Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB).

And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale.
Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute.

This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits.

If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not.
There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match."

Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

VP.NET has released the source code for its Intel SGX enclave on GitHub, allowing anyone to build the enclave and verify its mrenclave hash matches what's running on the servers. This takes "don't trust, verify" from marketing to reality, making privacy claims testable all the way down to hardware-enforced execution.

A move like this could set a new benchmark for transparency in privacy tech.

An anonymous reader writes: Kaisen Linux, a Debian-based distro packed with tools for sysadmins, system rescue, and network diagnostics, is shutting down. This comes not long after Intel's Clear Linux also reached the end of the road.

Kaisen offered multiple desktop environments like KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce, plus a "toram" mode that could load the whole OS into RAM so you could free up your USB port. The final release, Rolling 3.0, updates the base to Debian 13, defaults to KDE Plasma 6, replaces LightDM with SDDM, drops some packages like neofetch and hping3, and adds things like faster BTRFS snapshot restores, full ZFS support, and safer partitioning behavior.

Unlike Clear Linux, Kaisen will still get security updates for the next two years, giving current users time to migrate without rushing.

Intel's stock jumped 7% after reports that the Trump administration is considering taking a stake in the struggling chipmaker to support U.S.-based manufacturing. CNBC reports: Intel is the only U.S. company with the capability to manufacture the fastest chips on U.S. shores, although rivals including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung also have U.S. factories. President Donald Trump has called for more chips and high technology to be manufactured in the U.S. The government's stake would help fund factories that Intel is currently building in Ohio, according to the report.

Just days after demanding Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign over his past ties to China, President Trump reversed course, calling Tan a "success" following a White House meeting. "I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. "The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" CNBC reports: Tan has been an Intel director since 2022, and in March he replaced Pat Gelsinger as CEO. Last week Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., questioned Tan's ties to China. Cotton brought up a past criminal case involving Cadence Design, where Tan had been CEO, and asked whether Intel required Tan to divest from positions in chipmakers linked to the Chinese Communist Party, the People's Liberation Army and any other concerning entities in China.

Trump's latest message marks a stark change in tone from last week. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the president wrote that Tan "is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem." Intel said in a comment later that day that the company, directors and Tan are "deeply committed to advancing U.S. national and economic security interests."

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who faces calls for resignation from President Trump, helped build China's semiconductor industry over four decades. Tan's San Francisco-based Walden International, founded in 1987, was invited by Chinese officials to introduce venture capital to China in 1993, WSJ reported Friday. The firm invested in SMIC, China's largest chip manufacturer, where Tan served as board director for at least 18 years until the Commerce Department restricted the company in 2020. Walden also backed Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, now worth $17 billion and a leader in China's chip-manufacturing sector.

During Tan's tenure as Cadence CEO from 2009-2021, the company sold banned technology to a Chinese university conducting military simulations, resulting in a 2025 guilty plea and $140 million settlement. These investments, once common among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and U.S. university endowments, now appear problematic amid U.S.-China tensions and Washington's restrictions on chip exports to China.

Tan wrote in a blog post late Thursday that there had been a "lot of misinformation" circulating about his past roles. "Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote.

Google will discontinue Steam for Chromebook Beta on January 1, 2026, removing all installed games from devices after that date. The beta launched in March 2022 as an alpha before expanding to beta status in November 2022 with reduced hardware requirements of Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processors and 8GB RAM. The program never progressed beyond beta testing despite supporting 99 compatible Linux-based titles through its three-year run.

Intel's chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has hit out at "misinformation" over his career after U.S. President Donald Trump alleged the semiconductor industry veteran was "highly conflicted" and should resign. From a report: In a letter to Intel staff published late on Thursday, Tan said that Intel was "engaging" with the Trump administration "to address the matters that have been raised and ensure they have the facts."

"There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles...I want to be absolutely clear: Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote.

Tan's move to reassure staff at Intel, the only US-headquartered company capable of manufacturing advanced chips, came hours after Trump had demanded his resignation in a post on Truth Social. Trump did not detail Tan's alleged conflicts of interest but the U.S. president's broadside followed a letter from Tom Cotton, the Republican head of the Senate intelligence committee, to Intel's chair expressing "concern about the security and integrity of Intel's operations" and Tan's ties to China.

President Trump on Thursday called on Intel's CEO to resign because of his past ties to China, the latest challenge for the troubled chip maker. From a report: "The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Thursday. The president appeared to be referencing Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan's past business dealings in China, which Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) called out in a letter to the company's board earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Cotton wrote an open letter to Intel's board questioning Tan's ties to the Chinese government, including apparent connections to the country's military and investments in other semiconductor companies. "The new CEO of @intel reportedly has deep ties to the Chinese Communists," Cotton wrote in a post on X accompanying the letter. "U.S. companies who receive government grants should be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars and adhere to strict security regulations. The board of @Intel owes Congress an explanation."

EreIamJH writes: German tech newsletter Notebookcheck is reporting that the unexpectedly high 20% tariff the U.S. recently imposed on Taiwan is intended to pressure TSMC to buy a 49% minority stake in Intel -- including an IP transfer and to spend $400 billion in the U.S., in addition to the $165 billion previously planned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.

The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."

According to two sources Reuters spoke with, Intel is struggling with low yields in its next-gen 18A chip manufacturing process for its next PC chip, Panther Lake. Internal data suggests the company is far from reaching commercially viable production levels, leading some insiders to describe the effort as a "Hail Mary." Reuters reports: For months, Intel has promised investors it would increase manufacturing using a process it calls 18A. It spent billions of dollars developing 18A, including the construction or upgrades of several factories, with the goal of challenging Taiwan's chipmaking heavyweight, TSMC. Intel wants to round out its business designing chips that it largely makes in-house and TSMC helps it produce, with a contract manufacturing business that can compete with this key supplier. But whether Intel revives advanced chip production in the U.S. and gets its contract foundry on solid footing depends on closing the technology gap with TSMC. Early tests disappointed customers last year, but Intel has said its 18A is on track to make its "Panther Lake" laptop semiconductors at high volume starting in 2025, which include next-generation transistors and a more efficient way to deliver power to the chip.

The chipmaker has hoped that producing such an advanced in-house chip would grow external interest in its foundry, at a time when new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has explored a major shift to course-correct that fledgling business, Reuters previously reported. Yet only a small percentage of the Panther Lake chips printed via 18A have been good enough to make available to customers, said the two people, who were briefed on the company's test data since late last year. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Intel did not authorize them to disclose such information. This percentage figure, known as yield, means Intel may struggle to make its high-end laptop chip profitably in the near future. [...]

Intel in the past has aimed for a yield north of 50% before ramping production because starting any earlier risked damaging its profit margin, three of the sources said. Intel typically does not make the lion's share of its profit until yields reach roughly 70% to 80%, key for a chip as small as Panther Lake where many defects would make it a tough sell, the three people said. Profit also flows from market expansions and building up factory output, Intel said. An immense yield increase would be a tall task by Panther Lake's fourth-quarter launch, the two people with knowledge of Intel's manufacturing operation said. But without such a jump, Intel may have to sell some chips at a lower profit margin or at a loss, the two sources briefed on test data said. The company has warned it could exit leading-edge manufacturing entirely if it does not land external business for 14A, which is 18A's next-generation successor.

NBC News reports that in the U.S., many recent graduates looking to enter the labor force "are painting a dire picture of their job search." NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering.

Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn't planned to work in. "It was very frustrating," said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. "Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them."

The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday. "Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they're the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows," said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday... Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp.
The article cites an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab who believes early adoption of AI "is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI's future role." So besides federal policy changes, the article blames "the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development."

Seven months after graduating, one CS major told NBC News he'd applied for 100 jobs, and got one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares his list of "what's new and improved" in the latest Linux 6.16 kernel. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: First, the Rust language is continuing to become more well-integrated into the kernel. At the top of my list is that the kernel now boasts Rust bindings for the driver core and PCI device subsystem. This approach will make it easier to add new Rust-based hardware drivers to Linux. Additionally, new Rust abstractions have been integrated into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), particularly for ioctl handling, file/GEM memory management, and driver/device infrastructure for major GPU vendors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. These changes should reduce vulnerabilities and optimize graphics performance. This will make gamers and AI/ML developers happier.

Linux 6.16 also brings general improvements to Rust crate support. Crate is Rust's packaging format. This will make it easier to build, maintain, and integrate Rust kernel modules into the kernel. For those of you who still love C, don't worry. The vast majority of kernel code remains in C, and Rust is unlikely to replace C soon. In a decade, we may be telling another story. Beyond Rust, this latest release also comes with several major file system improvements. For starters, the XFS filesystem now supports large atomic writes. This capability means that large multi-block write operations are 'atomic,' meaning all blocks are updated or none. This enhances data integrity and prevents data write errors. This move is significant for companies that use XFS for databases and large-scale storage.

Perhaps the most popular Linux file system, Ext4, is also getting many improvements. These boosts include faster commit paths, large folio support, and atomic multi-fsblock writes for bigalloc filesystems. What these improvements mean, if you're not a file-system nerd, is that we should see speedups of up to 37% for sequential I/O workloads. If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.

If security is a top priority for you, the 6.16 kernel now supports Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX). This addition, along with Linux's improved support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Memory Encryption (SEV-SNP), enables you to encrypt your software's memory in what's known as confidential computing. This feature improves cloud security by encrypting a user's virtual machine memory, meaning someone who cracks a cloud can't access your data. Linux 6.16 also delivers several chip-related upgrades. It introduces support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), doubling x86 general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 and boosting performance on next-gen CPUs like Lunar Lake and Granite Rapids Xeon. Additionally, the new CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU option allows users to build processor-optimized kernels for greater efficiency.

Support for Nvidia's AI-focused Blackwell GPUs has also been improved, and updates to TCP/IP with DMABUF help offload networking tasks to GPUs and accelerators. While these changes may go unnoticed by everyday users, high-performance systems will see gains and OpenVPN users may finally experience speeds that challenge WireGuard.

Intel announced it will cut approximately 24,000 jobs in 2025 and cancel or scale back projects in Germany, Poland, Costa Rica, and Ohio as part of CEO Lip-Bu Tan's sweeping restructuring efforts. By the end of the year, the struggling chipmaker plans to have "just around 75,000 'core employees' in total," according to The Verge. "It's not clear if the layoffs will slow now that we're over halfway through the year, but Intel states today that it has already 'completed the majority of the planned headcount actions it announced last quarter to reduce its core workforce by approximately 15 percent.'" From the report: Intel employed 109,800 people at the end of 2024, of which 99,500 were "core employees," so the company is pushing out around 24,000 people this year -- shrinking Intel by roughly one-quarter. (It has also divested other businesses, shrinking the larger organization as well.) [...] Today, on the company's earnings call, Intel's says that Intel had overinvested in new factories before it had secured enough demand, that its factories had become "needlessly fragmented," and that it needs to grow its capacity "in lock step" with achieving actual milestones. "I do not subscribe to the belief that if you build it, they will come. Under my leadership, we will build what customers need when they need it, and earn their trust," says Tan.

Now, in Germany and Poland, where Intel was planning to spend tens of billions of dollars respectively on "mega-fabs" that would employ 3,000 workers, and on an assembly and test facility that would employ 2,000 workers, the company will "no longer move forward with planned projects" and is apparently axing them entirely. Intel has had a presence in Poland since 1993, however, and the company did not say its R&D facilities there are closing. (Intel had previously pressed pause on the new Germany and Poland projects "by approximately two years" back in 2024.)

In Costa Rica, where Intel employs over 3,400 people, the company will "consolidate its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica into its larger sites in Vietnam." Metzger tells The Verge that over 2,000 Costa Rica employees should remain to work in engineering and corporate, though. The company is also cutting back in Ohio: "Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand." Intel CFO David Zinsner says Intel will continue to make investments there, though, and construction will continue.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Intel has quietly pulled the plug on Clear Linux OS, officially ending support for the once-promising Linux distribution that it had backed for nearly a decade. Effective immediately, the company says it will no longer provide any updates, security patches, or maintenance for the operating system. In a final blow, the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository is now archived in read-only mode.

The move was announced with little fanfare, and for users still relying on Clear Linux OS, there's no sugarcoating it... you need to move on. Intel is urging everyone to migrate to an actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to avoid running unpatched software. "Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware," the company said in a statement. "A heartfelt thank you to every developer, user, and contributor who helped shape Clear Linux OS over the last 10 years. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable."

Intel is laying off more than 5,000 employees across four states, according to updated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings. From a report: Most of the cuts are happening in California and Oregon. Intel more than doubled its layoff estimates for Santa Clara and Folsom to a total of 1,935 affected employees, according to California WARN filings. The cuts began taking place in Folsom on July 11, and in Santa Clara on July 15.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release:

- Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI)
- Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading
- New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds
- GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs
- New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations)
- UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior
- Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration
- Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB
- Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support
- Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+
- New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*)
~500 bug fixes across all major systems

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that the company has fallen out of the "top 10 semiconductor companies" and that it's "too late" to catch up with Nvidia in AI training technology.

The remarks came as Intel began laying off thousands of workers globally, including 529 in Oregon and several hundred others in California, Arizona and Israel. "Twenty, 30 years ago, we are really the leader," Tan said during a conversation broadcast to Intel employees worldwide. "Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies." Tan said Nvidia's position in AI training is "too strong" and that customers are giving Intel failing grades.

Intel's market value has dropped to around $100 billion, roughly half its value from 18 months ago, while Nvidia briefly hit $4 trillion on Wednesday. Tan said Intel will instead focus on "edge" AI that operates directly on devices rather than centralized computers.

Intel is laying off over 500 employees in Oregon as part of a broader restructuring plan expected to impact about 20% of its workforce. Bloomberg reports: The Oregon job reduction will hit facilities in Aloha and Hillsboro starting on July 15, Intel said in a regulatory filing. The layoffs are expected to eliminate about 529 employees on a permanent basis. The latest disclosure follows an announcement in California, where 107 employees were let go at Intel's Santa Clara headquarters.

Under new Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan, Intel embarked on a plan in April to slash jobs and reduce operating expenses. The company hasn't given a total figure for the cuts, but a person familiar with the matter has put the amount at more than a fifth of staff. In a statement, Intel said it was making the Oregon cuts to become "a leaner, faster and more efficient company."

"Removing organizational complexity and empowering our engineers will enable us to better serve the needs of our customers and strengthen our execution," the company said. "We are making these decisions based on careful consideration of what's needed to position our business for the future, and we will treat people with care and respect as we complete this important work."