NEWS

Solomon Hykes Leaves Daily Operations at Docker

Docker founder Solomon Hykes has announced that he is leaving the company's daily operations. Docker started in 2013, when Hykes rebranded dotCloud as Docker Inc. and appointed a new CEO with the goal of successfully monetizing the power of container technology. The company celebrated its fifth anniversary in March. In the five years since, Docker has pioneered containerization. However, as containers and orchestration became commoditized, Docker Inc. has had to explore other ways to look for revenue.

According to his announcement, Hykes sees a major growth opportunity with the Docker Enterprise Edition and feels the company needs to find a CTO "…with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for the largest corporations in the world." Hykes has been evolving his role within Docker for a while. Last year he stepped down from the role of CTO and became Chief Architect and Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors. He had already moved out of the day to day involvement with the project and designated most of the work to maintainers.

Hykes wrote in blog post, "A founder's departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I've had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations."

Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversarywith a New Code Portal

Founded in 1993, two years after Linus Torvalds announced the Linux kernel, Red Hat has just celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 2018.

Red Hat was cofounded by Bob Young as ACC Corporation to sell Linux and Unix accessories. One year later, Marc Ewing created a Linux distribution called Red Hat Linux. Later, Young acquired Ewing's business and created what we know as Red Hat today.

Red Hat pioneered a business model around Linux and open source as it moved away from selling coffee mugs and merchandise and started a subscription-based business model. The company went public in 1999 and, fast forward to 2018, Red Hat reported revenue of ~ $3 billion in 2017.

Celebrating its anniversary in a pure open source manner, Red Hat announced a brand new GitHub page to host the source code of all of its projects (https://redhatofficial.github.io/#!/main). "The page will try to list every known free and open source project hosted on GitHub in which Red Hat staffers directly participate as part of their work," wrote Red Hat community analyst Brian Proffitt in a blog post.

Gnome 3.28 Released

The Gnome Foundation has announced the release of Gnome 3.28 "Chongqing" to honor the Gnome.Asia 2017 team. Gnome strives for simplicity to make it easier for a user to use desktop Linux. The Gnome desktop uses simple names for applications – Files, Web, Software, Videos – which accompany a simple user interface. Gnome 3.28 continues that trend.

According to the release notes, GNOME 3.28 offers two important new features that make it easier to keep track of the things. You can now star files and folders in Files (Gnome's file manager). Once they've been added, starred items can be easily viewed in a special location that can be opened from the sidebar. That's a handy feature to get quick access to files that you want.

The second feature is the arrival of "favorites" to the Contact app. Now users can pin often-used contacts, similar to iOS and Android devices. The Contact app also allows users to sort by first and last names.

The Boxes virtual machine manager offers a number of enhancements, including a new feature that makes passing files between host and guest systems easier.

There have been notable improvements in the entertainment department. The Photos app can now import files from removable devices, such as SD cards and USB drives. According to the release notes, this feature automatically detects devices that contain new images, and it also allows organizing new images into albums as they're imported.

With 3.28, Gnome has introduced a new app called Usage that tells you which app is consuming what system resources. Since the tool is just being introduced, it's very basic and includes features for examining CPU and memory consumption. It highlights problem areas, so you can easily identify issues and solve them.

From a security point of view, this release comes with extended device support. The integrated Thunderbolt 3 connection support offers security checks to prevent data theft through unauthorized Thunderbolt 3 connections.

The list of new features is long (https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.28/), and the best way to learn about them is by updating Gnome on your system.