Copilot, GitHub’s machine learning assisted code completion feature continues to generate controversy. View in browser »

ISSUE 320: Free Thinking

“With Kubernetes, you need a curated experience. So what you are seeing is that enterprise organizations are either building their own platforms, or they are buying OpenShift.”

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Sam Newman, an independent tech consultant. “Can You Live without Kubernetes?”

WebAssembly (Wasm) is among the more hot topics under the CNCF project umbrella. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the show floor from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, Liam Randall, CEO and co-founder, Cosmonic, and Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe, discuss why Wasm’s future looks bright.

Free Thinking

Copilot, GitHub’s machine learning assisted code completion feature continues to generate controversy in some quarters of the open source community.

Late last month, Microsoft’s GitHub had moved the Copilot service from beta into a paid offering, starting at $10 a month (but still free to students and developers of large open source projects.)

Because of this move to charge for the service, two open source advocacy groups, the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), came out with a recommendation that developers who care about open source software cut their ties with GitHub altogether.

Since its inception last year, Copilot has always drawn critical attention. GitHub bills the service as “pair programming with AI,” with the aim of cutting out the part of the coding process where developers look for pre-existing solutions on Stack Overflow or Google. To build the service, GitHub paired with another Microsoft entity, OpenAI, to scan the repositories on GitHub to build up a knowledge base to provide suggestions.

A lot of open source projects in GitHub, however, have a copyleft license, which demands anything made with the code must also be made available as open source. But in Copilot’s case, the code isn’t used directly, but rather as an input to create entirely new code.

In discussions with SFC, Microsoft and GitHub executives claimed that the use of this open source code falls under fair use since this is public anyway. But, as SFC points out, GitHub is using open source code to build a proprietary service that can be accessed only by way of a paid subscription. Also of note is that Microsoft did not provide any code from its own proprietary software offerings, notably Office and Windows, so it is clear, in SFC’s view, that the project did not want to use Microsoft’s own intellectual property. So why is it fair to use open source code, the organization asks.

What do you think? Does Copilot violate the spirit of open source? Or is it a natural evolution of programming we all will soon enjoy?

Specs: Dropbox’s Sixth Generation of Custom-Built Servers

File hosting service Dropbox began designing its own hardware infrastructure nearly a decade ago, and recently the company released the details on its sixth generation of servers, a fleet optimized for a higher capacity, and lower latency.

The Cultural Changes that Zero Trust Security Demands

At the core of a zero trust strategy is re-thinking how companies approach security, from who is involved to what the goal is. “Zero trust is a strategy designed to stop data breaches, and then to make other cyber attacks unsuccessful,” said John Kindervag, senior vice president, cybersecurity strategy at ON2IT, who is often considered the creator of zero trust. This latest excerpt from our ebook on zero trust discusses how to make the necessary changes to better secure your own systems.

Fiberplane: Collaboration When Everything’s on Fire

Since selling his previous company, Wercker, to Oracle, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen has turned his attention to the difficulties surrounding incident response in massive distributed systems — and among distributed teams. His new Amsterdam-based company, called Fiberplane, offers a real-time collaboration tool for site reliability engineers, where they can pull in data from observability and other tools to get to the heart of problems.

Trust No One & Automate (Almost Everything): Building a Modern Zero Trust Strategy

With cyberattacks on the rise, no organization can afford to be careless about its security. But cloud architecture makes old ways of keeping systems and data safe obsolete.

In a distributed network, there’s no single “castle” to defend. Instead, a new strategy — known as “zero trust” — is the best approach to keeping everything that matters locked down tight — and malicious actors locked out.

A zero trust security strategy calls for not only technology that automates authentication and authorization tasks, but also a shift in thinking and organization-wide cultural changes. In this ebook, we offer a high-level overview and explore what it takes to implement a zero trust approach in an organization.

You’ll learn:

What zero trust is.
Why the old “castle and moat” approach doesn’t work on the cloud.
What authentication and authorization mean in a zero trust environment.
How cultural changes support a zero trust strategy.
The role automation plays in ensuring security.

Download Ebook

Thanks to our exclusive ebook sponsor, Torq, for making this work possible!