FOSS World News: The EU Parliament Legal Affairs Committee Vote on Directive on Copyright, David Clark Cause and IBM's Call for Code, Equus' New WHITEBOX OPEN Server Platform and More

Thursday, June 21, 2018

The EU Parliament Legal Affairs Committee Vote on Directive on Copyright, David Clark Cause and IBM's Call for Code, Equus' New WHITEBOX OPEN Server Platform and More

News briefs for June 21, 2018.

Yesterday the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee voted in favor of "the most harmful provisions of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market", Creative Commons reports. The provisions include the Article 11 "link tax", which requires "anyone using snippets of journalistic content to first get a license or pay a fee to the publisher for its use online." The committee also voted in favor of Article 13, which "requires online platforms to monitor their users' uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering." There are still several steps to get through before the Directive is completely adopted. See EDRi for more information.

This week IBM and creator David Clark Cause announced the Call for Code, which "aims to unleash the collective power of the global open source developer community against the growing threat of natural disasters." See also here for more information on how to answer the Call for Code and "create applications that improve disaster preparedness, build resilient communities, and safeguard the health and well-being of individuals and institutions."

Equus Compute Solutions recently announced the release of its new WHITEBOX OPEN family of servers and storage solutions that are "custom, cost-optimized open-hardware platforms". The WHITEBOX OPEN servers use OpenBMC (the open-source implementation of the Baseboard Management Controller firmware stack), coreboot and LinuxBoot to customize the server BIOS and OCP slots that accommodate multi-vendor network cards.

Google added a Guest app to its Fucshia OS. According to the Linux.com post, the app enables Linux apps to run within Fuchsia as a virtual machine, using a library called Machina "that permits closer integration with the OS than is available with typical emulators."

Crate.io launched a commercial Machine Data Platform, as well as a new version of its open-source SQL database for the Internet of Things and machine data, Linux Insider reports. CrateDB 3.0 features faster performance, enhanced security and "gives mainstream SQL developers access to machine data applications that previously were available only with NoSQL solutions."