The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019. From a report: Apple adopted CUPS for Mac OS X in 2002, and hired its author Michael Sweet in 2007, with Cupertino also acquiring the CUPS source code. Sweet continued to work on printing technology at Apple, including CUPS, until December 2019 when he left to start a new company. Asked at the time about the future of CUPS, he said: "CUPS is still owned and maintained by Apple. There are two other engineers still in the printing team that are responsible for CUPS development, and it will continue to have new bug fix releases (at least) for the foreseeable future." Despite this statement, Linux watcher Michael Larabel noted earlier this week that "the open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020." This contrasts with 355 commits in 2019, when Sweet still worked at Apple, and 348 the previous year. We asked Apple about its plans for CUPS and have yet to hear back.

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available, bringing a bunch of refinements as well as some larger features. Some of the KDE Plasma 5.20 highlights include (via Phoronix): - Numerous fixes to the KWin window manager / compositor including a number of Wayland fixes. Among the Wayland work in Plasma 5.20 includes Klipper support and middle-click paste, mouse and touchpad support nearly on par to X11, window thumbnails in the task manager, crash fixes, and more.

- Improved notifications.

- Different redesigns and additions to the KDE System Settings from SMART monitoring to better looking interfaces.

- Redesigned on-screen displays.

- Various tack manager and system tray improvements. More information about KDE 5.20 is available here.

Nvidia has debuted the Jetson Nano 2GB, a new developer kit for students and hobbyists with an interest in robotics. ZDNet reports: The Jetson Nano 2GB is geared towards robotics enthusiasts, students, and educators that want to enter the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Nvidia says the entry-level Jetson Nano 2GB has been priced at $59 -- including online tutorials and certification -- to "make AI easily accessible for all." The Jetson Nano 2GB is a small package with a punch: not only supported by the Nvidia JetPack software development kit (SDK), the device also comes with Nvidia container runtime and a full Linux environment suitable for software development.

In addition, the Jetson Nano 2GB is powered by CUDA-X, a collection of libraries and tools designed to support AI-based features, data processing, machine learning (ML), and deployment. Nvidia says that this combination "allows developers to package their applications for Jetson with all its dependencies into a single container that is designed to work in any deployment." Free online training and certification are on offer, alongside open source projects, tutorials, and how-tos already contributed by thousands of Jetson developers. It's currently available for pre-order, but orders won't start shipping until the end of the month.

"Today, on October 4th, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrates its thirty-fifth year of fighting for software freedom," announces a blog post at FSF.org: Our work will not be finished until every computer user is able to do all of their digital tasks in complete freedom — whether that's on a desktop, laptop, or the computer in your pocket. The fight for free software continues, and we wouldn't be here without you.

To celebrate, we have a full week of announcements and surprises planned starting today, and we will end in an online anniversary event featuring both live and prerecorded segments this Friday, October 9th, from 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC) until 17:00 EDT (21:00 UTC). We'd love for you to join in celebration of this amazing community by submitting a short (two-minute) video sharing your favorite memory about free software or the FSF, and a wish for the future of software freedom. We'll be collecting the videos all week and airing a selection during the birthday event on October 9th...

If you are able to, please make a donation of $35 or more to help keep the fight for user freedom going another 35 years, we'll send you a commemorative pin... We're another year older, but that doesn't mean we're slowing down our efforts to bring software freedom to users around the globe. Stay tuned for more information on how we plan to ring in the FSF's next year, and the vital role each one of us plays in ensuring free software's success for the future. We hope that you'll be able to take part in our festivities this week!
The announcement suggests 10 different ways to celebrate, which include:

• Try a fully free distribution of GNU/Linux, which can be run "live" without making any permanent changes to your computer's hard drive.

• Take an hour to follow our Email Self-Defense Guide, and learn how to opt out of bulk surveillance .

• Download and experiment with one of the oldest parts of the GNU operating system, the GNU Emacs text editor. Try the tutorial by launching the editor and typing Ctrl-h + t (C-h t), or see if you can make it through some of the games included with Emacs, such as Alt-x (M-x) dunnet or M-x tetris.

• Make the commitment to replace one nonfree program that you use with one that respects your freedom, such as using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office.

• Petition the administrators of your favorite Web site to free the proprietary JavaScript lurking on their page that many users run and download without ever realizing it.

Last week open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond argued Microsoft was quietly switching over to a Linux kernel that emulates Windows. "He's on to something," says ZDNet's contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: I've long thought that Microsoft was considering migrating the Windows interface to running on the Linux kernel. Why...? [Y]ou can run standard Linux programs now on WSL2 without any trouble.

That's because Linux is well on its way to becoming a first-class citizen on the Windows desktop. Multiple Linux distros, starting with Ubuntu, Red Hat Fedora, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), now run smoothly on WSL2. That's because Microsoft has replaced its WSL1 translation layer, which converted Linux kernel calls into Windows calls, with WSL2. With WSL2 Microsoft's own Linux kernel is running on a thin version of the Hyper-V hypervisor. That's not all. With the recent Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20211, you can now access Linux file systems, such as ext4, from Windows File Manager and PowerShell. On top of that, Microsoft developers are making it easy to run Linux graphical applications on Windows...

[Raymond] also observed, correctly, that Microsoft no longer depends on Windows for its cash flow but on its Azure cloud offering. Which, by the way, is running more Linux instances than it is Windows Server instances. So, that being the case, why should Microsoft keep pouring money into the notoriously trouble-prone Windows kernel — over 50 serious bugs fixed in the last Patch Tuesday roundup — when it can use the free-as-in-beer Linux kernel? Good question. He thinks Microsoft can do the math and switch to Linux.

I think he's right. Besides his points, there are others. Microsoft already wants you to replace your existing PC-based software, like Office 2019, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs like Office 365. Microsoft also encourages you to move your voice, video, chat, and texting to Microsoft's Azure Communication Services even if you don't use Teams. With SaaS programs, Microsoft doesn't care what operating system you're running. They're still going to get paid whether you run Office 365 on Windows, a Chromebook, or, yes, Linux.

I see two possible paths ahead for Windows. First, there's Linux-based Windows. It simply makes financial sense. Or, the existing Windows desktop being replaced by the Windows Virtual Desktop or other Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings.... Google chose to save money and increase security by using Linux as the basis for Chrome OS. This worked out really well for Google. It can for Microsoft with — let's take a blast from the past — and call it Lindows as well.

Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure, points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business: So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer.

So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic.

Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API...

...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.

LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them...

Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it:

It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs....

The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones.

Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update.
Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."

Michael Ilseman, an engineer on the Swift Standard Library team at Apple, writes: In June, Apple introduced Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types. Today, I'm excited to announce that we're open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms.

New submitter kyubre writes: Seagate has unveiled CORTX, an open-source S3-compatible object storage software, today at their Datasphere virtual event. The source for this software-defined-storage (SDS) platform is hosted on Github. Seagate has also organized a group of open source researchers and developers in this space under the 'CORTX Community' moniker. As part of the Github repository, Seagate is providing a pre-built virtual machine image that enables users to get a quick start with testing. Seagate is a hardware vendor at its core, and as part of the CORTX initiative, it is also introducing the Lyve Drive Rack - a reference architecture supported by Seagate and available later this year with 20TB HAMR drives. The Lyve Drive Rack is expected to serve a variety of use-cases including backup/restore, big data and analytics, AI & ML, file sharing and synchronization, as well as video surveillance. Each rack node can support up to 106 drives, and a cluster can scale up as necessary.

Legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is now open source, meaning that modders can dig in and see what lies underneath the hood of both games. Polygon reports: The full source code for The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs has been released on Github for folks who want to take a crack at modifying the game. It's relatively rare for developers to post their game codes themselves, though sometimes proprietary code can make its way online via leaks. "This doesn't mean that the game is suddenly free," Amnesia developer Frictional Games said in a blog post. "It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 licence. The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before."

Seeing how these classic games are built will also mean seeing things like flaws, and inefficiencies Frictional Games warned -- but it's all still functional and potentially useful to anyone learning game development. "I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming," Frictional Games said. "While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package. It is also a testament that it is possible to do this sort of thing, even with a very limited team."

tola writes: Following a round of layoffs at Mozilla, their WebThings IoT platform is being spun out as an independent open source project by former employees, with a new commercial sponsor. WebThings is an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web, built on W3C Web of Things standards. It includes WebThings Gateway which is a software distribution for smart home gateways focused on privacy, security and interoperability and the WebThings Framework which is a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things. The project will be renamed from "Mozilla WebThings" to "WebThings" and will move to a new home at https://webthings.io/ Users will be able to opt-in to receive software updates from the new community run update servers and be offered the opportunity to transition to a replacement remote tunnelling service before Mozilla servers are shut down at the end of the year.

Two professors at the University of Massachusetts have co-authored a new essay explaining how open source licensing "could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research" in the international, multi-billion-dollar race for a Covid-19 vaccine: The invention of the "General Public License," sometimes referred to as a viral or reciprocal license, meant that should an improvement be made, the new software version automatically inherits the same license as its parent. We believe that in a time of a global pandemic, a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine should be licensed with General Public License-like properties...

Fortunately, some pharmaceutical companies, national governments, nonprofits like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and international organizations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives — which supports vaccine development — are putting policies in place that embrace openness and sharing rather than intellectual property protection. Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives officials have stated that all of their funding agreements require that "appropriate vaccines are first available to populations when and where they are needed to end an outbreak or curtail an epidemic, regardless of ability to pay." That's an important start.

However, when there is a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine, the U.S. and other national governments need to create contractual agreements with firms that provide fair and reasonable funding to cover their costs or even some reasonable profit margin while still mandating the open sharing of the processes for vaccine production, quality assurance and rapid global distribution.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes Ghacks: Raymond Hill, known online as gorhill, has set the status of the uMatrix GitHub repository to archived; this means that it is read-only at the time and that no updates will become available.

The uMatrix extension is available for several browsers including Firefox, Google Chrome, and most Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. It is a privacy and security extensions for advanced users that provides firewall-like capabilities when it is installed...

Hill suggests that developers could fork the extension to continue development under a new name. There is also the chance that Hill might resume development in the future but there is no guarantee that this is going to happen.

For now, uMatrix is no longer in active development.

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws.
The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.
This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project.

CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.

An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust.

Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar.

Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring.
* Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day."

The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..."

"Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack: While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control: Istio has introduced a new Istio steering committee.

According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four "elected Community Seats" and nine "proportionally allocated Contribution Seats," a change they say "solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project." This final point is really the key to the announcement here, with them further and more explicitly clarifying later that "no single vendor, no matter how large their contribution, has majority voting control over the Istio project." To this end, they write, they have "implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee."

As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election. The nine Contribution Seats will be assigned to a minimum of three different companies "in proportion to contributions made to Istio in the previous 12 months," with this year's metric being merged pull requests.
But not everyone was satisfied. On Twitter AWS engineer Matthew S. Wilson called it "a crappy way to build a community," objecting to the way it's recognizing and rewarding open source contributions by company rather than by the individuals.

And Knative co-founder Matt Moore called it "what you get when a company wants to 'play community', but treat its employees as interchangeable cogs."

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Wired, written by Kevin Xu and Jordan Schneider. Xu is the author of Interconnected, investor and advisor of open source startups at OSS Capital, and served in the Obama White House. Schneider is the author of the ChinaTalk newsletter and host of the ChinaTalk podcast, posted on Lawfare. From the report: Open source is a technology development and distribution methodology, where the codebase and all development -- from setting a roadmap to building new features, fixing bugs, and writing documentation -- is done in public. A governing body (a group of hobbyists, a company, or a foundation) publicly manages this work, which is most often done in a public repository on either GitHub or GitLab. Open source has two important, and somewhat counterintuitive, advantages: speed and security. These practices lead to faster technological developments, because a built-in global community of developers help them mature, especially if the technology is solving a real problem. Top engineers also prefer to work with and on open source projects. Wrongly cast as secretive automatons, they are more often like artists, who prefer to learn, work, collaborate, and showcase what they've built in public, even when they are barely compensated for that work.

But doesn't keeping a technology's codebase open make it more vulnerable to attack? In fact, exposing the codebase publicly for security experts and hackers to easily access and test is the best way to keep the technology secure and build trust with end users for the long haul. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and open source is that sunlight in technology. Linux, the operating system, and Kubernetes, the cloud container orchestration system, are two of the most prominent examples. [...] Using open source technology is now the fastest way new products get built and legacy technologies get replaced. Yet as US policymakers develop their industrial policy to compete with China, open source is conspicuously absent.

By leaning on the advantages of open source, policymakers can pursue an industrial policy to help the US compete in the 21st century in line with our broader values. The alternative is to continue a top-down process that picks winners and losers based on not just technology but also political influence, which only helps individual firms secure market share, not sparking innovation more broadly. A few billion more dollars won't save Intel from its technical woes, but a healthier ecosystem leveraging open source technology and community would put the US in a better position for the future. Open source technology allows for vendor-neutrality. Whether you're a country or a company, if you use open source, you're not locked in to another company's technical stack, roadmap, or licensing agreements. After Linux was first created in 1991, it was widely adopted by large companies like Dell and IBM as a vendor neutral alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system. In the future, chip designers won't be locked into Intel or ARM with RISC-V. With OpenRAN, 5G network builders won't be forced to buy from Huawei, Nokia, or Ericsson. [...] By doubling down on open source, America not only can address some of our most pressing technological challenges faster and more securely, but also revive relationships with our allies and deepen productive collaborations with the tech sector.

Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, argues that the question of open source sustainability "is really a people problem."

But to make the case, he cites comments by Tobie Langel, formerly W3C's testing lead (and a former member of Facebook's Open Source and Web Standards Team) who's now founded an open-source strategies consulting firm whose clients include Mozilla, Intell, Google, and Microsoft. Much of the "open source sustainability" discussion has focused on the one thing that really needs no help being sustained: software. As Tobie Langel rightly points out, "Open source code isn't a scarce resource. It's the exact opposite, actually: It's infinitely reproducible at zero cost to the user and to the ecosystem." Nor is sustainability really a matter of funding, though this gets closer to the truth.

No, open source sustainability is really a people problem. Or, as Langel highlights, "In open source, the maintainers working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured."

Over the past several weeks, I've interviewed a number of maintainers for popular open source projects. In every case, they talked about how they contribute because it's fun, but also acknowledged that some aspects of open source development can make it decidedly "un-fun" (e.g., demanding users who complain about missing features or existing bugs but don't contribute code or fixes). Most have found ways to turn their passion into financial independence, but Langel stresses that cash is critical to keeping open source humming along... "Without revenue, there is no maintenance, and without maintenance, the commons becomes toxic very quickly... As new security issues are discovered, open source code that isn't updated becomes a security risk..."

Langel is absolutely correct to argue, "In an ecosystem with infinite resources, the attention needs to be on the people taking care of and maintaining that resource, because that's where the bottleneck is." Again, that's partly a question of money, but it's even more a question of treating people with dignity and respect, while making open source communities a fun, welcoming place.

Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they've written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that "The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it's far from tech history's only community gathering centered on CPUs." Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications. And these groups didn't stick to Slacks, email threads, or forums; the meetings often happened in real life. But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups' existence and their importance in the personal computer's development. That's a damned shame... Computer groups celebrated the industry's fundamental values: a delight in technology's capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we're all here to help one another...

Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.

The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...

Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.

So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.
The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")

And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.