This tribute honors the late Linux kernel developer Li Shaohua, highlighting his pivotal contributions to MD RAID, block I/O, NVMe, and storage performance, while sharing personal anecdotes and technical lessons that continue to inspire kernel engineers worldwide.
This week’s Alibaba tech roundup highlights the DAMO Academy’s 2019 top‑10 technology trends—from smart cities and AI chips to blockchain and 5G—plus breakthrough AI liver‑tumor segmentation results, the open‑source Fusion design system, a Flink Forward China recap, a new computer‑vision paper collection, and an upcoming Apache Dubbo live session.
The 2018 Flink Forward China conference in Beijing showcased Apache Flink’s evolution, Alibaba’s massive contributions—including the Blink fork, real‑time BI, online learning and city‑level analytics—and highlighted how industry leaders like Alibaba, Didi and others leverage Flink for scalable, low‑latency big‑data processing across diverse use cases.
The article presents DTLE, an open‑source MySQL data‑transfer middleware that extends replication capabilities with high‑performance CDC, multi‑topology support, cloud‑to‑cloud synchronization, and robust cluster management, while comparing it with other open‑source solutions and showcasing real‑world demos.
Quicksql is an open‑source unified SQL query engine that simplifies and secures cross‑data‑source queries by providing a consistent ANSI‑based language, automatic engine selection, and support for mixed queries across Hive, MySQL, Elasticsearch, and other platforms, reducing learning and integration costs.
Wave Computing announced that the MIPS instruction set architecture and its latest R6 core will be released as open source in early 2019, sparking industry debate about the move’s impact on MIPS’s market position, licensing revenue, and competition with RISC‑V, especially in the AI and Chinese markets.
Matrix is Tencent’s open‑source Android APM that unifies performance monitoring, offering tools like APK Checker, SQLite Lint, Trace Canary, Resource Canary, and IO Canary to detect issues such as leaks, slow methods, and I/O problems, helping developers build higher‑quality apps.
This newsletter introduces Alibaba’s X‑DeepLearning deep‑learning framework, releases a large‑scale cluster dataset for research, announces the upcoming open‑source of the Blink streaming engine, showcases the futuristic FlyZoo Hotel, and shares a welcome letter to new hires, highlighting cutting‑edge technologies across AI, big data, and cloud operations.
Navi is an open‑source component‑routing framework that separates routing logic from business code using matcher annotations, allowing developers to define reusable handlers for different client types and versions, thereby reducing code complexity, improving extensibility, and simplifying backend services while supporting future extensions and community contributions.
The article argues that, despite common advocacy for open‑source, closed‑source solutions can sometimes be preferable because they relieve users from bug‑fixing, licensing complexities, overwhelming choices, and the need to hunt for documentation or support, relying instead on vendor assistance.
This article chronicles Dubbo’s journey from its 2018 Apache incubation vote through its key features, release history, and upcoming 2.7 version that aims to graduate the high‑performance Java RPC framework to an Apache top‑level project.
This article traces the evolution of Alibaba’s internal microservice configuration center—from a group‑wide tool to a commercial cloud product and finally an open‑source project—detailing design decisions such as centralized control, dynamic push, namespace isolation, release governance, capacity limits, and console UX improvements.
This article compiles over sixty top open‑source tools spanning version control, build automation, continuous integration, deployment, configuration management, container platforms, monitoring and logging, providing a comprehensive resource for building efficient DevOps pipelines.
This article compiles over fifty open‑source and free Kubernetes tools, organized into categories such as cluster deployment, monitoring, testing, security, CLI utilities, development aids, CI/CD pipelines, serverless frameworks, service discovery, and native visualization, providing concise descriptions, repository links, and cost information for each.
This article traces OpenStack’s rise, decline, and recent resurgence, describing how the foundation refocused on core services, launched pilot projects in CI/CD, containers, edge computing, and AI, and positioned the platform as a mature, widely‑adopted private‑cloud solution.
The article explains the formation of the Ceph Foundation, outlines Ceph’s widespread adoption, and provides a detailed, step‑by‑step analysis of the Scrub and Deep‑Scrub processes, highlighting their operation, limitations, and ongoing efforts to improve automatic repair.
In this interview, Kubernetes contributor Lei (Harry) Zhang explains the CRI Shimv2 interface, its benefits for developers and end‑users, reflects on the 2018 container ecosystem evolution, shares highlights from KubeCon Shanghai, and discusses balancing open‑source engineering with technical evangelism.
This guide lists and briefly describes 18 open‑source and cloud‑based machine learning platforms—from H2O and TensorFlow to Azure ML and AWS services—highlighting their key features, supported languages, and typical use cases for developers at any skill level.
The article surveys ten leading open-source AI tools and frameworks—including TensorFlow, SystemML, Caffe, Apache Mahout, OpenNN, Torch, Neuroph, Deeplearning4j, Mycroft, and OpenCog—detailing their primary features, supported languages, hardware compatibility, and typical use cases for research and development.
The article announces the open-source release of the Windows Agent component under the Apache license, its integration into the Open-Falcon community, future feature enhancements, and gratitude to contributors, while providing links to the source code and related documentation.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Platform as a Service (PaaS), covering its definition, service model distinctions, historical milestones, major vendors, technical characteristics, container foundations, and the most prominent open‑source and commercial PaaS platforms.
This article chronicles the eight‑month development of ShardingSphere 3.0.0, detailing its origins from Sharding‑JDBC, the addition of Sharding‑Proxy and Sidecar, core feature enhancements, distributed transaction redesign, community growth, and future roadmap for the open‑source database middleware ecosystem.
This article chronicles Red Hat’s journey from its Unix roots in the 1960s through key milestones like the GNU project, Linux adoption, major product launches, strategic acquisitions, and its eventual $34 billion acquisition by IBM, highlighting its impact on open‑source and cloud computing.
This essay explores how differing philosophies between closed‑source and open‑source software drive distinct business models, legal risks, and innovation pathways, highlighting open source's growing influence across AI, blockchain, DevOps, licensing, and cloud computing.
The 2018 China Open‑Source Annual Report analyzes GitHub data, introduces the Grank health index, highlights dominant companies and trending technologies such as AI, cloud, and blockchain, and reveals how activity and community decentralisation shape the vitality of Chinese open‑source projects.
The article traces the origins of the Zend Engine, its role as PHP’s core, the corporate shifts after its acquisition by Rogue Wave, and the recent departure of its key developers, highlighting community concerns and hopes for future contributions to PHP 8.
GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse report uncovers global developer habits, highlighting the most chatty nations, favorite emojis, peak activity hours, top programming languages, fastest‑growing topics like AI, and major platform updates such as GitHub Actions and Connect, offering a comprehensive snapshot of the open‑source ecosystem.
This article explains the rapid rise of open‑source technologies, outlines common questions and risks associated with open‑source license usage, summarizes a guide covering eleven major licenses, and announces the OSCAR Open Source Pioneer Day where experts will discuss compliance and best practices.
The article chronicles Elastic’s journey from a small open‑source search tool to a NYSE‑listed company, explaining Elasticsearch’s technical foundations, its real‑world applications, and what the IPO means for developers and the broader search‑technology ecosystem.
Logan, Meituan‑Dianping’s open‑source mobile logging framework, unifies log collection, secure storage, backend processing, and visual frontend tools to capture all user‑side logs without sampling, enabling fast case‑analysis debugging across Android, iOS, mini‑programs and web, with future ML‑driven insights.
The article reviews three high‑star Java interview projects on GitHub—interviews, Java‑Interview, and JavaGuide—detailing their coverage of coding practice, data structures, algorithms, and system design, along with star/fork statistics and direct repository links to help developers prepare for technical interviews.
Elastic's NYSE debut, its rapid stock surge, the origins and technical strengths of Elasticsearch, and what the company's public listing means for developers and tech entrepreneurs are explored in detail, highlighting the journey from a personal recipe‑search tool to a global data‑search platform.
Over the past two years AMP has grown from a tiny project to a large open‑source effort with over 700 contributors, prompting a shift from a single‑maintainer governance model to a consensus‑based Technical Steering Committee and working groups to give all community members a voice.
JD Security presents a series of AI‑driven security innovations—including black‑box explanation methods, deep‑learning crash analysis, AI‑vs‑AI e‑commerce fraud defenses, and open‑source collaboration—to illustrate how artificial intelligence can be made transparent, effective, and safely integrated into modern security operations.
The Redis community is urging a rename of the master‑slave replication terminology due to social concerns, but the project's lead highlights significant compatibility costs, outlining short‑term compromises and long‑term redesigns while balancing technical feasibility and community expectations.
This article compares MySQL and PostgreSQL across open‑source licensing, ACID compliance, SQL standard support, replication modes, concurrency control, performance characteristics, high‑availability solutions, external data source integration, and storage models, helping readers decide which database best fits their workloads.
This guide explains why contributing to open‑source projects matters, outlines the benefits, walks through essential Git operations, forking, pull‑request workflow, CI checks, mailing‑list communication, and best practices, helping newcomers become effective contributors to projects like incubator‑dubbo.
This article presents a curated collection of outstanding Spring Cloud open‑source projects, describing their purpose, key features, and providing direct GitHub links to help developers quickly adopt microservice solutions and related tools in Java‑based cloud‑native environments.
On August 4 2018, Didi Open Source and the Open Source Database Forum hosted a salon where five industry experts presented the latest advances in open‑source databases—covering Redis multi‑data‑center deployment, MySQL InnoDB Cluster, streaming‑processing architecture, PostGIS GIS solutions, and Redis 5.0 features—followed by a Q&A, a prize draw, and a showcase of Didi’s growing open‑source portfolio.
GitHub created the open‑source GitHub Load Balancer (GLB), a bare‑metal load‑balancing solution that uses Rendezvous hashing to smoothly add or remove nodes, offering high availability, DDoS resilience, and scalable performance for massive connection workloads, and is now publicly available on GitHub.
GitHub’s GLB Director is an open‑source, layer‑4 load balancer designed for data‑center environments that scales a single IP across thousands of servers, uses ECMP, a stateless director layer, DPDK‑accelerated packet processing, and health‑check mechanisms to provide high‑availability without disrupting existing connections.
China’s 2018 Cloud Computing Development White Paper reveals that the public cloud market grew over 50% in 2017, predicts continued rapid expansion, highlights fierce competition among industry clouds, the rise of hybrid and multi‑cloud strategies, growing security concerns, open‑source adoption, and evolving policy and technology trends.
This 1991 article by Linus Torvalds explains what Linux is, its free Unix‑like kernel, licensing terms, required 386‑AT hardware, how to obtain the source via FTP, step‑by‑step installation, missing features, ported utilities, and ways to get technical help.
Andromeda is an open‑source Android framework that unifies local and cross‑process component communication by providing blocking IPC, a global event bus, remote callbacks, and a dispatcher‑based architecture, solving the limitations of existing single‑process routing solutions.
The article presents a technical overview of Chatopera’s multi‑turn dialogue platform, covering language model fundamentals, Chinese segmentation, word embeddings, information retrieval, and open‑source tools, while illustrating how these AI techniques enable low‑cost, scalable enterprise chatbot solutions.
This article recounts Linus Torvalds' 1991 announcement of Linux—a free Unix‑like kernel for 386‑AT machines—detailing its design, permissive licensing, required hardware, how to obtain the source, step‑by‑step installation, known limitations, and early ported GNU tools.
From its AT&T Bell Labs origins to modern cloud servers, this article traces Unix’s evolution, explains how Linux emerged from the GNU project, and compares the two systems’ philosophies, licensing, and practical differences for developers and enterprises today.
This guide reviews eight free Linux antivirus tools—ClamAV, ClamTk, ChkrootKit, Rootkit Hunter, Comodo, Sophos, BitDefender, and F‑PROT—detailing their key capabilities, platform support, and how they help protect servers and workstations from malware and rootkits.
The June 2018 Ceph Developer Monthly Report reviews key changes such as the deprecation of ceph‑disk, the upcoming seastar‑based OSD, SMART‑driven disk‑failure prediction, new rbd namespace support, BlueStore memory optimizations, iWARP RDMA support, and several operational enhancements.
The article argues that programmers who spend most of their careers developing on Linux tend to advance faster than those confined to Windows, citing differences in open‑source availability, API complexity, learning curves, and the ability to study superior architecture and design patterns.
Based on interviews with over ten recent interviewees and personal experience, the article argues that developers using Linux or macOS tend to have higher development proficiency than those on Windows, due to open-source access, superior command‑line tools, and more consistent package management.
This article introduces Yugong, an open‑source ETL framework for heterogeneous database migration, explains its core Extractor‑Translator‑Applier architecture, details key classes and interfaces, discusses limitations of the original version, and describes extensive refactoring and new features added to support SQL Server, MySQL, and Canal‑based incremental replication.
At the iQIYI Technical Salon in Shanghai, senior engineers from iQIYI, Ele.me, Mushroom Street and others shared practical advances in mobile componentization and webization, including Ele.me’s hierarchical Android modularization, the open‑source CC framework, iQIYI’s Qigsaw dynamic delivery and Utopia web‑SPA, LiteApp performance optimizations, and the Lynx cross‑platform framework, while inviting developers to join iQIYI’s R&D team.
The Elasticsearch Team Development Constitution outlines a comprehensive set of principles and guidelines—covering design philosophy, code quality, interaction etiquette, and organizational responsibilities—to help the rapidly growing project evolve into a reliable, secure, scalable, and user‑friendly distributed search engine.
Ant Group engineers Yang Bing and Huang Ting discuss the evolution of their SOFA middleware platform—from early service‑oriented architecture to a full‑stack DevOps ecosystem—highlighting microservice governance, Service Mesh integration with Kubernetes/Istio, open‑source strategies, and the cultural emphasis on reliable, commercially‑savvy engineering talent.
This article introduces Hadoop’s origins and core challenges, then presents thirteen essential open‑source tools spanning resource scheduling, real‑time query engines, and additional processing frameworks, detailing each project's purpose, key features, and repository locations to help practitioners choose the right component for big‑data workloads.
An in‑depth interview with Jun‑ichiro Hamano reveals how he joined the Git project, the challenges of early merge implementations, the relationship between Git and GitHub, and the personal qualities Linus Torvalds values in top programmers.
This article introduces the recently open‑sourced SOFA middleware components—including SOFATracer, SOFALookout, SOFA‑Boot, SOFA‑RPC (Node and Java), Eggjs integration, and JarsLink—explaining their features, usage scenarios, and providing GitHub links for developers to adopt these financial‑grade cloud‑native solutions.
The article argues that, in most cases, developers who work on Linux gain skills faster than those who stay on Windows because of richer open‑source resources, fewer APIs to master, and easier access to high‑quality reference implementations.
This article provides a comprehensive, beginner‑friendly overview of OpenStack, covering its history, version‑naming scheme, core components, community governance, reasons for its popularity, industry adoption, and practical advice on how to start learning the open‑source cloud platform.
This guide shares practical GitHub usage habits, from crafting consistent READMEs and issue/PR templates to leveraging labels, CI integration, release workflows, and post‑release support, helping open‑source maintainers improve project visibility, collaboration, and quality.
On May 17, 2018, Alibaba became the sole Chinese representative on the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee, giving China a voice in shaping global Java standards, highlighting its extensive Java deployment across e‑commerce, finance, and logistics, and its open‑source contributions like AlibabaJDK, Dubbo, and RocketMQ.
This article traces Python's evolution from Guido van Rossum's early frustrations with C and shell scripting, through the influence and shortcomings of the ABC language, to the creation of Python in 1989 and its rapid growth driven by extensibility, community collaboration, and open‑source momentum.
In an interview with Tianxi Technology’s database director, the article explores the company’s strategy of creating a domestically controlled, PostgreSQL‑based database that offers Oracle compatibility, discusses the technical implementation, and outlines the broader challenges facing Chinese database vendors.
This article showcases ten highly‑starred Python open‑source projects—from web scraping and testing tools to e‑book readers, terminal recorders, NLP libraries, code formatters, Instagram feeds, static site generators, Twitter scrapers, and pandas benchmarks—offering developers a curated list of useful libraries to explore.
This article explains why more enterprises are adopting blockchain, outlines its core advantages such as immutable distributed ledgers and smart contracts, and presents four practical ways—BaaS, public platforms, open‑source deployments, and custom protocols—for companies to experiment with the technology.
At the 2018 Percona Live conference in California, Alibaba Cloud received the MySQL Community Corporate Contributor Award for the first time, recognizing its extensive contributions—including Multiple Source Replication, FlashBack, Sequence, column compression, dynamic column addition, persistent auto‑increment, SemiSync optimization, InnoDB patches, and cross‑engine backup—to the MySQL and MariaDB ecosystems.
This article surveys Qihoo 360’s notable open‑source projects—including distributed system testing tools, high‑performance storage services, AI scheduling platforms, database alternatives, frontend frameworks, mobile plugin solutions, and development utilities—highlighting their purposes, key features, and public GitHub repositories.
This article explains why open‑source software is vital, defines what open source means, and provides a detailed, illustrated workflow—from forking a repository on GitHub to creating pull requests and merging code—so developers can start contributing effectively.
At GopherChina 2018, Didi engineer Shi Songran explained how Go powers the company’s high‑availability order, dispatch, and storage systems, detailing service‑governance practices, two production‑level bugs, and Didi’s open‑source contributions of the gendry database helper and the high‑performance json‑iterator codec.
Vant 1.0, the open‑source mobile Vue component library maintained by Youzan, delivers ultra‑light components averaging 8.8KB, embraces a lightweight, fast‑iteration, and ecosystem‑centric philosophy, and showcases impressive community contributions and tooling support for modern front‑end development.
Microsoft announced the open‑source release of Azure Service Fabric’s .NET SDK in 2017 and, after a year of anticipation, fully open‑sourced the platform under the MIT license in March 2018, providing Linux builds on GitHub, outlining its benefits for stateful and stateless microservices, and noting integration with Ocelot.
Google continues to lead in open‑source contributions, showcasing a diverse set of newly released projects—including Puppeteer for headless Chrome automation, the JPEG optimizer Guetzli, ML visualization tool Facets, Python‑to‑Go compiler Grumpy, CLI generator Python Fire, and many more—spanning AI, cloud, and development tools.
A comprehensive 2017 timeline shows how Python surged to the top of machine‑learning, data‑science, and general programming rankings, moved its source code to GitHub, inspired new libraries, and even entered school curricula, highlighting its rapid adoption across diverse tech domains.
This article examines Capital One’s open‑source DevOps dashboard Hygieia, explaining its shift to an Open Source First strategy, the value of DevOps visualisation, core functionalities, main views, technical architecture, integration ecosystem, and practical lessons for improving continuous delivery pipelines.
Barcelona is transitioning its municipal IT from proprietary Windows applications to open‑source software, aiming to cut costs, boost local IT firms, allocate 70% of its software budget to open source, and complete the migration by spring 2019, marking a significant move for the public‑sector open‑source movement.
This article introduces RDR, an open-source visualization platform developed by Xueqiu's SRE team to safely and efficiently analyze Redis memory consumption by parsing RDB files, estimating key-level memory usage based on internal data structures, and generating intuitive statistical reports for operational optimization.
This article explores Capital One’s open‑source Hygieia DevOps dashboard, detailing its value, core features, main views, technical architecture, and integration capabilities, and explains how it enables continuous feedback and measurable improvement across the software delivery pipeline.
This article clarifies ten widespread misconceptions about AMP, explaining its open‑source nature, Google involvement, cross‑browser support, layout constraints, suitability for lightweight and mobile pages, integration with PWA, and when it may or may not be appropriate for your site.
The article reviews Alibaba’s 2017 open‑source contributions, highlighting nine major projects—including Dubbo, RocketMQ, Druid, Fastjson, ApsaraCache, Pouch, Dragonfly, Ant Design, and Egg—detailing their features, community impact, and how they advance high‑performance distributed systems, cloud‑native computing, and modern application development.
This article surveys the 20 most active Python machine‑learning repositories on GitHub, summarizing each project's core capabilities, typical use cases, and providing direct links for developers interested in exploring open‑source AI tools.
In a 2011 LinuxFR interview, Linus Torvalds discusses why he changed the kernel's original non‑GPL license to GPL, his views on morality in licensing, the challenges of desktop versus server markets, and how he collaborates with maintainers on kernel development.
MesaLock Linux is an open‑source Linux distribution that rewrites user‑space applications in memory‑safe languages like Rust and Go, applying three security principles to reduce attack surface, offering container‑ready images, BSD licensing, and community‑driven development.
This article chronicles Monty Widenius’s journey from a teenage programmer in Helsinki to the creator of MySQL, detailing the database’s origins, open‑source philosophy, commercial licensing model, and its lasting impact on the global data‑management ecosystem.
Tim Berners‑Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, chose to make his groundbreaking technology freely available, a decision that transformed global communication, spurred the internet’s rapid growth, and earned him numerous honors, illustrating how altruism can drive monumental technological change.
This article explains what IRC is and outlines eight technical advantages—distributed architecture, low bandwidth, privacy, cross‑platform support, and a rich bot ecosystem—plus additional cultural reasons why many open‑source developers continue to favor this decades‑old chat protocol.
Istio, an open-source service mesh created by IBM, Google, and Lyft, offers a uniform platform for integrating microservices, managing traffic, enforcing policies, and collecting telemetry, with a control plane that abstracts underlying cluster platforms like Kubernetes, illustrated through developer presentations and slide decks.
The article uses the iPhone and Android stories to illustrate how Git’s open, collaborative, and service‑oriented model outperforms traditional SVN, highlighting the strategic shift from closed systems to distributed development, knowledge sharing, and continuous integration.
The Dubbo project has entered a maintenance phase with a dedicated virtual team, releasing three successive versions (2.5.5, 2.5.6, 2.5.7) that address key community issues, add new features, and outline a roadmap for future enhancements and modularization.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of ONOS, an open‑source SDN controller tailored for telecom operators, covering its origins, design principles, architecture, community ecosystem, performance benchmarks, real‑world deployments, and its strategic positioning against competing controllers like OpenDaylight.
This article explains what open‑source licenses are, distinguishes permissive and copyleft types, outlines common licenses such as BSD, MIT, Apache 2, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL, and answers frequent questions about distribution, patent grants, notice requirements, and the so‑called GPL virus myth.
This article explains the challenges of growing data volumes, small files, and hot‑cold data in Hadoop HDFS, then details heterogeneous storage options, erasure‑coding techniques, and the open‑source SSM (Smart Storage Management) system that automates tiered storage based on data access patterns.
This article highlights the rapid growth of Linux distributions over two decades, explains the challenges of tracking their complex histories, and provides an illustrative chart (last updated in 2012) for readers to explore the lineage of these open‑source operating systems.
This interview chronicles Zhang Wensong’s evolution from a university student experimenting with Linux and creating the LVS load‑balancer to a senior executive at Alibaba and Didi, highlighting his open‑source contributions, entrepreneurial ventures, and impact on China’s cloud and transportation technologies.
The 2017 GitHub Octoverse report highlights massive growth in users, repositories, and contributions, showing Python overtaking Java as the second‑most popular language, JavaScript still leading, and AI‑related projects like TensorFlow dominating forks, contributors, reviews, and discussions.
This article provides a comprehensive, regularly updated collection of widely used Java open‑source projects, libraries, frameworks, and related learning resources from major companies and communities, organized by organization and project type for developers seeking reliable references.
Since its transfer to the Eclipse Foundation, Java EE is undergoing major shifts—including an open‑source compatibility kit, a push for cloud and microservice features, the EE4J charter for more flexible governance, and Oracle’s contribution of GlassFish—signaling a new era for enterprise Java development.
The article traces the origins of Unix, its various branches such as BSD, System V, and modern derivatives like XNU, AIX, Solaris, and Linux, highlighting key historical milestones, licensing, and the impact of open‑source releases on developers.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), detailing their concepts, major vendor solutions, open‑source projects, industry challenges, and the considerations CSPs must address when adopting these technologies for agile, automated network services.
Apple surprised developers by publishing the XNU kernel source for macOS and iOS on GitHub, explaining the kernel’s origins, licensing under APSL 2.0, and how this move may help developers understand system internals while aiming to attract more contributors.
