How Non-Devs Can Help Linux | LAS 350

What are the best options for non-coders and developers to contribute to their favorite open source project? We’ll break down some of the barriers we’ve faced & approaches we like to help out in a non-development capacity.

Plus the common ways the Ghost vulnerability is being exploited, how you can do your taxes under Linux & a few surprises!

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— Show Notes: —

Contribution to open source when your not a developer

Brought to you by: System76

Problems we’ve faced trying to help

Who could use the money the most ie: Mozilla vs Tox
Abandoned IRC, unclear if anyone still “owning” the project.
Mixed ways of funding. I want to contribute, but each project has their own payment system, and way of handling it.

Non-Monetary ways to help

Advocation for software,
Documentation
Community outreach
Bug Triage, find dupes, discover missing information developers would need to fully troubleshoot.

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

Samsung Smart Refrigerator

The Samsung 4-Door refrigerator with 8″ Wi-Fi Enabled LCD will allow you to browse the web, access apps and connect to other Samsung smart devices – opening up a world of interactive communication and entertainment.

Samsung’s new smart fridge mirrors your smart phone

Desktop App Pick

Gourmet Recipe Manager

Gourmet

Gourmet Recipe Manager is a recipe-organizer available for Windows, Linux, and other Unix systems.

Weekly Spotlight

BeansBooks

Easily create invoices and purchase orders, pay bills and track sales tax. Import and automatically categorize bank transactions.

Our Past Picks

These are the weekly picks provided by the Jupiter Broadcasting podcast, the Linux Action Show.

This site includes a separate picks lists for the “Runs Linux”, Desktop Apps, Spotlight Picks, Android Picks, and Distro Picks.

— NEWS —

WordPress, PHP Apps, Subject to Ghost glibc Attacks

“Less than 48 hours after the disclosure of the Ghost vulnerability in the GNU C library (glibc), researchers have uncovered that PHP applications, including the WordPress content management system, could be another weak spot and eventually in the crosshairs of attackers.

Ghost is a vulnerability in glibc that attackers can use against only a handful of applications right now to remotely run executable code and gain control of a Linux server. The vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow and affects all Linux systems, according to experts, and has been present in the glibc code since 2000. ???An example of where this could be a big issue is within WordPress itself: it uses a function named wp_http_validate_url() to validate every pingback???s post URL,??? wrote Sucuri research Marc-Alexandre Montpas in an advisory published Wednesday. ???And it does so by using gethostbyname(). So an attacker could leverage this vector to insert a malicious URL that would trigger a buffer overflow bug, server-side, potentially allowing him to gain privileges on the server.???”

LibreOffice gets a streamlined makeover, native alternatives for major Microsoft

The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft’s OOXML formats.

Official Google Drive Linux Client Screenshots Leaked

The screenshots above are bundled with the official Google Drive Mac client and they first appeared with version 1.18.7821.2489 (I checked the previous version and some random old versions and none contained these screenshots), released on October 30, 2014, which isn’t long ago and it most probably means that Google is testing Drive for Linux internally. So we might actually see an official release pretty soon.

Bill Gates Inadvertently Shows Off Ubuntu on His Facebook Page

The Internet is abuzz today after Bill Gates published an image on his Facebook page and a link towards his website with the text “15 years from now, most people in poor countries will be able to take classes online.” It’s a sound goal and it’s perfectly doable, but in the image posted on Facebook the operating system is Ubuntu.