Newsbytes
For many people the name ‘PowerShell’ will take you back to when you had to use Windows, as it’s the command-line shell for Microsoft’s operating system. It looks like
PowerShell may once again be a part of your life, Microsoft is open-sourcing the command line shell and is looking to bring it to Linux and Mac OS X. This follows on from previous news that Microsoft has open-sourced its .NET framework, and shows that the company finally recognises that people like to choose their own operating systems (which, shock, horror, may not be Windows), while still wanting to use its cloud platforms, such as Azure.
Stellar animation studio, Pixar has recently revealed that it uses open source software, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenGL, when animating its films, and uses System 76 machines, which come with open source software installed. Most excitingly of all, Pixar has opensourced its Universal Scene Description (USD) technology, which is a powerful set of tools for filmmakers. Pixar views open sourcing its technology as a way to encourage innovation, with Disney, the owner of Pixar, commenting that “we want to contribute back to the community; therefore, we have established this platform. We encourage you to investigate and use the technologies we are sharing. We also very much welcome your collaboration and contribution in these areas.” You can download the source code from https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD.
Mozilla will allow the Let’s Encrypt root key, which provides a free SSL/TLS certificate authority, to be trusted by default in the next version of
Firefox50. This means that websites with certificates from Let’s Encrypt are now more widely supported, and Let’s Encrypt doesn’t have to rely on its partnership with IndenTrust to supply trusted roots. The project has also applied to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Blackberry to trust its root key by default.