An official version of the popular 7-zip archiving program has been released for Linux for the first time. Bleeping Computer reports: Linux already had support for the 7-zip archive file format through a POSIX port called p7zip but it was maintained by a different developer. As the p7zip developer has not maintained their project for 4-5 years, 7-Zip developer Igor Pavlov decided to create a new official Linux version based on the latest 7-Zip source code. Pavlov has released 7-Zip for Linux in AMD64, ARM64, x86, and armhf versions, which users can download [via their respective links].

"These new 7-Zip binaries for Linux were linked (compiled) by GCC without -static switch. And compiled 32-bit executables (x86 and armhf) didn't work on some arm64 and amd64 systems, probably because of missing of some required .so files." "Please write here, if you have some advices how to compile and link binaries that will work in most Linux systems," Pavlov stated on his release page.

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years.

Its page on GitHub explains: Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha.

Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project.

Growl is a retired project, we couldn't think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion.
Lead developer Christopher Forsythe writes at 336699.org: With the announcement of Apple's new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple's notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we're announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It's been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career... There's even a SourceForge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it... Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else...

For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Satoshi didn't leave much behind when he decided to leave the scene for good back in April, 2011. But, he did leave enough for us to conduct a thorough research into his whereabouts when he was working on Bitcoin. To conduct this research, we gathered data from the following:
Satoshi's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)
His 34 emails on the cryptography and Bitcoin mailing lists
His 169 commits on SourceForge
The metadata from Bitcoin whitepaper versions from 2008 (PDF) and 2009 (PDF)
The Genesis block
Various Wayback Machine archives

The data-driven part of the research focuses on timestamps from Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails, which represent a total of 742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive). The timestamp data starts from October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, and ends on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email that is known to be UTC timestamped. Using that data we compiled scatter charts in different suspect time zones to see when he was active and when he was not. We then used other data we gathered to further confirm the most likely location he called home. Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST). The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.

Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix.

"While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism" -- especially on high-core-count CPUs.

This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough).

The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory.

You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes.

Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.

Atlassian today announced an update to Jira Software, its popular project and issue-tracking tool, that brings a number of major updates to the roadmapping feature it first introduced back in 2018. From a report: Back in 2018, Atlassian also launched its rebuilt version of Jira Software, which took some of its cues from Trello, and today's release builds upon this. "When we launched that new Jira experience back in October 2018, I think we had a really good idea of what we were trying to do with it and where we were taking it," said Jake Brereton, the head of marketing for Jira Software. "And I think if you fast-forward 14 months to where we are today, we just had some really strong validation in a number of areas that are over the target and that that investment we made was worth it."

With this release then, Jira Software's roadmapping tool is getting progress bars that show you the overall status of every roadmap item and that give you a lot more information about the overall state of the project at a glance. Also new here are hierarchy levels that let you unfold the roadmap item to get more in-depth information about the stories and tasks that are part of an item. You can also now map dependencies by simply dragging and dropping items, something that was missing from the first release but that was surely high on the list for many users. Atlassian is also introducing new filters and a number of UI enhancements.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Last week, the Solicitor General of the White House weighed in on Google's request for the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit's ridiculously confused ruling in the Oracle/Google case concerning the copyrightability of APIs (and whether or not repurposing them is fair use). Not surprisingly, as the Solicitor General has been siding with Oracle all along, it suggests that the Supreme Court not hear the case. Of course, it does so by completely misrepresenting what's at stake in the case -- pretending that this is about whether or not software source code is copyright-eligible:

"This case concerns the copyrightability of computer code. To induce a computer to perform a function, a person must give the computer written instructions. Typically, those instructions are written in 'source code,' which consists of words, numbers, and symbols in a particular 'programming language,' which has its own syntax and semantics. The source code is then converted into binary 'object code' -- ones and zeros -- that is readable by the computer.

It is both 'firmly established' and undisputed in this case that computer code can be copyrightable as a 'literary work[].' 1 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright & 2A.10[B] (2019). Section 101 defines a 'computer program' as 'a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.' 17 U.S.C. 101. And various Copyright Act provisions recognize that a person may own a copyright in a 'computer program.'"

Masnick adds: Except... that's not what this case is about. Even remotely. Literally no one denies that software source code is subject to copyright. The question is whether or not an Application Programming Interface -- an API -- is subject to copyright.

A SaaS "price transparency" site at Capiche.com writes that "It's not just you: software has gotten far more expensive," citing their survey of 100 business applications. Software prices went up 62% on average over the past decade -- over three times faster than inflation, outpacing even rent and healthcare. Today's iPhone XR, by comparison, costs 25% more than 2009's iPhone 3GS (or 67% more if comparing the iPhone XS). Some apps went up far more drastically, though even if you removed the ones whose price went up more than 200%, software still on average went up 42% -- or over double the average inflation rate... [I]f you paid $9.99 a month for business software in 2009, there's a good chance you pay $16.18 for it today -- if not $19.78.

Of the hundred business apps we surveyed, sixty-seven raised their prices an average of 98% in the decade between 2009 and 2019. Fourteen lowered their prices an average of 28%, and nineteen apps kept their prices the same... Notably, if the apps you used raised their prices, odds are their prices nearly doubled over the past decade. That's perhaps even more noticeable than if all of your apps went up a few percent...

in an industry where we were long accustomed to getting more for less -- an industry where that still holds for most physical products -- software has gone up in price three times faster than inflation. That's hard to ignore.
All of their data is available in a public spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and they ultimately argue that today free "most often a strategy, a means not an end. Apple gives away software to sell devices; Google gives away storage to get you to store more so you'll upgrade."

Bitbucket, once one of the largest Mercurial repository hosting sites, said Tuesday it plans to remove Mercurial features and repositories from its platform on June 1, 2020. In a blog post, Bitbucket wrote: As we surpass 10 million registered users on the platform, we're at a point in our growth where we are conducting a deeper evaluation of the market and how we can best support our users going forward. After much consideration, we've decided to remove Mercurial support from Bitbucket Cloud and its API. Bitbucket will stop letting users create new Mercurial repositories starting February 1, 2020, and start removing all the Mercurial repositories four months later. So you will want to backup your repositories and switch to a different platform in the coming months. A different user pointed out, "Another shitty aspect of bitbucket dropping mercurial support and deleting all the old repositories in 2020: all yt pull request discussions from before 2017 are going to be deleted. There's valuable context for how the code got written in those discussions." Several users have expressed their concerns over this decision. Sebastien Jodogne, CSO at Osimis, said, "This is an extremely concerning decision that endangers diversity in the computer science industry by pushing the de facto hegemony of git."

For those of you affected by this, you can consider a number of platforms including SourceForge to host and manage your repositories.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CRN: Broadcom has agreed to purchase Symantec's enterprise business in a massive $10.7 billion deal that will break up the world's largest pure-play cybersecurity vendor. The San Jose, Calif.-based semiconductor manufacturer said the monster acquisition is expected to drive $2 billion of revenue and $1.3 billion of EBITDA (earning before interest, taxation, depreciation, and amortization), as well as upwards of $1 billion of cost synergies in the year following close. The Symantec name will be sold to Broadcom as part of the transaction. The deal will bring Symantec's $2.5 billion enterprise unit together with the software capabilities inherited last year through its $19 billion acquisition of CA Technologies. Symantec's enterprise business includes its traditional strength around anti-virus and endpoint protection as well as the cloud security capabilities inherited through the 2016 acquisition of Blue Coat Systems. "Meanwhile, Symantec's consumer business -- which includes its legacy Norton anti-virus capabilities as well as its more recent acquisition of LifeLock -- will become a standalone company," the report adds. "Interim Symantec President and CEO Rick Hill said the remaining consumer business contributed 90 percent of the company's total operating income, and the company expects to be able to continue to grow revenue for its Norton LifeLock business in the mid-single digits going forward."

As open source software grows more popular, and important, developers face an existential question: How to make money from something you give away for free? An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Source Initiative standards body says an open source license must allow users to view the underlying source code, modify it, and share it as they see fit. Independent developers and large companies alike now routinely release software under these licenses. Many coders believe open collaboration results in better software. Some companies open their code for marketing purposes. Open source software now underpins much technology, from smartphone operating systems to government websites.

Companies that release software under open source licenses generate revenue in different ways. Some sell support, including Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion earlier this month. Others, like cloud automation company HashiCorp, sell proprietary software based on the open source components. But with the rise of cloud computing, developers see their open source code being bundled into services and sold by other companies. Amazon, for example, sells a cloud-hosted service based on the popular open source database Redis, which competes with a similar cloud-hosted service offered by Redis Labs, the sponsor of the open source project. To protect against such scenarios, companies behind popular open source projects are restricting how others can use their software. Redis Labs started the trend last year when it relicensed several add-ons for its core product under terms that essentially prohibit offering those add-ons as part of a commercial cloud computing service.

That way, Amazon and other cloud providers can't use those add-ons in their competing Redis services. Companies that want the functionality provided by those add-ons need to develop those features themselves, or get permission from Redis Labs. [...] Analytics company Confluent and database maker CockroachDB added similar terms to their licenses, preventing cloud computing companies from using some or all of their code to build competing services. Taking a slightly different tack, MongoDB relicensed its flagship database product last year under a new "Server Side Public License" (SSPL) that requires companies that sell the database system as a cloud service also release the source code of any additional software they include.

The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

"Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend," writes Bill Gates, challenging the widespread use of forecasts and policies based on a "supply and demand" economic model. An anonymous reader quotes the Gates Notes blog: Software doesn't work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn't the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.

The portion of the world's economy that doesn't fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven't kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn't getting enough attention. If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about as good an explanation as I've seen.... They don't act like there's something evil about the trend or prescribe hard policy solutions. Instead they take the time to convince you why this transition is important and offer broad ideas about what countries can do to keep up in a world where the "Ec 10" supply and demand chart is increasingly irrelevant.
"What the book reinforced for me is that lawmakers need to adjust their economic policymaking to reflect these new realities," Gates writes, adding "a lot has changed since the 1980s. It's time the way we think about the economy does, too."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 8.1 dropped out of mainstream support earlier this year, entering the five-year extended support period in which it receives only security fixes. However, Microsoft is still accepting new software application submissions to the Windows 8 Store. Submissions for new Windows Phone 8 apps are also currently accepted. Today, Microsoft announced that this is soon coming to an end. After October 31, new applications will no longer be accepted for distribution through the store. Updates to existing applications will continue to be supported. However, there's now an end date for these, too: from July 1, 2023, Microsoft will cease to distribute any updates for Windows 8.1 Store applications. The deadline for Windows Phone 8 is sooner: updates for those apps will end on July 1, 2019.

Bloomberg reports:
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Terms of the agreement weren't known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015.

GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, use GitHub to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It's also a social network of sorts for developers. While GitHub's losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016 -- it had revenue of $98 million in nine months of that year.
On Friday, it was reported that Microsoft was in talks with GitHub about an acquisition. Now it seems like it's actually happening.

Update: Our sister site, SourceForge, has weighed in. Here is a tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge.
Update #2: Already, we are seeing plenty of backlash over this news. One user has started a petition to stop Microsoft from buying GitHub.
Update #3: It's official. Microsoft has acquired GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B.

Reader rootmon writes: Our thoughts/prayers are with the family and friends of long time open source writer/journalist Robin "Roblimo" Miller who passed away this morning. Robin "Roblimo" Miller (born October 30, 1952) served as the Editor-in-Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company which owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, Freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek between 2000 to 2008. Miller formerly owned Robin's Limousine, a small limo company based in Elkridge, Maryland, the origin of his online nickname. Miller is best known for his involvement with Slashdot, where he was not only the corporate editorial overseer but also Interview Editor.

As a freelancer, Miller wrote for a number of print and online publications including Time.com, Baltimore City Paper, American Medical News, Innkeeping World, Machine Design, The Baltimore Sun, and Rewired.com. Miller is the author of three books: The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point -- Click Linux!, and Point -- Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall. His most recent ventures revolved around Internet-delivered video, including video software "tours" and tutorials on Linux.com and his recent "side" venture, Internet Video Promotion, Inc. Miller has been a judge for the Lulu Blooker Prize and is on the online advisory board of the Online Journalism Review of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. (Biographical Info Quoted in Part from Wikipedia) Further reading: Linux Journal: RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller.

Remembering Miller, ZDNet journalist S. Vaughan-Nichols wrote, "He was funny, bright, quick with a quip, caring, and wise. I, and many others who had the pleasure of knowing him, will miss him enormously." Paul Jones, Clinical Professor at the School of Information & Library Science, and Director of ibiblio.org, wrote, "Robin taught me many things, besides the immense gift of his friendship, including 'the way to make money on the internet is to take on more than you spend.' Both funny and accurate in context and very much true to roblimo." Writer and engineer Emmett Initiative said, "He was my editor, which means he was my best friend and worst enemy. He was a kind and thoughtful man that made every writer around him at least 300% better. I already miss him."

A new copyright proposal in the EU would require code-sharing platforms like GitHub and SourceForge to monitor all content that users upload for potential copyright infringement. "The proposal is aimed at music and videos on streaming platforms, based on a theory of a 'value gap' between the profits those platforms make from uploaded works and what copyright holders of some uploaded works receive," reports The GitHub Blog. "However, the way it's written captures many other types of content, including code."

Upload filters, also known as "censorship machines," are some of the most controversial elements of the copyright proposal, raising a number of concerns including: -Privacy: Upload filters are a form of surveillance, effectively a "general monitoring obligation" prohibited by EU law
-Free speech: Requiring platforms to monitor content contradicts intermediary liability protections in EU law and creates incentives to remove content
-Ineffectiveness: Content detection tools are flawed (generate false positives, don't fit all kinds of content) and overly burdensome, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that might not be able to afford them or the resulting litigation Upload filters are especially concerning for software developers given that: -Software developers create copyrightable works -- their code -- and those who choose an open source license want to allow that code to be shared
-False positives (and negatives) are especially likely for software code because code often has many contributors and layers, often with different licensing for different components
-Requiring code-hosting platforms to scan and automatically remove content could drastically impact software developers when their dependencies are removed due to false positives The EU Parliament continues to introduce new proposals for Article 13 but these issues remain. MEP Julia Reda explains further in a recent proposal from Parliament.

dryriver writes: All used to be well in the world of Digital Content Creation (DCC) until two very major DCC software makers -- Adobe and Autodesk -- decided to force a monthly subscription model on pretty much every software package they make to please Wall Street investors. Important 2D and 3D DCC software like Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, 3DMax, Maya, and Mudbox is now only available to "rent" from these companies. You simply cannot buy a perpetual license or boxed copy for this software at all anymore, and what makes matters worse is that if you stop paying your subscription, the software locks itself down, leaving you unable to open even old files you created with the software for later review. Also annoying is that subscription software constantly performs "license validity" checks over the internet (subscription software cannot be run offline for any great length of time, or on an air-gapped PC) and the software is increasingly tied into various cloud services these companies have set up. The DCC companies want you to save your -- potentially confidential -- project files on their servers, not on your own hard disk.

There are millions of DCC professionals around the world who'd love to be able to buy a normal, perpetual, offline-use capable license for these software tools. That is no longer possible. Adobe and Autodesk no longer provide that. What is your view on this "forced subscription" model? What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously? What if the whole idea of being able to "purchase" a perpetual license for ANY commercial software went away completely, and it was subscription only from that point on?

SourceForge on Tuesday introduced an overhaul of its website to give it a new look and add new features. Among the most notable additions, the popular repository, which hosts over 430,000 projects and 3.7 million registered developers, said it was creating a GitHub Importer tool which would enable developers to import their GitHub project to SourceForge and also sync their GitHub project file releases on SourceForce so they "can take advantage of the strengths of both platforms." In a blog post, the team wrote:We believe the open source community is always better served when there are multiple options for open source projects to live, and these options are not mutually exclusive. More improvements and new features are on track to be released throughout the year, the team wrote.

WheezyJoe writes: Classic Shell is a free Windows application that for years has replaced Microsoft's Start Screen or Start Menu with a highly configurable, more familiar non-tile Start menu. Yesterday, the lead developer released what he said would be the last version of Classic Shell. Citing other interests and the frequency at which Microsoft releases updates to Windows 10, as well as lagging support for the Win32 programming model, the developer says that he won't work on the program anymore. The application's source code is available on SourceForge, so there is a chance others may come and fork the code to continue development. There are several alternatives available, some pay and some free (like Start10 and Start Is Back++), but Classic Shell has an exceptionally broad range of tweaks and customizability.

mikeatTB writes: Many Slashdotters weighed in on Steven A. Lowe's post, "Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software?", where he slammed project management and called for product-centrism. Many commenters pushed back, but one PM, Yvette Schmitter, has fired back with a scathing response post, noting: "As a project manager, I'm saddened to see that project management and project managers are getting a bad rap from both ends of the spectrum. Business tends not to see the value in them, and developers tend to believe their own 'creativity' is being stymied by them. Let's set the record straight: Project management is a prized methodology for delivering on leadership's expectations.

"The success of the methodology depends on the quality of the specific project manager..." she continues. "If the project is being managed correctly by the project manager/scrum master, that euphoric state that developers want to get to can be achieved, along with the project objectives -- all within the prescribed budget and timeline. Denouncing an entire practice based on what appears to be a limited, misaligned application of the correct methodology does not make all of project management and all project managers bad."
How do Slashdot readers feel about project management for software teams?