New cybersecurity rules for digital products proposed by the European Commission pose "unnecessary economic and technological risks to the European Union," according to a group of 12 open-source software leadership organizations.
In an open letter to the Commission published last week, the group stated: "We write to express our concern that the greater open-source community has been underrepresented during the development of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) to date and wish to ensure this is remedied throughout the co-legislative process by lending our support."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 27, 20230 comments
Microsoft announced the next step in its evolving generative AI strategy on Thursday with news that its ubiquitous Office suite will soon support natural language (NL) interactions. But while NL-powered versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams are sure to grab mainstream headlines, developers learned that Redmond is also AI-enabling components of the Microsoft Power Platform with GitHub's Copilot tool.
Three of the four components that comprise the Power Platform—Power Apps (low/no code development), Power Automate (process automation, formerly "Flow"), and Power Virtual Agents (intelligent virtual bots)—will soon include "a Copilot experience."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20230 comments
I've been on this beat for a long time, and I can't remember a piece of software catching fire with the mainstream media—from cable news to late-night talk shows—quite like ChatGPT. The folks at OpenAI, which developed the conversational chatbot, claimed an increase of 1 million users in one week in December. Microsoft just announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in the organization that "extends our ongoing collaboration." Needless to say, getting an interview with the folks at OpenAI has been a challenge…which is why I decided to pose some questions directly to the AI-driven natural language processing tool's public demo on the Web.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 24, 20230 comments
An estimated 140,000 Twitter users have declared their intention to abandon the social media platform and move to the self-hosted social networking service Mastodon. According to some industry watchers, Mastodon has been growing by more than a million users per month since Twitter was acquired by Tesla founder Elon Musk. Last month, Mastodon reported (ironically, with a tweet) that the platform had just passed the two-million active user mark, bolstering its claim to being the largest decentralized social network on the Internet.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 12, 20220 comments
GitHub rolled out a slew of product announcements at its annual GitHub Universe developer conference earlier this month. As we reported, expanded access for business users of its Copilot AI pair programming service generated the loudest buzz. (The company calls the new offering "Copilot for Business.")
More
Posted by John K. Waters on November 22, 20220 comments
New Relic just released its 2022 State of Logs Report, which captured the data gathered from millions of applications within the New Relic observability platform to provide an in-depth look at the use and management of logs.
The publication of a report on log data stats is not the sexiest tech news to cross my desk, but amid the Sturm und Drang of the current landscape the report's authors offer some appealingly quotidian insights into an activity that is, let's face it, critical to every business in every industry.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on October 16, 20220 comments
Oracle today announced the general availability of version 19 of the Java Development Kit (JDK 19), and though it's not a long-term support (LTS) release, the latest version of the reference implementation of the Java SE platform comes with a bundle of previews and incubating features that make this short-term release well worth a look.
On schedule with the accelerated, six-month release cadence Oracle announced in 2017, JDK 19 includes seven JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals), only one of which is final. The list includes:
More
Posted by John K. Waters on September 20, 20220 comments
Lightbend, the company behind the Scala JVM language and developer of the Reactive Platform, is changing the license on its Akka technology from Apache 2.0 to the BSL v1.1 (Business Source License), starting with Akka v2.7, which is set for release in October.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on September 8, 20220 comments
Microsoft today announced the launch of a new website designed to provide Java developers with a new level of support in the form of tools and resources that enable them to code, deploy, and scale their apps more productively.
The website is another brick in the foundation of support for Java developers that Microsoft has been building over the last couple of years (which my colleague, David Ramel, has been tracking quite diligently in Visual Studio Magazine.) The new site is chock-a-block (pun intended) with content and links to technical documentation, learning paths, and on-demand videos from Microsoft conferences and its Java Cloud Developer Advocacy team.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 30, 20220 comments