OSS Funding, CentOS 6.8, Open Source Hardware

Johnny Hughes announced the release of CentOS 6.8 topping the Linux news today. Slackware-current received more updates today and Alicia Gibb announced a new Open Hardware certification. Jeremy Garcia offered some financial assistance to Open Source projects "in need of funding" and Gentoo developer Andreas Huettel today said, "Akonadi for e-mail needs to die."

CentOS 6.8 was announced today following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 May 10. CentOS is compiled from Red Hat sources and this release brings the security and bug fixes in RHEL 6.8 to CentOS users. Some of the major changes include libreswan replacing openswan, sssd supports smart cards, XFS supports filesystems to 300TB, TLSv1.2 support, chrony has been added as an alternative to NTPd, squid updated to 3.4, SSLv3 and older disabled, LibreOffice rebased to 4.3.7.2, and lots of package updates.

Slackware-current received some updates today with several packages being upgraded or rebuilt against new upgrades. Poppler was updated to 0.44 which required the rebuild of tumbler, calligra, and cups-filters. Slackpkg was rebuilt with new mirrors and libarchive was rebuilt to address a security bug with Zip. MPlayer was rebuilt to disable ossaudio support. gnutils, e2fsprogs, and syslinux were upgraded and new boot kernels were built.

Andreas Huettel today blogged that Akonadi for kmail "needs to die" because after five years of constant development, it still isn't "robust and error-tolerant." He's a Gentoo developer with fingers in KDE pie and he's giving up on Kmail2. He relayed a rumor that a new framework dubbed Sink is under development, so there may be hope yet. But for now Huettel is joining many others who dumped Kmail with version 4.2. One commenter said he's been saying for years that Akonadi is broken by design and another said it was the reason he left KDE altogether.

In other news:

* Coming soon: First ever certification for open hardware

* Insiders slowly decreasing postitions in Red Hat, Inc.

* Are You Involved With an Open Source Project That's In Need of Funding?