicon (NVLink, NVSwitch) is proprietary, while the software and mechanical layers around it are public: NCCL under a BSD licence, the GB200 NVL72 rack contributed to the Open Compute Project. Where the line falls between what is documented and reusable and what stays tied to a single vendor.
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How open is the open-source NVIDIA GPU driver
NVIDIA's Linux GPU kernel modules have been open source since 2022, but the boundary of that openness runs through the GSP and the closed CUDA user space. What stays proprietary, and why the open driver depends on a closed firmware.
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SQLAlchemy 2.0: typing moves into the ORM mapping
With 2.0 the declarative layer derives columns from PEP 484 annotations and the select() API becomes the single form for Core and ORM. What actually changes for anyone maintaining a Python application.
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Handing over a cloud-native platform at the end of a research project
Technical notes from the close of SMARTOUR: what it takes to move a multi-tenant Kubernetes system from lab prototype to verifiable deliverable, across headless portals and a standards-drift debt.
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Metal on Apple Silicon: one language for graphics and compute
Metal is an explicit, low-overhead model for rendering and compute on Apple GPUs, with a single shader language and unified memory on Apple Silicon. Notes on MSL, MPS/MPSGraph and Metal 3 after WWDC 2022.
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Abstracting industrial robots under a common model
Every industrial robot maker has its own language. A shared model that crosses brands can be built, but the level you bind it to decides what becomes portable.
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Transformers 4.0: fast tokenizers become the default
Version 4.0 of Hugging Face's transformers library (30 November 2020) makes Rust tokenizers and return_dict the default, reorganises the package and splits out sentencepiece. Migration notes and consequences for the shared-model ecosystem.
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The SMARTOUR compute platform on an open-source stack
Technical notes on multi-cluster orchestration with Kubernetes, Rancher, GitLab CE and Grafana for hosting the deliverables of a multi-partner research project.
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Django 3.0 and ASGI: what actually changes inside the request
Django 3.0 runs under ASGI, yet views, middleware and the ORM stay synchronous. What the new asynchronous handler really enables, and what it defers to the DEP 0009 roadmap.
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Jetson Nano: the datacentre CUDA stack on a 5-watt module
The Jetson Nano announced at GTC 2019 puts 128 Maxwell cores and CUDA 10 into a 99-dollar, 5-10 W device. The interesting part is the continuity of the stack between training on desktop GPUs and inference at the edge, not the price.
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Loki: indexing log labels instead of content
At KubeCon Seattle (December 2018) Grafana Labs presented Loki, an alpha-stage log aggregator that indexes only the labels of each stream and keeps the compressed content on object storage. Notes on the Cortex-derived architecture and on the cost-versus-search trade-off.
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Podman and daemonless Linux containers
Podman manages containers with a fork-exec model rather than a persistent daemon. Technical notes on the architecture, on rootless via user namespaces, and on current limits, at version 0.12.
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NestJS: Angular's decorators on the Node backend
NestJS, a Node.js framework in TypeScript with decorators, dependency injection and modules borrowed from Angular. What the 4.x line offers, and where the cost of the abstraction sits.
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containerd joins the CNCF, CRI-O grows in the Kubernetes incubator
On 29 March 2017 the CNCF accepted containerd as an incubating project, while CRI-O matured in the Kubernetes incubator. Two answers to the Container Runtime Interface introduced in Kubernetes 1.5.
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Grafana: metric storage and visualisation, kept apart
Grafana neither collects nor stores metrics: it queries external sources through data source plugins and draws dashboards. Technical notes on a decoupled architecture and on the Apache 2.0 licence.
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Which protocols for a regional tourism platform
When a region's data comes from heterogeneous sources, integration is decided on the choice of protocols. A survey of REST, gRPC, GraphQL, MQTT and the OGC standards as of January 2017.
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Fab Lab Cascina: reproducibility as a network requirement
A fab lab is defined by a shared inventory of machines and a common open-source toolchain. The opening of Fab Lab Toscana in Cascina is an occasion to examine what makes the nodes of the Fab network interoperable.
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React Native: how the bridge between JavaScript and native widgets works
On 26 March 2015 Facebook published the iOS version of React Native on GitHub. Technical notes on native rendering, the asynchronous bridge, and the limits known so far.
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Babel 5.0: the transpiler becomes a plugin pipeline
With version 5.0 (31 March 2015) the 6to5 transpiler, renamed Babel, opens a plugin API and adopts the TC39 process stages. Technical notes on the AST architecture and the chosen defaults.
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An RF field meter inside the browser: serial data with the Chrome Serial APIs
How to read a personal radiofrequency electromagnetic field sensor from a Chrome app over a USB serial port, and why V/m readings only become legible next to the thresholds of ICNIRP 1998 and the Italian DPCM of 8 July 2003.
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Webpack 1.0: the bundle as a dependency graph
On 19 February 2014 webpack reached version 1.0. Its graph, loaders and code splitting address problems left open by browserify and RequireJS.
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Hugo, a static site generator written in Go: the differences from Jekyll
Hugo 0.9.0 builds a static site from Markdown with no external runtime: a single Go binary, the Blackfriday engine, html/template, indexes for taxonomies. Technical notes from a hands-on trial.
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A tourism platform on an open-source cloud stack
Technical notes on an open-source IaaS stack ā OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus ā for the requirements of a tourism and cultural-heritage platform.
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Arduino YĆN: an AVR microcontroller and a Linux on the same board
The Arduino YĆN pairs an ATmega32U4 microcontroller with an Atheros AR9331 SoC running OpenWrt. Technical notes on the serial bridge between the two chips and what changes for anyone prototyping connected objects.
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What Docker adds to the Linux kernel primitives
Docker, open-sourced by dotCloud in March 2013, puts a uniform interface over cgroups, namespaces and a union filesystem already present in the Linux kernel. What changes is not the kernel but the distribution format.
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BeagleBone Black: the two PRUs next to the Cortex-A8 for deterministic I/O
The BeagleBone Black ships in April 2013 at $45 with a TI AM335x SoC, 512 MB DDR3, 2 GB eMMC and two 200 MHz PRUs. Next to the core that runs Linux sits a real-time subsystem few same-price boards offer.
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Vagrant: the development environment as a versioned file
Vagrant describes a development virtual machine in a Ruby Vagrantfile and recreates it with vagrant up. The 1.1.0 release, out today, decouples the workflow from the VirtualBox backend through its provider system.
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Frame masking in RFC 6455 WebSocket
RFC 6455 standardised WebSocket in December 2011. The least obvious detail is the mandatory XOR masking of client-to-server frames: a rule born from a real attack on transparent proxies, not a stylistic choice.
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Arduino 1.0: what changes in the sketch format and the core API
Arduino 1.0 (30 November 2011) freezes the sketch format and core API: .ino extension, Arduino.h replacing WProgram.h, Stream return values, rewritten String and SoftwareSerial. Notes on the compatibility breaks.
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Reading a solar inverter's data without going through the portal
In 2011 the production data of a photovoltaic plant lives behind proprietary protocols. The state of open formats and free software that try to make it readable.
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A document repository is not enough for multi-channel publishing
Why digitising an editorial catalogue is mainly a problem of metadata and content typing, not of storage alone: the role of CMIS, SKOS, DITA and EPUB on top of an Alfresco core.
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OpenStack Cactus: notes on running an in-house IaaS
OpenStack's third release, Cactus (15 April 2011), brings live migration to Nova and static serving to Swift. Technical notes on the compute architecture and on what is still missing before production.
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Kafka: the log as a messaging primitive
LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka in January 2011. Instead of a queue with single-consumption delivery, it builds messaging on top of a persistent, partitioned log.
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Who really controls an open source project: the Jenkins fork from Hudson
On 29 January 2011 the Hudson community voted to rename the project Jenkins. The code's licence was free; the name and the infrastructure were not. Where the real control of a project sits.
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LibreOffice 3.3: the first release after the OpenOffice.org fork
The first stable LibreOffice release (25 January 2011) gathers OpenOffice.org 3.3, the Go-oo patches and the Linux distribution patches into a single tree. A technical note on import filters, build and governance.
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Ten years of open source from the builder's side
A technical reckoning of free software in 2010: from distributed version control to licensing, what really changed in the daily work of standing up sites and applications.
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Who maintains the free software the public sector adopts
Adopting free software in the public sector does not end with the licence: someone has to maintain, integrate and support the code over time. A technical note on the role of firms, from the 2010 Tuscan context.
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What stays protected after an open source release
Publishing source code under an open source licence is not the same as surrendering know-how: what remains protectable as a secret and what becomes public, in the light of TRIPS art. 39, Reg. EC 772/2004 and arts. 98-99 of the Italian IP Code.
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ROS and the reuse of robotics software
ROS 1.0, released in January 2010 by Willow Garage under a BSD licence, organises robot software as a graph of processes that talk via publish/subscribe to separate drivers, algorithms and hardware. Architecture, design choices and limits against Player/Stage and earlier middleware.
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What art. 69 of the CAD actually mandates on software reuse in public bodies
Article 69 of the Italian Digital Administration Code requires public bodies to grant their commissioned software for reuse, in source form and free of charge. I trace the legal chain that led here and the points where the obligation hollows out.
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Indexing a financial domain with open-source tools
Doing knowledge management in a risk-analysis setting means indexing heterogeneous, versioned documents. What the open-source stack offers in 2009: semantic wikis, Lucene, Solr.
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Puppet 0.24: describing a machine's state instead of the steps
Puppet 0.24, by Luke Kanies and Reductive Labs, describes a system's configuration as a set of resources with a desired state. Notes on its DSL, catalog, idempotency and agent/master architecture as they stand in 2009.
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From diagram to orchestration: compiling bioinformatics workflows into BPEL
How a visual editor for scientific workflows is translated into WS-BPEL executable on a Globus grid, and why the dataflow the biologist draws does not coincide with BPEL's web-service orchestration model.
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Xen virtualisation in a public-sector data centre: what is verifiable and what is not
Technical notes on Xen paravirtualisation, live migration and the running cost of a server estate, written alongside a seminar on free software in public administration.
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The technical choices behind a magazine's portal
Technical notes on building, in 2009, the website for a bimonthly magazine: an open-source CMS, RSS/Atom feeds, PDF distribution, and the problem of keeping the conversation alive between one issue and the next.
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PloneGov reaches Italy: shared code between public administrations
PloneGov brings a co-operative model for the public sector to Italy, built on Plone: bodies pooling code instead of re-purchasing the same applications. Technical notes and the limits of the model.
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Compatibility between open licences: a design constraint
Compatibility between open licences, and between open and proprietary ones, depends on the clauses, not on the code. GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MPL 1.1, BSD and Apache 2.0 compared, with Italian law 633/1941 in the background.
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RepRap: the printer that builds half of itself
On 9 February 2008 a RepRap 1.0 Darwin produced more than half of its own printed parts. Technical notes on partial self-replication, the GPL licence and the 2008 FDM software chain.
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PyCon Due Italia and the move to Python 3.0
The day before the second PyCon Italia, Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 ship: notes on migrating the language and on the state of the WSGI web ecosystem.
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PostgreSQL 8.3: full-text search moves into the engine
PostgreSQL 8.3, released on 4 February 2008, brings full-text search and HOT updates into the core. A technical note on MVCC, GIN/GiST indexes, and what it means for a database to absorb functions previously left to external modules.
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Free knowledge: what changes for free software in autumn 2007
Months after GPLv3 and on the eve of Linux Day, a technical note on licences, proliferation and compatibility: what it now means to talk about free knowledge.
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GPLv3: what changes in copyleft after sixteen years
On 29 June 2007 the FSF published version 3 of the GNU GPL. Anti-tivoization, an explicit patent grant and Apache 2.0 compatibility redraw the boundary of copyleft, while the Linux kernel stays on v2.
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What AKIRA, the MindRACES framework, leaves behind
As the FP6 MindRACES project closes, a technical look at the open-source AKIRA framework: a daemon pandemonium, an energy model and schemas for anticipatory agents.
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State and identity delegation in Globus Toolkit 4
Globus Toolkit 4 gives state to stateless web services with WSRF and delegates credentials with X.509 proxy certificates (RFC 3820). How the open-source grid middleware reuses existing standards instead of reinventing them.
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How a web portal authenticates on a computing grid
Technical notes on how a web portal plugs into the X.509 authentication of a computing grid, between Grid Security Infrastructure, RFC 3820 proxy certificates and accredited certification authorities.
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Building a business on free software
Working on free software, you sell the services around the code, not the licence. A technical note on the subscription model and the state of licensing at the close of 2006.
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Pattern recognition for industrial inspection with open-source tools
With OpenCV 1.0 and LIBSVM the defect-detection pipeline on a production line becomes reproducible outside the lab: features, classifiers, and the point where precision is actually lost.
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Maker Faire and downloadable hardware: when the design is worth more than the object
The first Maker Faire (San Mateo, 22-23 April 2006) brings to the fair projects whose value lies in reproducible documentation, not in the specimen on display. Technical notes on licences, schematics and the reproducibility of open hardware.
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A standard API for content repositories: what JSR-170 is
Since June 2005 there has been a standard Java API for reading from and writing to a content repository. What changes for open-source document management, and why repository portability weighs more than any single product.
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A teaching CD-ROM on open standards rather than a proprietary runtime
Shipping training material offline on a CD-ROM forces a format decision: a proprietary authoring tool tied to one platform, or XHTML/CSS files read locally by a browser. The second path outlives the vendor.
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Arduino: a microcontroller board with open schematics
At the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, an ATmega8 board is going around, aimed at people who are not engineers: published schematics, the AVR toolchain hidden behind setup() and loop(), a parts cost under thirty euros. Technical notes by Stefano Noferi.
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A Province portal on an open source stack: what the Stanca directive changes
The directive of 19 December 2003 requires Italian public bodies to assess open source software and open data formats. Technical notes on how a Province portal is built today on a free stack.
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How git stores history: content-addressed objects
git keeps a project's history as a graph of immutable objects, each named by its own SHA-1. What that changes for integrity, branches and distributed work, and where the weak point sits.
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papiNet and ebXML: open standards for paper B2B
papiNet and ebXML (ISO/TS 15000) give B2B exchanges in the paper supply chain a shared vocabulary. Technical notes on schemas, messaging and transport, from the point of view of someone building portals for the sector.
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An association of Zope and Plone users has been founded in Italy
As of a few days ago there is an association of Zope and Plone users in Italy. I note why a Python-based server stack needs local coordination, and which technical knots make it hard to sustain without a structured community.
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What a research project leaves behind when the stack changes
An industrial research project on a CMS can prototype on one Open Source stack and ship the definitive platform on another. When the two phases diverge, the verifiable legacy is the analysis and the modular design, more than the prototype's code.
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The fab lab: twenty thousand dollars of digital fabrication machines
Since 2002 MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms has been replicating a small group of computer-controlled machines ā roughly 20,000 dollars of equipment ā outside the campus, in Costa Rica, India, Norway and Boston. Technical notes on the model, the software and the limits, as of mid-2004.
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Software patents in Europe: what the computer-implemented inventions directive changes
The proposed European directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions reopens a question that Article 52 of the European Patent Convention had already bounded. A technical reading of the text, the Parliament's amendments, and what is at stake for those who write software.
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Subversion 1.0: the repository as a sequence of trees
Subversion 1.0 (23 February 2004) treats a commit as a transaction and versions directories. Technical notes on the Berkeley DB backend, the mod_dav_svn transport over WebDAV/DeltaV, and branches built as copies.
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A replicated membership register: authoritative LDAP on site, web front-end in hosting
Technical notes on a master-slave architecture for a learned society's membership data: an authoritative LDAP directory on site, encrypted replication to a web front-end in hosting, an open-source stack.
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FreeBSD as a single product: kernel, userland and one licence
FreeBSD ships kernel, userland and documentation in one source tree under the BSD licence. A technical note on the practical consequences of that model versus assembling a Linux distribution, as of the 4.8 release.
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Free software in public administration: the real knot is not the licence price
Notes after a day spent discussing open source in public administration: the problem is not how much a licence costs, but who holds the data formats, the code, and the continuity of the service.
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What makes a licence 'open source': the OSD and the three families
The Open Source Definition sets ten criteria a licence must satisfy for OSI certification. The approved licences sit along one axis: strong copyleft, weak copyleft, permissive.
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Content management with an Open Source framework
An application server with an object database and a content management framework keep content, presentation and workflow separate. Technical notes on Zope and the CMF, and on why the Open Source approach holds up against enterprise products.
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Separating content from presentation in an open-source CMS
Why a content management platform should treat multi-channel publishing as a chain of XML transformations, and what it actually takes to get there in 2002.
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Dual licensing: how MySQL sells the GPL
The dual-licence model of MySQL, Qt and Berkeley DB rests on the GPL's reciprocity. A technical anatomy of a 2002 mechanism.
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Will open source last? Licences and foundations
The questions put to the Pisa panel already have a measurable answer in 2002: filed licences, foundation governance and third-party market share, not opinion.
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Free software inside a technology park
Technical notes on using Linux, Apache and GPL licensing inside a technology park near Pisa, in the spring of 2002.
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Bash: the free rewrite of the Bourne shell
Bash 2.05a is a free rewrite of the Bourne shell that extends POSIX.2. Writing portable scripts means choosing when to lean on the extensions and when to stop at the standard.
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Jabber: federation and gateways in a field of closed protocols
Jabber routes messages and presence between independent servers via dialback, and bridges the closed networks with transports. Technical notes on a streaming-XML protocol in 2001.
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The editorial workflow as a state machine in Zope CMF
An editorial archive with several editors needs explicit publication states and per-transition permissions. DCWorkflow, in Zope CMF, models this as a state machine, kept out of the content type code.
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Running a radio portal on Zope and Python
What it takes to serve a high-traffic editorial site on a fully open-source stack: object database, acquisition, page templates and scaling with ZEO.
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Three licences in twelve months: the founding of the Python Software Foundation
Between 2000 and 2001 the rights to Python changed hands three times. The founding of the Python Software Foundation closes a season of fragmented licences and shows why a project's governance weighs as much as its code.
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Apache 1.3: the prefork model and the governance that holds it up
In February 2001 Apache serves nearly 60% of the sites Netcraft found. How the 1.3 prefork works, what the Multi-Processing Modules in the 2.0 development tree change, and why the licence and the governance weigh as much as the code.
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A network server for the small business: integration is the hard part
The network services a small office LAN needs already exist as mature open-source projects. The hard part is making them coexist on one administrable machine.
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A declarative schema as the single source for database and interfaces
Describe the tables once, in a metadata file, and generate the DDL, queries and forms from there: what holds and what stays manual.
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PHP 4 and the process-per-request model
The new Zend Engine separates parsing from execution: what actually changes in server-side work, and what it leaves uncovered.
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Linux 2.2: a monolithic kernel with loadable modules
The 2.2 kernel keeps everything in kernel space yet loads and unloads code while the machine is running ā a middle way relative to the 1992 microkernel argument.
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Three networks over one radio link: how a Linux node holds together AX.25, NET/ROM, ROSE and FlexNet
In amateur packet radio the AX.25 link layer carries no routing at all: incompatible network protocols live on top of it. Technical notes on how a Linux node terminates and translates between them on a single machine.
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The four freedoms and copyleft: how the GPL works
Free software is defined by the permissions it grants over source code, not by its price. What the four freedoms guarantee and why copyleft makes them inherited.
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Open-source software in a small business: reading the licence
What actually changes when a small company builds its infrastructure on open-source software: licences, copyleft, supplier dependence.
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Packet radio on Linux: bringing AX.25 and NET/ROM into the free kernel at the ARI section in Pisa
Bringing amateur packet radio onto Linux means moving the AX.25 and NET/ROM stack into a kernel whose code you can read and fix. An account of the work done at the ARI section in Pisa: patches to the kernel, libraries and tools, the IP-over-radio bridge on the 44/8 network and an IP-IP tunnel to Tampa.
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