Monthly Archives: April 2020

Source: OSNews

There’s a storm brewing in the world of Qt and KDE, as the parent company of Qt, The Qt Company, is contemplating restricting new Qt releases to paying customers (i.e., not releasing them as open source) for twelve months. This obviously affects the KDE project considerably, who have been negotiating with The Qt Company for years now.

An announcement made by The Qt Company in January derailed said negotiations, however. As KDE’s Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer explains:

They announced that LTS releases of Qt will only be available for paid license holders. It is still unclear what this implies for contributions to Qt and for the sharing of security fixes between the various parties (including The Qt Company, the many Qt experts contributing, the KDE community, and Linux distributions).

It seemed the two parties were working on a path forward acceptable to all parties involved, but then came the announcement earlier today that The Qt Company was contemplating restricting all releases to paid customers for twelve months. It seems bad blood has been brewing for a while, as Schmidt-Wischhöfer states:

The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead.

All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. We will continue to work on a contract update that helps all sides. But even if these negotiations were to be unilaterally stopped by The Qt Company, Qt will stay Open Source, and KDE will be able to use it. I am also absolutely sure that the Qt + KDE communities will continue cooperation on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes, even should The Qt Company decide to forgo the benefits of cooperation.

Luckily for the future of KDE and Qt, there is an agreement in place between KDE and The Qt Company that states that “[…] should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.”

This is a serious issue that I hope can be resolved, as nobody will benefit from a serious rift between The Qt Company and the KDE project.

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is out of the 2020 presidential race.

The Vermont senator announced in a call with his staff on Wednesday he's suspending his campaign for president, CNN reports. This leaves former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic party's presumed 2020 presidential nominee.

Biden had maintained his lead over Sanders in the delegate count over the past few weeks after his impressive showings in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, and after suffering another series of primary losses to Biden last month, Sanders admitted he was "losing the debate over electability" to the former vice president.

This news comes after The Washington Post reported that some of Sanders' top aides, including his campaign manager, were urging him to consider dropping out of the race. Sanders is set to speak to supporters in a live stream shortly.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Yuri Samoilov Follow / Flickr)

Richard Blumenthal, the US senator sponsoring a bill that critics say will limit the use of encryption, is calling for an investigation of video-conference provider Zoom, in part over its false claim it offered... end-to-end encryption.

The Connecticut Democrat is a sponsor of the EARN IT (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies) Act bill that would create incentives for companies to make changes to their platforms. In return, the companies would receive liability protections for any violations of laws related to online child sexual abuse material. Critics of the proposed law, who include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), say it's a Trojan horse designed to allow the government to weaken end-to-end encryption.

A pattern of privacy infringements

Citing a "pattern of security failures & privacy infringements," Sen. Blumenthal on Tuesday called for the FTC to investigate Zoom. Chief among cited privacy infringements is the claim on the Zoom website that meetings were end-to-end encrypted, meaning video, audio, and text was encrypted at all times in transit, and couldn't be decrypted by Zoom or anyone else, other than conference participants. A post published last week by The Intercept reported that Zoom meetings, in fact, used what's usually called transport encryption, which allows Zoom to decrypt meeting data.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

President Trump has been promoting the malaria and lupus drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 "with all of the enthusiasm of a real estate developer," even as the medical experts on his coronavirus task force have repeatedly "warned against overselling a drug yet to be proved a safe remedy, particularly for heart patients," The New York Times reports. Some hospitals in Sweden stopped using hodroxycholoriquinine to treat the coronavirus due to adverse side effects, and the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy rejected a positive French study it had published on the drug, cited by Trump.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease officials, has warned publicly and privately against promoting the drug absent studies showing its effectiveness, and "behind the scenes, career health officials have raised even stronger warnings about the risk to some Americans' heart health and other complications, but been warned not to publicly speak out and potentially contradict Trump," Politico reports. "Trump's focus on the drugs ... has increasingly warped his administration's response. Health officials have been told to prioritize the anti-malaria drugs over other projects that scientists believe have more potential to fight the outbreak." So...

"If hydroxychloroquine becomes an accepted treatment, several pharmaceutical companies stand to profit, including shareholders and senior executives with connections to the president," the Times reports. "Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine." Other top Trump donors, allies, golf buddies, and Cabinet officials also have various ties to hydroxychlorquine.

On the other hand, some hospitals in New York are using the drug to treat COVID-19, with mixed results. Senior administration officials tell Politico that Trump really believes hydroxychloroquine could end the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump has told associates Oracle founder Larry Ellison first pointed him to the drug, and TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, Rudy Giuliani, and trade adviser Peter Navarro have boosted his faith. "He thinks that it's the drug that's going to get everyone back to work," one Republican close to the White House told Politico, joking: "Do you have a supply?"

Source: Hacker News

Source: Inside Higher Ed (news)

Source: OSNews

Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app (we are also heavy users of Go, TypeScript, and Rust). At our scale—millions of lines of Python—the dynamic typing in Python made code needlessly hard to understand and started to seriously impact productivity. To mitigate this, we have been gradually migrating our code to static type checking using mypy, likely the most popular standalone type checker for Python. (Mypy is an open source project, and the core team is employed by Dropbox.)

This post tells the story of Python static checking at Dropbox, from the humble beginnings as part of my academic research project, to the present day, when type checking and type hinting is a normal thing for numerous developers across the Python community. It is supported by a wide variety of tools such as IDEs and code analyzers.

I recently came across an article complaining about Python’s dynamic typing and couldn’t quite believe this was still the case. As it turns out, nowadays there is indeed a standardized way to do write type annotations and to type-check prior to runtime using mypy, all the while being driven forward by the good folks at Dropbox (which includes Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life Guido van Rossum). This article provides a fascinating insider insight into the history of type-checking in Python and how it evolved in symbiosis with Dropbox’s codebase.

Source: Hacker News