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Azure hopes its expansion of open source patent protection to include on-premises as well as cloud use will help efforts to attract enterprise customers.

Red Hat got into a bit of a PR snafu this week after it pulled from distribution a CPU microcode update meant to address the Spectre Variant 2 CPU design flaw. The Register, the tech news site that broke the story about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in processors earlier this month, characterized the move as Red Hat washing its hands of the responsibility to provide customers with firmware patches to address the vulnerability by instructing them to get firmware updates from their hardware vendors instead.

SourceForge, tired of being the forgotten GitHub alternative, has been busy redesigning its website. Normally such a cosmetic solution might seem a little underwhelming -- the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" comes to mind -- but in this case it's a necessary step in the site's efforts to return to relevance, especially in light of changes that have already been made.

It might be called the little engine that could -- or maybe the little engine that does. Whatever you call it, Austin, Texas based WP Engine web hosting company just got a big payoff with a $250 million investment from the private equity giant Silver Lake partners.

If you've got MySQL or MariaDB running on any of your machines -- and you probably do -- then there's a good chance you're also running phpMyAdmin, a popular free and open source MySQL administration tool. That means you might have a problem.

Those reading media accounts published Wednesday and Thursday are probably under the impression that while Spectre affects Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs, that Meltdown affects only Intel products -- or perhaps all Intel CPUs and some ARM chips. Not so, says Red Hat's Jon Masters. Both vulnerabilities are basically architecture agnostic.

Contrary to some beliefs, Linux distros are rarely just carbon copies of other distros. As is evident in this look at five of the most popular Linux server distributions, each is different, with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Are you ready for a new operating system for your Android phone? An operating system that's totally free and that's main purpose isn't to get you to consume? How about an operating system that, although based on Android, brings to the table some of the best aspects of Linux -- like (eventually) it's own repository of apps? Well, get ready, Gaël Duval is working to bring eelo to the table.

As 2017 draws to a close, we look at some of the reasons why the use of open source software is growing and will continue to grow in the year ahead.

By this time next year Amazon will be competing with itself as far as Kubernetes on AWS goes. The world's largest public cloud recently announced it's embracing Kubernetes and that sometime in 2018 it will make a new service, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, or EKS, available. Currently all instances of Kubernetes on AWS are user installed.

It's not the first time one of Heptio's tools has found favor with a major cloud provider. In late November, when Amazon Web Services announced its upcoming Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, it revealed that a single sign on solution it would implement had been developed in partnership with Heptio.

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, with usage numbers that far outweigh other platforms such as Docker's Swarm, Mesos and the like. The platform has become so popular with users that Docker recently integrated Kubernetes alongside Swarm in its container suite, and on November 29, Amazon Web Services announced the platform will be fully supported in its cloud sometime in 2018.

The company hedged it's bet a bit with this unveiling. At the same time it was demoing the product at the Kubernetes containers conference being held inside the Austin Texas city limits, it was officially launching the product at its headquarters in San Francisco. Evidently the folks at Bitnami wanted to make sure the folks in Silicon Valley took note.

It started in a time when "open source" was not yet a term. Linux and the GNU stack were "free software," with the mantra "free as in speech, not as it beer" oft repeated lest anyone confuse software licensed under the GPL with "freeware."

This move is far from a surprise. In August, AWS became the last major cloud provider to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Linux Foundation project behind Kubernetes, and something like this was an expected next move.

The folks at Intel probably went to the nearest lavatory to wash egg off their faces after finding these flaws. This should never have happened. Security experts have been saying for years that Intel's ME was a security nightmare waiting to happen. Intel didn't listen, apparently because being the first (and now second) largest chip maker on the planet, it knew better.

We're accustomed to seeing proprietary vendors embrace open source. What we don't see very often is the opposite, open source developers moving into the world of proprietary software. We're seeing that today with Capital One's beta release of Critical Stack, its Kubernetes compatible container technology.

The foundation, which controls development of Kubernetes, was able to get 36 member organization to agree to a set of standards for the container orchestration platform. Kubernetes has already become the standard for container management, and this new agreement makes sure that Kubernetes always means what admins and DevOps think it means, regardless of vendor.

Today the social network open sourced open/R, making it free to use by anyone who might be designing applications that will require routing at the speed of Facebook. It's being released under the "permissive" MIT license, which allows it to be used in both open source and proprietary projects.

With the announcement, Red Hat joins Linux distributions SUSE and Ubuntu, both of which already support ARM with their server editions. However, it's not really late to the fair. The company has been actively working on an ARM version of RHEL for a while, having released its first "development preview" for the architecture in 2015.