According to ChinaScope, an effort is currently underway to strengthen Huawei's HarmonyOS platform's presence. The local government of Shenzhen has unveiled an ambitious program aimed at supercharging the development of native applications for the operating system. The "Shenzhen Action Plan for Supporting the Development of Native HarmonyOS Open Source Applications in 2024" outlines several key goals to foster a more robust and competitive ecosystem around HarmonyOS. One primary objective is for Shenzhen-based HarmonyOS apps to account for over 10% of China's total by the end of 2024. To facilitate this, the city plans to establish at least two specialized industrial parks dedicated to HarmonyOS software development across various application domains.

Furthermore, the initiative calls for over 1,000 software companies in Shenzhen to obtain HarmonyOS development talent qualifications, underscoring the city's commitment to cultivating a skilled workforce for the platform. Perhaps most impressively, the action plan encourages eligible companies to ramp up their outsourcing services for HarmonyOS app development, with a lofty target of reaching 500,000 HarmonyOS developers. This would represent a significant influx of developer talent focused on the platform if achieved. The Shenzhen government's push aligns with China's broader strategy to reduce reliance on foreign technologies and promote the adoption of domestic alternatives like HarmonyOS. While initially launched by Huawei as a workaround for U.S. sanctions, HarmonyOS has since expanded to power many devices, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and TVs.

The Orange Pi Neo handheld gaming PC was first exhibited in Europe earlier in the year—where the Manjaro Linux team handed out demo units to attendees of FOSDEM. The initial batch of Orange Pi Neo handhelds were specced with AMD's ubiquitous Ryzen 7 7840U "Phoenix" mobile APU, but a recent official launch event—in China—revealed a new-gen alternative. The Manjaro Linux social media account summarized this weekend presentation: "we launched Orange Pi Neo in Shenzhen. The Ryzen 7 7840U model (16 GB/512 GB) will be 4099 CNY / 499 USD and Ryzen 7 8840U (16 GB/512 GB) model starts at 4499 CNY / 599 USD."

The newly unveiled price points have been deemed quite reasonable and competitive—when lined up against the nearest competition. The Manjaro Linux distribution could be a sticking point for more discerning OS-heads, but alternative operating routes could be outlined by online communities in the near future. The $599 AMD "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8840U-based option seems to be slightly overpriced, when you consider the marginal performance improvements it levies when compared to the very similarly appointed Ryzen 7 7840U APU. The "modernized" processor nets you a more potent XDNA NPU, but both product generations house Team Red's Radeon 780M iGPU. Orange Pi and Manjaro are likely testing the waters with an initial Chinese market launch—we hope to see a wider global rollout in the coming months.

Aleph One, a community project, has worked on an "open source continuation of Bungie 's Marathon 2 game engine" for several years. Bungie's classic 1990s trilogy—consisting of Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity—is natively supported on the Aleph One platform (on macOS, Windows, and Linux). The first entry (1994) in the series debuted on Mac systems—Bungie stayed loyal to Apple OS ecosystems with successive titles, but started to shift over to PC platforms with its Myth franchise. A clean break occurred after post Microsoft's takeover, although Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) did eventually land on Mac OS X systems. Long-term Marathon fans have spotted an exciting entry on Valve's Steam store—the Aleph One Developers group has listed a "Classic" version of the first game.

PC Gamer reached out to Bungie for comment on the new-ish listing—a spokesperson responded with this statement: "Yup, this is real, and will be free. We're very supportive of the Marathon community and Aleph One's dedication here to bring the original Marathon to PC, Linux, and Mac for everyone to experience, with cross-platform play available in multiplayer. This is a true tribute to the original game!" The Sony-owned studio is working on a reboot of its classic IP, but that reimagining—as a PvP extraction shooter—is not due anytime soon. The entire original trilogy could be released on Steam by that time (possibly 2025/2026).

George Hotz and his Tiny Corporation colleagues were pinning their hopes on AMD delivering some good news earlier this month. The development of a "TinyBox" AI compute cluster project hit some major roadblocks a couple of weeks ago—at the time, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware was not gelling with Tiny Corp.'s setup. Hotz expressed "70% confidence" in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware. At the time of writing this has not transpired—this week the Tiny Corp. social media account has, once again, switched to an "all guns blazing" mode. Hotz and Co. have publicly disclosed that they were dabbling with Intel Arc graphics cards, as of a few weeks ago. NVIDIA hardware is another possible route, according to freshly posted open thoughts.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that the young startup organization had paused its utilization of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards: "the driver is still very unstable, and when it crashes or hangs we have no way of debugging it. We have no way of dumping the state of a GPU. Apparently it isn't just the MES causing these issues, it's also the Command Processor (CP). After seeing how open Tenstorrent is, it's hard to deal with this. With Tenstorrent, I feel confident that if there's an issue, I can debug and fix it. With AMD, I don't." The $15,000 TinyBox system relies on "cheaper" gaming-oriented GPUs, rather than traditional enterprise solutions—this oddball approach has attracted a number of customers, but the latest announcements likely signal another delay. Yesterday's tweet continued to state: "we are exploring Intel, working on adding Level Zero support to tinygrad. We also added a $400 bounty for XMX support. We are also (sadly) exploring a 6x GeForce RTX 4090 GPU box. At least we know the software is good there. We will revisit AMD once we have an open and reproducible build process for the driver and firmware. We are willing to dive really deep into hardware to make it amazing. But without access, we can't."

The latest version of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack, ROCm, is due for launch soon according to a Phoronix article—chief author, Michael Larabel, has been poring over Team Red's public GitHub repositories over the past couple of days. AMD ROCm version 6.0 was released last December—bringing official support for the AMD Instinct MI300A/MI300X, alongside PyTorch improvements, expanded AI libraries, and many other upgrades and optimizations. The v6.0 milestone placed Team Red in a more competitive position next to NVIDIA's very mature CUDA software layer. A mid-February 2024 update added support for Radeon PRO W7800 and RX 7900 GRE GPUs, as well as ONNX Runtime.

Larabel believes that "ROCm 6.1" is in for an imminent release, given his tracking of increased activity on publicly visible developer platforms: "For MIPOpen 3.1 with ROCm 6.1 there's been many additions including new solvers, an AI-based parameter prediction model for the conv_hip_igemm_group_fwd_xdlops solver, numerous fixes, and other updates. AMD MIGraphX will see an important update with ROCm 6.1. For the next ROCm release, MIGraphX 2.9 brings FP8 support, support for more operators, documentation examples for Whisper / Llama-2 / Stable Diffusion 2.1, new ONNX examples, BLAS auto-tuning for GEMMs, and initial code for MIGraphX running on Microsoft Windows." The change-logs/documentation updates also point to several HIPIFY for ROCm 6.1 improvements—including the addition of CUDA 12.3.2 support.

Slimbook, a Spanish tech company, is a self-described pioneer in the GNU/Linux hardware ecosystem—specializing in laptops and notebooks. Their latest offering is a gaming-oriented model that packs a typical modern day specification sheet: Intel Core i7-13620H CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 integrated graphics, and a 15.6 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel 165 Hz display. A previously released Hero model sports the same specs, although it is sold with "Windows, Linux, or both (Dual Boot)" options. Beyond the usual gaming hardware credentials, a unique selling point is signified by its name: Slimbook Hero Manjaro—this Linux distribution was previously sighted on Orange Pi Neo handheld demo units.

Linux's popularity in gaming circles has grown since the launch of Valve's Steam Deck handheld—its Proton software layer grants access to roughly 4400 compatible Windows titles (at the time of writing). Valve's Deck Verified operation will continue on its quest to add even more titles in the near future. By all indications, the Manjaro Linux team and its hardware partners have been taking notes—while most gaming handhelds manufacturers have sided with Microsoft's Windows 11 OS, the Orange Pi Neo team has opted to go open source. Slimbook's selection of a community-backed Manjaro OS is certainly quite distinctive in the world of GNU/Linux gaming laptops/notebooks—customers are treated to a wide selection of ecosystems: Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, ProtonUp-QT, OBS, and Lutris.

Last week, Doc TB acted as a spokesperson for an updated version of everyone's favorite lightweight open source memory testing tool: "We have released Memtest86+ v7! 🎉 Now with live RAM settings displayed (supported on Core 1st to 14th Gen & AMD Ryzen CPUs) and preliminary ECC support (supported on some Ryzen CPUs). Give it a try at memtest.org 👍." Version 6.0 of Memtest86+, issued back in 2022, was a complete overhaul (courtesy of dev. Martin Whitaker) that revived the irregularly updated FOSS tool's fortunes. Recent media coverage has presented a more optimistic view of Memtest86+ (not to be confused with Passmark's similarly titled app)—several articles propose that a consistent release of future updates is feasible. Version 7.0's changelog documents a good number of highlighted improvements, including: "IMC polling for live RAM settings, preliminary support for ECC polling (on a selection of Ryzen CPUs), added support for MMIO UART, debugging options, plus various bug fixes & optimizations."

Large language model development is about to reach supersonic speed thanks to a collaboration between NVIDIA and Anyscale. At its annual Ray Summit developers conference, Anyscale—the company behind the fast growing open-source unified compute framework for scalable computing—announced today that it is bringing NVIDIA AI to Ray open source and the Anyscale Platform. It will also be integrated into Anyscale Endpoints, a new service announced today that makes it easy for application developers to cost-effectively embed LLMs in their applications using the most popular open source models.

These integrations can dramatically speed generative AI development and efficiency while boosting security for production AI, from proprietary LLMs to open models such as Code Llama, Falcon, Llama 2, SDXL and more. Developers will have the flexibility to deploy open-source NVIDIA software with Ray or opt for NVIDIA AI Enterprise software running on the Anyscale Platform for a fully supported and secure production deployment. Ray and the Anyscale Platform are widely used by developers building advanced LLMs for generative AI applications capable of powering intelligent chatbots, coding copilots and powerful search and summarization tools.

NVIDIA joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk today to found the Alliance for OpenUSD, a major leap toward unlocking the next era of 3D graphics, design and simulation. The group will standardize and extend OpenUSD, the open-source Universal Scene Description framework that's the foundation of interoperable 3D applications and projects ranging from visual effects to industrial digital twins.

Several leading companies in the 3D ecosystem already signed on as the alliance's first general members—Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX and Unity. Standardizing OpenUSD will accelerate its adoption, creating a foundational technology that will help today's 2D internet evolve into a 3D web. Many companies are already working with NVIDIA to pioneer this future.

Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it. Our Linux engineering team makes significant contributions to the kernel, file systems, and tools. We push all that work back to mainline so that every Linux distribution can include it. We are proud those contributions are part of the reason Linux is now so very capable, benefiting not just Oracle customers, but all users.

In 2006, we launched what is now called Oracle Linux, a RHEL compatible distribution and support offering that is used widely, and powers Oracle's engineered systems and our cloud infrastructure. We chose to be RHEL compatible because we did not want to fragment the Linux community. Our effort to remain compatible has been enormously successful. In all the years since launch, we have had almost no compatibility bugs filed. Customers and ISVs can switch to Oracle Linux from RHEL without modifying their applications, and we certify Oracle software products on RHEL even though they are built and tested on Oracle Linux only, never on RHEL.

When it comes to APIs, OpenGL is something of a classic. According to the Khronos Group, OpenGL is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API. Since its launch in 1992 it has been used extensively by software developers for PCs and workstations to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics applications for markets such as CAD, content creation, entertainment, game development and virtual reality.

To date, Imagination GPUs have natively supported OpenGL up until Release 3.3 as well as OpenGL ES (the version of OpenGL for embedded systems), Vulkan (a cross-platform graphics API) and OpenCL (an API for parallel programming). However, thanks to the increasing performance of our top-end GPUs, especially with the likes of the DXT-72-2304, they present a competitive offering to the data centre and desktop (DCD) market. Indeed, we have multiple customers - including the likes of Innosilicon - choosing Imagination GPUs for the flexibility an IP solution, their scalability and their ability to offer up to 6 TFLOPS of compute.

Banana Pi recently released the specifications of their upcoming BPI-R4 router SBC with a host of new connectivity and features over the last generation BPI-R3. The new BPI-R4 adds dual 10GbE via the SFP ports, with a second board design offering 10GbE+2.5GbE instead, as well as a large daughterboard addon that enables 36 Gbps tri-band WiFi 7 and fits to a pair of mPCIE connectors on the bottom. There is also now support for 5G cellular via a M.2 B-Key port laid over the top of a trio of NanoSIM card slots. Enabling this improvement in connectivity is the updated MediaTek 'Filogic 880' MT7988A SoC which features four Cortex-A73 cores at 1.8 GHz as well as a host of dedicated improvements specifically tuned for high speed networking which combines most functions into the single SoC. Now instead of surrounding the main processor with a host of co-processing chips like the BPI-R3 did, the BPI-R4 simply surrounds the SoC with 8 GB of DDR4 and an 8 GB eMMC flash module. The remaining wireless logic now lives on the NIC daughterboard. The BPI-R4 does give up one of its gigabit RJ-45 ports despite the topside space savings, but reuses this empty space by offering an optional plug-in POE module, and both a 12 V power input as well as 20 V USB-PD with the added Type-C port.

Features retained from previous generations are the M.2 M-Key for SSD storage expansion, a microSD card slot, rear facing USB 3.2 Type-A, the bootstrap toggle switch, and 26-pin GPIO. The BPI-R4 retains roughly the same physical dimensions as the BPI-R3 except for the additional height from the WiFi 7 module which hugs the bottom of the main board when installed. The BPI-R4, like its predecessors, will support Debian Linux and OpenWRT at launch with images available on the Banana Pi wiki product page. Banana Pi hopes to launch the BPI-R4 by Q1 2024 and has yet to announce any pricing. Our hope is that pricing stays roughly in line with the BPI-R3 which launched at just shy of $90 USD. Given the swath of new technologies on the BPI-R4 it's a fair guess that it is going to be over the $100 mark.

Apple has struggled in the area of offering comprehensive gaming ecosystems - in the personal computer space - over the past few decades with only a handful of studios bothering to port their games over to macOS, but material presented at this week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) indicates that the technology giant is getting serious about its silicon becoming a legitimate platform for video games. A lot of the company's presentation focused on the controversial Vision Pro Headset, but some press outlets took notice of a quieter announcement during proceedings. Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) made an appearance and announced: "I have been a die-hard Apple fan since I bought my first Mac back in 1994—and it has been a dream of mine to see my team's best work come to life on the Mac. Death Stranding Director's Cut on the Mac takes advantage of the latest Apple technologies to provide the best experience to our fans." Several other development outfits have also declared that their games are set for arrival on Mac systems this year. Apple was enthused about this new strategy and let everyone know that: "tens of millions of Macs can run demanding games with outstanding performance, exceptional battery life, and breathtaking visuals."

Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations stated: "A new era for gaming on Mac is here...Developers around the world can harness our powerful tools in Metal 3 to deliver incredibly responsive gameplay with high frame rates to more players than ever before." Their software engineering team has been working on a system that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating Windows-to-Mac game ports. A Proton-esque environment - comparable to Valve's software layer efforts with Steam Deck - is capable of translating and running the latest DirectX 12 Windows titles on macOS. Codeweavers revealed in a blog post that Apple has chosen to base the Game Porting Toolkit on their CrossOver source code.

Microsoft has been hyping up a new implementation of AI assistance into its flagship operating system - Windows 11 - this week, but a keen-eyed journalist has noticed an interesting tidbit placed in plain sight amongst all of the artificial intelligence bluster. Those who have legitimately purchased the WinRAR archiver extractor tool within the past few days should look away now. Within the announcement of a Windows 11 Co-Pilot, under the section named "Reducing toil and unlocking the fun and joy of development on Windows with new features and improvements," Panos Panay (the chief product officer) mentions an unexpected addition: "We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."

It is slightly amusing that it has taken Microsoft's engineers almost three decades to add native support for RAR files in their OS product environment - it should be noted that Windows 10 is not getting this exclusive treatment, after all the company's product managers are encouraging folks to get onto 11 to enjoy all of the latest fun features. It is perhaps not great news for the developer of this archive file format - RARLAB proclaims on their site: "With over 500 million users worldwide, WinRAR is the world's most popular compression tool! There is no better way to compress files for efficient and secure file transfer. Providing fast email transmission and well-organized data storage options, WinRAR also offers solutions for users working in all industries and sectors." Windows users have often joked about getting the most out of time-limited shareware versions of the WinRAR suite, but not many have actually purchased it - will the small update to Windows 11 impact RARLAB's sales figures in the immediate future?

One of the biggest issues with TWS and any other kind of wireless headphones for that matter, is limited support for various audio codecs, where many rely on the not so great SBC codec or AAC, simply because these are two codes that are supported by most of the devices that the headphones would be connected to. When it comes to smartphones, Qualcomm is by far the biggest chipset provider and as it happens, Qualcomm is also the owner of the various aptX audio codecs that many headphones support. Up until very recently, the phone makers had to pay a royalty fee to include support for the aptX codecs even if they used Qualcomm's chips in their phones and thus some companies—Samsung for example—decided not to include support for aptX.

Now it has come to light that just like Sony with its LDAC codec, Qualcomm has decided to add support for aptX to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which means all Android devices can support aptX as well as aptX HD without paying any royalty fees. However, more advanced versions of aptX, such as aptX Adaptive and the rarely used low latency version of aptX are not included. That said, headphone makers will still have to pay a royalty fee to Qualcomm, although there doesn't appear to be any headphones on the market that support aptX that aren't based on a Qualcomm or one of the older CSR chipsets from the time before Qualcomm acquired them. On the other hand, Sony's LDAC codec is used by a wide range of headphones, of which none rely on a Sony chipset. Regardless, this should be good news for consumers, who will be the ones reaping the benefits from this change in the long term.

SiFive, Inc. the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced two new products that address the need for high performance and efficiency in a small size in high volume applications like wearables, smart home, industrial automation, AR/VR, and other consumer devices. The SiFive Performance P670 and P470 RISC-V processors bring unparalleled compute performance and efficiency that is significantly raising the bar for innovative designs in these high-volume markets. The modern and innovative SiFive design methodologies bring raw compute density that is a substantial advantage for SiFive Performance products and also translates into significant cost savings for customers.

"The P670 and P470 are specifically designed for, and capable of handling the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications. These new products offer powerful performance and compute density for companies looking to upgrade from legacy ISAs," said Chris Jones, SiFive VP of Product. "We have optimized these new RISC-V Vector enabled products to deliver the performance and efficiency improvements the industry has long been asking for, and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers. Additionally, as the upstream enablement of RISC-V has started within the Android Open Source Project, (AOSP), designers will have unrivaled choice and flexibility as they consider the positive implications with that platform for future designs."

Tap Systems is excited to announce the release of the new TapXR wearable keyboard and controller. The TapXR is the first wrist-wearable device that allows users to type, input commands, and navigate menus. It allows fast, accurate, discreet, and eyes-free texting and control with any bluetooth device, including phones, tablets, smart TVs, and virtual and augmented reality headsets. TapXR works by sensing the user's finger taps on any surface, and decoding them into digital signals.

While conventional hand gestures are slow, error prone and fatiguing, tapping is fast, accurate, and does not cause visual or physical fatigue. Tap users have achieved typing speeds of over 70 words per minute using one hand. While hand tracking supports relatively few gestures and has no haptic feedback, TapXR has over 100 unique commands, and is inherently tactile.

Intel has released the first set of open source AI reference kits specifically designed to make AI more accessible to organizations in on-prem, cloud and edge environments. First introduced at Intel Vision, the reference kits include AI model code, end-to-end machine learning pipeline instructions, libraries and Intel oneAPI components for cross-architecture performance. These kits enable data scientists and developers to learn how to deploy AI faster and more easily across healthcare, manufacturing, retail and other industries with higher accuracy, better performance and lower total cost of implementation.

"Innovation thrives in an open, democratized environment. The Intel accelerated open AI software ecosystem including optimized popular frameworks and Intel's AI tools are built on the foundation of an open, standards-based, unified oneAPI programming model. These reference kits, built with components of Intel's end-to-end AI software portfolio, will enable millions of developers and data scientists to introduce AI quickly and easily into their applications or boost their existing intelligent solutions."

NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules repo on GitHub. This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back. For Linux distribution providers, the open-source modules increase ease of use.

They also improve the out-of-the-box user experience to sign and distribute the NVIDIA GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are able to immediately package the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Distributions. Developers can trace into code paths and see how kernel event scheduling is interacting with their workload for faster root cause debugging. In addition, enterprise software developers can now integrate the driver seamlessly into the customized Linux kernel configured for their project.

Xiaomi today took another bold step in the exploration of future technology with its new bio-inspired quadruped robot - CyberDog. The launch of CyberDog is the culmination of Xiaomi's engineering prowess, condensed into an open source robot companion that developers can build upon.

CyberDog is Xiaomi's first foray into quadruped robotics for the open source community and developers worldwide. Robotics enthusiasts interested in CyberDog can compete or co-create with other like-minded Xiaomi Fans, together propelling the development and potential of quadruped robots.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

Today Intel announced ModernFW - an experimental approach to building a minimum viable platform firmware for machines such as cloud server platforms. The reason for this software is that, while traditional PC Firmware has evolved over time and retained its backward compatibility, it has become very big and often inefficient.

So to meet the requirements of new platforms that need to be built quickly and adapted easily, Intel decided to offer a new software package that will help with that. The new firmware package targets x86_64 from ISA standpoint and Linux kernel based OSes.

ZSA Technology Labs, Inc. is the company behind the Ergodox EZ keyboard that we had taken a look at in great detail, and appreciated a lot. It was a retail take on the open source Ergodox keyboard concept which, until then, was available as a kit or pre-assembled by artisans in low numbers, and was not a mass-market product. One could argue the Ergodox EZ is still not a mainstream keyboard, but it certainly made things much more accessible via options to choose from for a pre-assembled keyboard, as well as a powerful, GUI-based configurator for those wanting easier firmware access and control.

In that same vein, the parent company has now introduced the Planck EZ which, as the name suggests, is based on the 47-key Planck keyboard design. Designed in conjunction with Jack Humbert, the creator of the Planck, the Planck EZ aims to be a simple, complete, portable, mechanical keyboard built with layers and ergonomics in mind. The Planck EZ goes a bit further with adding in not only multiple switch options, but also backlighting and a buzzer that can also be controlled to play 8-bit tunes from the keyboard- definitely a first in my books! The Planck EZ is up for pre-order now beginning at $180, with an estimated shipping date in June 2019.

Steve Ballmer once said 'Linux is a cancer'. Times have changed a lot, and since Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, Linux and Open Source have become really important for Redmond's company. Azure is based on Linux, for example, and this OS dominates the cloud platform with about half of Azure VMs being Linux ones). Running Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SuSE or Fedora is also possible natively under Windows 10 through Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The company has made big strategic acquisitions, and Microsoft recently acquired Github, but that approach to Linux and Open Source goes further with the new announcement. Microsoft has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium that defines itself as a "shared defensive patent pool with the mission to protect Linux". With that move, Microsoft is bringing 60,000 patents to OIN that will be available royalty-free to anyone who joins the OIN community.

Considering Microsoft only recently acquired GitHub, it took them no time at all to put the software development platform to good use. Accordingly, the Redmond-based IT giant has set up an online repository from which they could re-release versions 1.25 and 2.0 of MS-DOS. According to Rich Turner, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, it is "much easier to find, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they're in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file." The compressed archive Turner mentions is the original release of the source code from 2014 when both versions of MS-DOS were first made available via the Computer History Museum after their discovery by Tim Paterson. This is fitting considering Paterson is the original author of 86-DOS, which forms the basis for MS-DOS.

Microsoft has stated that they will ignore any pull requests or changes to the original source code, with the repository instead being kept static more as a historical reference to be used in literature. That said, users are more than welcome to create separate development forks for exploration and experimentation. When it comes to yours truly, while I don't plan to do much experimenting, this has created an itch to relive the past. Maybe I should dust off that old MS-DOS system in the garage and see if it still works.