Following the recent application period, Outreachy on Thursday announced the dozens of selected participants who will have a $5500 USD paid internship the next few months for working on open-source projects.

PHP developers unanimously approved and already merged support for the new "preloading" concept for this web server language. PHP preloading basically allows loading PHP code that persists as long as the web server is running and that code will always be ready for each subsequent web request, which in some cases will dramatically speed-up the PHP performance on web servers.

The latest software initiative out of the Linux Foundation -- and in particular their Deep Learning Foundation -- is the Acumos AI "Athena" release that tries to make it easier dealing with artificial intelligence apps.

If you are looking for some Phoronix shirts this holiday season, there are some new options available from HELLOTUX, the clothing vendor where everything is "Made on Linux, powered by Linux, for us, Linux fans."

It doesn't look like GIMP 3.0 will be under the tree this Christmas, but at least GIMP 2.10 continues progressing with new stable releases to provide new optimizations and enhancements.

PostgreSQL 11.1 is out today with fixes over last month's PostgreSQL 11 introduction but there are also updates to the 10.6, 9.6, 9.4, 9.4, and 9.3 release streams due to a new security issue.

Over the weekend we reported on the Samsung Open-Source Group reportedly shutting down with many of the former OSG staffers in the US no longer employed by Samsung. We've now received comments both from Samsung in the US and Korea on the matter.

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has provided a status update on his efforts around the VC4 open-source driver stack that most notably works with Raspberry Pi devices and also his efforts on the V3D driver as the next-generation Broadcom graphics driver stack for VideoCore V and later.

If you are looking for new open-source talent for your organization, check out LinkedIn but it's under unfortunate circumstances for the availability of a sudden surplus in skilled Linux/FLOSS developers... Samsung has apparently shut down the Samsung Open-Source Group (Samsung OSG) as a blow to the wider free software ecosystem considering the group's prolific contributions over the years from low-level open-source projects to desktop/user-facing code-bases.

UPower, the power management abstraction layer born out of DeviceKit for providing information on power sources and other data, is still on the trek towards version 1.0.

At this week's Open-Source Summit in Edinburgh there was a kernel internship panel discussion focused on the work done by Outreachy participants, the program paying women and other under-represented groups $5,500 USD for contributing to various open-source projects over a three month period.

Blender 2.80 development had been running a few months behind schedule but coming out in the next few weeks will be their beta milestone.

It's been four years since the debut of the Cairo 1.14 stable series and today that has been succeeded by Cairo 1.16. Cairo, as a reminder, is the vector graphics library for 2D drawing and supports back-ends ranging from OpenGL to PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG outputs. Cairo is used by the likes of the GTK+ tool-kit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, Gnuplot, Poppler, and many other open-source projects.

Among other software releases, yesterday brought the debut of the PostgreSQL 11.0 database server. Given it has possible performance enhancements and the new (non-default) LLVM-based just-in-time compilation ability, I decided to run some benchmarks on the powerful Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server.

The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME, KDE, Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome OS, Java, and countless other desktop applications has reached version 2.0.

Besides Ubuntu 18.10 releasing today, another cause for celebration today is the official debut of the PostgreSQL 11 database server.

With Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II Lite and especially the forthcoming Blackbird positioning the POWER architecture in a prime spot for use by libre Linux users who want a system that's open-source down to the firmware, they've been trying to make sure the Linux desktop stack is in order. The latest area they've been working on is browser coverage.

One week from today will hopefully mark the release of the PostgreSQL 11 stable database server release.

Version 16.0 of the long-standing, open-source Asterisk VoIP/PSTN telephony software is now available for voice communication deployments.

With the Open-Source Firmware Conference 2018 videos having been uploaded this week, another one of the interesting videos to watch from this conference was about Facebook's preference for open-source firmware.

Nuitka version 0.6 was quietly released last week as the Python 2/3 compiler that converts the Python code into optimized C code.

Arcan is that display server built originally off a game engine code base and has been building up a feature-set close to that of X11/Wayland. Durden is its accompanying desktop while the project has also been pursuing a virtual reality desktop and trying to work on other innovations in this space.

The Portable Computing Language (a.k.a. POCL or PortableCL) is the effort for getting OpenCL running on CPUs as well as other hardware for this open-source code-base that supports OpenCL 1.2 with some OpenCL 2.0+ functionality.

The Collabora open-source consulting firm whose expertise spans from the Linux kernel to LibreOffice and X.Org had another successful year. The UK-based company last week reported their 2017 financial position last week providing a glimpse at the viability of open-source / free software consulting.

OpenCV, the popular Open-Source Computer Vision real-time library, is nearing its big "4.0" release with a number of improvements for this widely-used library.

For eligible students or others with time to participate, the winter 2018 round of the Outreachy program opened this week for applications.

The fourth and likely last beta release of PostgreSQL 11 is now available.

The PostgreSQL database server is the latest open-source project adopting a Code of Conduct to promote inclusivity and appropriate conduct in engaging with the community.

SQLite 3.25 was released this weekend as the newest feature update to this embed-friendly SQL database library.

Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year's end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance.