A vulnerability in sudo can elevate unprivileged users to root privileges. Linux users should immediately patch a serious vulnerability to the sudo command that, if exploited, can allow unprivileged users gain root privileges on the host machine. Called Baron Samedit, the flaw has been “hiding in plain sight” for about 10 years, and was discovered earlier this month by … Read more
Red Hat’s new vice president and general manager of its RHEL Business Unit, Stefanie Chiras, enthusiastically embraces the growing importance of Linux. While you may not spend a lot of time thinking about this, the role Linux plays in the technology that we all use everyday is growing quite significantly. In an effort to more … Read more
IBM just spent $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free. IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means … Read more
Some see this as a giant leap forward for Microsoft and open source. A few, however, see Microsoft’s open-source patent move as just more of the same old, same old. When Microsoft surprised everyone by releasing its entire 60,000 patent portfolio to the open-source community, someone asked me if I thought the move would finally convince everyone … Read more
Linux-savvy legal experts from the past and present weigh in on this knotty, open-source licensing matter. A side-effect of Linus Torvalds taking leave from Linux to work on how he deals with people and the new Linux contributors’ Code of Conduct (CoC) was one person suggesting that programmers forced out of Linux could take their contributed code out of … Read more
Red Hat initiated open-source projects which use GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1, will be expected to add GPLv3’s cure commitment language to their licenses. From outside programming circles, software licensing may not seem important. In open-source, though, licensing is all important. So, when leading Linux company Red Hat announces that — from here on out — all new Red … Read more
