Media

Adobe's Premiere Video Editor is Coming To iPhone For Free (theverge.com) 22

An anonymous reader shares a report: Adobe is bringing its video editor Premiere to iPhone, promising "pro-level" editing on the go for free. The app will launch later this month, with an Android version also under development.

The Premiere app features a familiar multi-track timeline, with support for an unlimited number of video, audio, and text layers. There's automatic captioning, 4K HDR support, and one-tap exporting to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram -- including automatic resizing that frames content for each platform.

The iOS version of Premiere will be free to download and use, though Adobe says there will be charges for additional cloud storage and generative AI credits. Speaking of, it includes support for Adobe's generative sound effects and AI-powered speech enhancement, plus a wider range of AI assets generated through Adobe Firefly. If you'd rather not use AI content, there's a selection of Adobe fonts, along with images, sounds, music, and video assets that are free to use.

The Courts

Supermarket Giant Tesco Sues VMware, Warns Lack of Support Could Disrupt Food Supply (theregister.com) 80

Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions.

The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9.

The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland."

"VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

Security

Cloudflare Stops New World's Largest DDoS Attack Over Labor Day Weekend (zdnet.com) 21

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger.

According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources.

The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

Cloud

SAP To Invest Over 20 Billion Euros In 'Sovereign Cloud' (cnbc.com) 18

SAP will invest over 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in European sovereign cloud infrastructure over the next decade. "Innovation and sovereignty cannot be two separate things -- it needs to come together," said Thomas Saueressig, SAP's board member tasked with leading customer services and delivery. CNBC reports: The company said it was expanding its sovereign cloud offerings to include an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform enabling companies to access various computing services via its data center network. IaaS is a market dominated by players like Microsoft and Amazon. It will also roll out a new on-site option that allows customers to use SAP-operated infrastructure within their own data centers. The aim of the initiative is to ensure that customer data is stored within the European Union to maintain compliance with regional data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

[...] Saueressig said that SAP is "closely" involved in the creation of the new AI gigafactories but would not be the lead partner for the initiative. He added that the company's more than 20-billion-euro investment in Europe's sovereign cloud capabilities will not alter the company's capital expenditure for the next year and has already been baked into its financial plans.

Microsoft

Azure Budget Alerts Go Berserk After Microsoft Account Migration Misfire (theregister.com) 13

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts.

An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure's automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft's support forums indicates their issue was not isolated.

The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of $85, received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach $1,027. Another said: "We're actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it's appalling."

AI

Alibaba Creates AI Chip To Help China Fill Nvidia Void 29

Alibaba, China's largest cloud-computing company, has developed a domestically manufactured, versatile inference chip to fill the gap left by U.S. restrictions on Nvidia's sales in China. The Wall Street Journal reports: Previous cloud-computing chips developed by Alibaba have mostly been designed for specific applications. The new chip, now in testing, is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks, said people familiar with it. The chip is manufactured by a Chinese company, they said, in contrast to an earlier Alibaba AI processor that was fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Washington has blocked TSMC from manufacturing AI chips for China that use leading-edge technology.

[...] Private-sector cloud companies including Alibaba have refrained from bulk orders of Huawei's chips, resisting official suggestions that they should help the national champion, because they consider Huawei a direct rival in cloud services, people close to the firms said. China's biggest weakness is training AI models, for which U.S. companies rely on the most powerful Nvidia products. Alibaba's new chip is designed for inference, not training, people familiar with it said. Chinese engineers have complained that homegrown chips including Huawei's run into problems when training AI, such as overheating and breaking down in the middle of training runs. Huawei declined to comment.
China

Pentagon Halts Chinese Coders Affecting DOD Cloud Systems (defense.gov) 27

DOD: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon has halted a decade-old Microsoft program that has allowed Chinese coders, remotely supervised by U.S. contractors, to work on sensitive DOD cloud systems. In a digital video address to the public posted yesterday, the secretary said DOD was made aware of the "digital escorts" program last month and that the program has exposed the Defense Department to unacceptable risk -- despite being designed to comply with government contracting rules.

"If you're thinking 'America first,' and common sense, this doesn't pass either of those tests," Hegseth said, adding that he initiated an immediate review of the program upon learning of it. "I want to report our initial findings. ... The use of Chinese nationals to service Department of Defense cloud environments? It's over," he said. Additionally, Hegseth said DOD has issued a formal letter of concern to Microsoft, documenting a breach of trust, and that DOD is requiring a third-party audit of the digital escorts program to pore over the code and submissions made by Chinese nationals. The audit will be free of charge to U.S. taxpayers, he said.

XBox (Games)

Microsoft Expands Xbox Cloud Gaming to Cheaper Game Pass Tiers 7

Microsoft is testing new Xbox Game Pass features with Insiders, letting Core and Standard subscribers stream cloud-enabled titles they own or access via subscription across more devices, including supported TVs and browsers. These tiers will also gain access to select PC game versions for the first time. From a Xbox blog post: We're always exploring more ways to make your Xbox experience centered around you -- your content, benefits, and playstyle. That's why we're making it easier to enjoy the games you love, wherever you are, and on any device. Starting today, Xbox Insiders are invited to try out new updates in Xbox Game Pass that make it easier to stream and play across more devices.

Xbox Insiders subscribed to Xbox Game Pass Core or Standard now have even more freedom to play wherever they are with Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta). As part of this Insider experience, Xbox Game Pass Core and Standard subscribers will be able to stream cloud playable games included with their subscription or select cloud playable games they own, making it easier to jump in from any supported device. [...] We're expanding the ways players can experience PC gaming through Xbox Game Pass. As part of testing, Xbox Insiders subscribed to Game Pass Core or Standard will for the first time gain access to PC versions of select titles, giving you even more flexibility and the choice to play on a PC or Windows handheld."
Japan

Japan Launches its First Homegrown Quantum Computer (livescience.com) 2

Japan has launched its first entirely homegrown quantum computer, built with domestic superconducting qubits and components, and running on the country's own open-source software toolchain, OQTOPUS. "The system is now ready to take on workloads from its base at the University of Osaka's Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology (QIQB)," reports LiveScience. From the report: The system uses a quantum chip with superconducting qubits -- quantum bits derived from metals that exhibit zero electrical resistance when cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius). The quantum processing unit (QPU) was developed at the Japanese research institute RIKEN. Other components that make up the "chandelier" -- the main body of the quantum computer -- include the chip package, delivered by Seiken, the magnetic shield, infrared filters, bandpass filters, a low-noise amplifier and various cables.

These are all housed in a dilution refrigerator (a specialized cryogenic device that cools the quantum computing components) to allow for those extremely low temperatures. It also comes alongside a pulse tube refrigerator (which again cools various components in use), controllers and a low-noise power source. OQTOPUS, meanwhile, is a collection of open-source tools that include everything required to run quantum programs. It includes the core engine and cloud module, as well as graphical user interface (GUI) elements, and is designed to be built on top of a QPU and quantum control hardware.

Cloud

Word Documents Will Now Be Saved To the Cloud Automatically On Windows (ghacks.net) 132

Starting with Word for Windows version 2509, Microsoft is making cloud saving the default behavior. New documents will automatically save to OneDrive (or another cloud destination), with dated filenames, unless users manually revert to local saving in the settings. From the report: "Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination", writes Raul Munoz, product manager at Microsoft on the Office Shared Services and Experiences team. Munoz backs up the decision with half a dozen advantages for saving documents to the cloud. From never losing progress and access anywhere to easy collaboration and increased security and compliance. While cloud saving is without doubt beneficial in some cases, Munoz fails to address the elephant in the room. Some users may not want that their documents are stored in the cloud. There are good reasons for that, including privacy.

Summed up:
- If you do not mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud, you do not need to become active.
- If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting.

Open Source

LibreOffice Stakes Claim as Strategic Sovereignty Tool For Governments (documentfoundation.org) 46

The Document Foundation, which operates the popular open source productivity suite LibreOffice, is positioning the suite's newest release, v25.8, as a strategic asset for digital sovereignty, targeting governments and enterprises seeking independence from foreign software vendors and cloud infrastructure.

The Document Foundation released the update last week with zero telemetry architecture, full offline capability, and OpenPGP encryption for documents, directly addressing national security concerns about extraterritorial surveillance and software backdoors. The suite requires no internet access for any features and maintains complete transparency through open source code that governments can audit. Government bodies in Germany, Denmark, and France, alongside national ministries in Italy and Brazil, have deployed LibreOffice to meet GDPR compliance, national procurement laws, and IT localization mandates while eliminating unpredictable licensing costs from proprietary vendors.

"It's time to own your documents, own your infrastructure, and own your future," the foundation wrote in a blog post.
Python

Survey Finds More Python Developers Like PostgreSQL, AI Coding Agents - and Rust for Packages (jetbrains.com) 85

More than 30,000 Python developers from around the world answered questions for the Python Software Foundation's annual survey — and PSF Fellow Michael Kennedy tells the Python community what they've learned in a new blog post. Some highlights: Most still use older Python versions despite benefits of newer releases... Many of us (15%) are running on the very latest released version of Python, but more likely than not, we're using a version a year old or older (83%). [Although less than 1% are using "Python 3.5 or lower".] The survey also indicates that many of us are using Docker and containers to execute our code, which makes this 83% or higher number even more surprising... You simply choose a newer runtime, and your code runs faster. CPython has been extremely good at backward compatibility. There's rarely significant effort involved in upgrading... [He calculates some cloud users are paying up to $420,000 and $5.6M more in compute costs.] If your company realizes you are burning an extra $0.4M-$5M a year because you haven't gotten around to spending the day it takes to upgrade, that'll be a tough conversation...

Rust is how we speed up Python now... The Python Language Summit of 2025 revealed that "Somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of all native code being uploaded to PyPI for new projects uses Rust", indicating that "people are choosing to start new projects using Rust". Looking into the survey results, we see that Rust usage grew from 27% to 33% for binary extensions to Python packages... [The blog post later advises Python developers to learn to read basic Rust, "not to replace Python, but to complement it," since Rust "is becoming increasingly important in the most significant portions of the Python ecosystem."]

PostgreSQL is the king of Python databases, and only it's growing, going from 43% to 49%. That's +14% year over year, which is remarkable for a 28-year-old open-source project... [E]very single database in the top six grew in usage year over year. This is likely another indicator that web development itself is growing again, as discussed above...

[N]early half of the respondents (49%) plan to try AI coding agents in the coming year. Program managers at major tech companies have stated that they almost cannot hire developers who don't embrace agentic AI. The productive delta between those using it and those who avoid it is simply too great (estimated at about 30% greater productivity with AI).

It's their eighth annual survey (conducted in collaboration with JetBrains last October and November). But even though Python is 34 years old, it's still evolving. "In just the past few months, we have seen two new high-performance typing tools released," notes the blog post. (The ty and Pyrefly typecheckers — both written in Rust.) And Python 3.14 will be the first version of Python to completely support free-threaded Python... Just last week, the steering council and core developers officially accepted this as a permanent part of the language and runtime... Developers and data scientists will have to think more carefully about threaded code with locks, race conditions, and the performance benefits that come with it. Package maintainers, especially those with native code extensions, may have to rewrite some of their code to support free-threaded Python so they themselves do not enter race conditions and deadlocks.

There is a massive upside to this as well. I'm currently writing this on the cheapest Apple Mac Mini M4. This computer comes with 10 CPU cores. That means until this change manifests in Python, the maximum performance I can get out of a single Python process is 10% of what my machine is actually capable of. Once free-threaded Python is fully part of the ecosystem, I should get much closer to maximum capacity with a standard Python program using threading and the async and await keywords.

Some other notable findings from the survey:
  • Data science is now over half of all Python. This year, 51% of all surveyed Python developers are involved in data exploration and processing, with pandas and NumPy being the tools most commonly used for this.
  • Exactly 50% of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience! And 39% have less than two years of experience with Python (even in hobbyist or educational settings)...
  • "The survey tells us that one-third of devs contributed to open source. This manifests primarily as code and documentation/tutorial additions."

Firefox

Firefox 142's Link Previews Have a New Option: AI-Generated Summaries (theregister.com) 73

"Good news, everyone! The new version of Mozilla's browser now makes even more extensive use of AI," writes the Register, "providing summaries of linked content and offering developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions." Firefox 142 brings some visible shininess, but due to the combination of regional restrictions and Mozilla's progressive rollout system, not everybody can see all the features just yet... Not geofenced but subject to phased rollout are link previews, for various native-English-speaking regions. Hover over, long-press, or right-click a link and pick Preview Link, and a summary should appear. Mozilla's summary says: "Previews can optionally include AI-generated key points, which are processed on your device to protect your privacy."
"Link Previews is gradually rolling out to ensure performance and quality," Firefox says in their release notes, "and is now available in en-US, en-CA, en-GB, en-AU for users with more than 3 GB of available RAM." (The notes also add a welcome for "the developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 20 of whom were brand new volunteers!")

The Register notes that Firefox 142 also gives developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions using wllama, a Wasm binding interfacing with llama.cpp, which lets you run Meta's Llama LLM and other models, locally or in the cloud.
Cloud

Meta Signs $10 Billion Cloud Deal With Google (reuters.com) 14

Google has signed a six-year cloud computing deal with Meta worth over $10 billion, making it the second major partnership after a recent agreement with OpenAI. The deal will see Meta rely on Google Cloud's infrastructure to support its massive AI data center buildout, as the company ramps up capital spending into the tens of billions. The Information (paywalled) first reported the deal.
AI

Amazon Cloud Chief Says Replacing Junior Staff With AI is 'Dumbest' Idea (yahoo.com) 50

Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees. From a report: The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard."

"They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.

He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren't tied to any one college degree. "If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you're like, 'That's the thing I'm going to be expert at for the next 30 years,' I can promise you that's not going to be valuable 30 years from now," he said.

AI

Gates Funds $1 Million AI Alzheimer's Prize (ft.com) 59

Bill Gates is funding a $1 million competition to spur the use of AI to find innovative treatments for Alzheimer's disease, the latest effort to deploy the promising technology to find cures for humanity's toughest illnesses. From a report: The Alzheimer's Insights AI prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most original way to program AI-powered agents that are "capable of independent planning, reasoning, and action to accelerate breakthrough discoveries from existing Alzheimer's data."

 The winning tool will be released for free on the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative's cloud "workbench" to be used by scientists globally, the organisation said on Tuesday. The prize is being financed by Gates Ventures, the family office of the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.

Security

Male-Oriented App 'TeaOnHer' Also Had Security Flaws That Could Leak Men's Driver's License Photos (techcrunch.com) 112

The women-only dating-advice app Tea "has been hit with 10 potential class action lawsuits in federal and state court," NBC News reported last week, "after a data breach led to the leak of thousands of selfies, ID photos and private conversations online." The suits could result in Tea having to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages to the plaintiffs, which could be catastrophic for the company, an expert told NBC News... One of the suits lists the right-wing online discussion board 4chan and the social platform X as defendants, alleging that they allowed bad actors to spread users' personal information.
But meanwhile, a new competing app for men called "TeaOnHer" has already been launched. And it was also found to have enormous security flaws, reports TechCrunch, that "exposed its users' personal information, including photos of their driver's licenses and other government-issued identity documents..." [W]hen we looked at the TeaOnHer's public internet records, it had no meaningful information other than a single subdomain, appserver.teaonher.com. When we opened this page in our browser, what loaded was the landing page for TeaOnHer's API (for the curious, we uploaded a copy here)... It was on this landing page that we found the exposed email address and plaintext password (which wasn't that far off from "password") for [TeaOnHer developer Xavier] Lampkin's account to access the TeaOnHer "admin panel"... This API landing page included an endpoint called /docs, which contained the API's auto-generated documentation (powered by a product called Swagger UI) that contained the full list of commands that can be performed on the API [including administrator commands to return user data]...

While it's not uncommon for developers to publish their API documentation, the problem here was that some API requests could be made without any authentication — no passwords or credentials were needed...

The records returned from TeaOnHer's server contained users' unique identifiers within the app (essentially a string of random letters and numbers), their public profile screen name, and self-reported age and location, along with their private email address. The records also included web address links containing photos of the users' driver's licenses and corresponding selfies. Worse, these photos of driver's licenses, government-issued IDs, and selfies were stored in an Amazon-hosted S3 cloud server set as publicly accessible to anyone with their web addresses. This public setting lets anyone with a link to someone's identity documents open the files from anywhere with no restrictions...

The bugs were so easy to find that it would be sheer luck if nobody malicious found them before we did. We asked, but Lampkin would not say if he has the technical ability, such as logs, to determine if anyone had used (or misused) the API at any time to gain access to users' verification documents, such as by scraping web addresses from the API. In the days since our report to Lampkin, the API landing page has been taken down, along with its documentation page, and it now displays only the state of the server that the TeaOnHer API is running on as "healthy."

The flaws were discovered while TeaOnHer was the #2 free app in the Apple App Store, the article points out. And while these flaws "appear to be resolved," the article notes a larger issue. "Shoddy coding and security flaws highlight the ongoing privacy risks inherent in requiring users to submit sensitive information to use apps and websites,"

And TeaOnHer also had another authentication issue. A female reporter at Cosmopolitan also noted Friday that TeaOnHer "lets you browse through profiles before your verifications are complete. So literally anyone (like myself) can read reviews..."
AI

AI Is Reshaping Hacking. No One Agrees How Fast (axios.com) 18

"Several cybersecurity companies debuted advancements in AI agents at the Black Hat conference last week," reports Axios, "signaling that cyber defenders could soon have the tools to catch up to adversarial hackers." - Microsoft shared details about a prototype for a new agent that can automatically detect malware — although it's able to detect only 24% of malicious files as of now.

- Trend Micro released new AI-driven "digital twin" capabilities that let companies simulate real-world cyber threats in a safe environment walled off from their actual systems.

- Several companies and research teams also publicly released open-source tools that can automatically identify and patch vulnerabilities as part of the government-backed AI Cyber Challenge.

Yes, but: Threat actors are now using those AI-enabled tools to speed up reconnaissance and dream up brand-new attack vectors for targeting each company, John Watters, CEO of iCounter and a former Mandiant executive, told Axios.

The article notes "two competing narratives about how AI is transforming the threat landscape." One says defenders still have the upper hand. Cybercriminals lack the money and computing resources to build out AI-powered tools, and large language models have clear limitations in their ability to carry out offensive strikes. This leaves defenders with time to tap AI's potential for themselves. [In a DEF CON presentation a member of Anthropic's red team said its Claude AI model will "soon" be able to perform at the level of a senior security researcher, the article notes later]

Then there's the darker view. Cybercriminals are already leaning on open-source LLMs to build tools that can scan internet-connected devices to see if they have vulnerabilities, discover zero-day bugs, and write malware. They're only going to get better, and quickly...

Right now, models aren't the best at making human-like judgments, such as recognizing when legitimate tools are being abused for malicious purposes. And running a series of AI agents will require cybercriminals and nation-states to have enough resources to pay the cloud bills they rack up, Michael Sikorski, CTO of Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat research team, told Axios. But LLMs are improving rapidly. Sikorski predicts that malicious hackers will use a victim organization's own AI agents to launch an attack after breaking into their infrastructure.

Open Source

Remember the Companies Making Vital Open Source Contributions (infoworld.com) 22

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB).

And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale.
Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute.

This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits.

If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not.

There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match."

Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.
AI

Foxconn Now Making More From Servers than iPhones (theregister.com) 9

An anonymous reader shares a report: Manufacturer to the stars Foxconn is building so many AI servers that they're now bringing in more cash than consumer electronics -- even counting the colossal quantity of iPhones it creates for Apple.

The Taiwanese company revealed the shift in its Thursday announcement of Q2 results, which saw revenue grow 16% to NT$1.79 trillion ($59.73 billion) and operating profit rise 27% to NT$56.6 billion ($1.9 billion). CEO Kathy Yang told investors the company's Cloud and Networking Products division delivered 41% of total revenue, up nine percent compared to Q2 2024, and surpassing the company's Smart Consumer Electronics unit for the first time. The latter business includes Foxconn's work for Apple.

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