Posted on 2023-12-04

Hello,

Welcome to the 63rd issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter 📰 covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Please pass this on to anyone else you think might be interested. Suggestions and feedback are welcome at ✉️ info@tmpdir.org.

Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff

Quote for the week

Technology is best when it brings people together -- Matt Mullenweg

Yoe 2023.11 release 🚀

The latest monthly release of yoe distro is available now. It has incremental updates some of which are worth noting from Yoe distro's point of view. QT6 is upgraded to 6.6.2 and clang compiler is upgrade to 17.0.5, ODROID-C4 project is refreshed and fixed to work with latest Yoe. A major problem was corrupted SD cards from wic images which was fixed -- it was an issue due to dropping IMAGE_NAME_SUFFIX in core layer. PE and PR are dropped from /usr/src/debug paths which should improve reuse. Systemd tmpfiles.d files are put under noarch_libdir across multiple packages. busyboxinit based Yoe profile was fixed to boot complex images e.g. yoe-kiosk-image. recipetool can now create recipes for packages written in Go language. A new project to build for Nvidia Orin Nano platform is added. This should expand yoe-distro to support Nvidia jetson based systems in Yoe distro.

Why Open Source for Product Development

One of the paradoxes in product development is Open Source. How can you personally or as a company benefit from participating in Open Source projects? Why should you share your great ideas and code? How can you build a business or a career by giving things away? How can an open-source project be a reliable supplier without contractual guarantees? Most successful technology companies today participate in open-source projects. Why do they do this?

Open source is difficult to fully understand and much has been said about it. There are many approaches to licensing and funding. Many question the equity and sustainability. Many get bogged down in ethical, moral, and political arguments. There are messy problems that don’t seem to have good answers. But we need to go deeper and examine the core issues of why companies are turning to open-source.

We will consider several product development perspectives:

Our motivation is to produce something of value that society can use and benefit from. Software technology is advancing at a rapid rate of change. Technology in modern systems is increasingly complex. How can we maintain some level of control over the resources we use to ensure they will meet our needs? And how does organizational culture impact our ability to deal with these issues and build modern systems?

product dev perspectives