The Hacks The Hacks

Tom and Chunga are tired, TIRED of talking about AI!  They need a dang break from talking about AI!!  Are they going to get a break in this episode of The Hacks?  Nope... Well, ok, kind of.
At the start of the year, Tom predicted one of the biggest stories of 2024 will be the failure and ultimate collapse of a whole bunch of AI focused companies and products. The most recent organization to proove Tom right, is Stability AI. 
What did they do wrong?  How could they botch things so badly? Will other companies make the bad mistakes?  Tom says "Oh! Most definitely!" Listen now, to learn what those mistakes are and who may be making them next!
Get started with Salt in just a few minutes!

Do you remember a few episodes ago, when Chunga said "The tech industry is terrible at this! We're the worst I've ever seen, in any industry, when it comes to taking 20-steps to do something, when it can be done in two!" This episode of The Hacks, is a perfect case study of what Chunga's talking about.
Recently, Terraform changed it's license. Shortly after, a group of open source community members forked Terraform and renamed it "Open Tofu".  Last week, it looks like someone within the Open Tofu eco-system has caused an awful lot of trouble. Why? Well, there is a solid accusation that Open Tofu has stolen some new features of a recent release of Terraform. To make things even more contentious and embarassing, they didn't just steal the complete feature set, they also stole the line by line code of the Terraform copywrite itself.  Tom is shocked, asking the question "How could someone be this freakin stupid?!?" 
How does something like this happen? More importantly, whats going to happen next? Tom knows exactly why this kind of thing happens, and he has several different examples of what's going to happen next! Listen NOW
Join the Salt Project Community Discord Server!
Get started using Salt in just a few minutes.

Tom and Chunga have a good one for you today! 
Late last week, news broke that an extremely dangerous backdoor CVE, built within the XZ compression library had compromised Linux Debian Unstable and Fedora 40-41.  Fortunately, was discovered before it could hit an enterprise platform!
Tom says this particular CVE was especially dangerous and hard to detect because it was built deep into the XZ compression library. As dangerous as it was, it was also brilliant backdoor hack because nobody ever pays any attention to the compression library! Plus, the hacker took an extremely long time to execute his or her plan. It was so smart in fact, that Tom says we're all very lucky it was ever discovered. 
Chunga has a theory that this is only the beginning when it comes to what this individual is actually planning. He's of the opinion that this person has several of these CVE's built into multiple open source software platforms.  Does Tom agree with this theory?  Listen NOW to find out!
Get started using Salt in just a few minutes!

Tom tells people a lot... a lot. When you choose to pick up or "adopt" open source software, you take on a certain level of liability. If you choose to deploy open source software into your infrastructure you run the risk of that software going away!
We've seen this happen several times within the past year. Now things are changing at Redis.
Last week, Redis announced it's changing to a dual source license. What does this mean? Well... it basically means it's no longer free for most users. In this episode of The Hacks, explain why they think Redis chose to make this decision, and why Tom says we're going to see more and more of this type of thing within the world of open source. Listen NOW!
Get started using Salt in just a few minutes!

Chunga noticed somehting recently, and he's wondering if it's symptomatic of a larger problem. A few weeks ago, a video game emulator company called "Yuzu" was sued by Nintendo. Yuzu folded and disappeared almost immediately. Since then, several other emulator makers have done the same thing.  Many of them have scattered to the four winds! Unfortunately, Chunga is seeing more and more of this type of thing when it applys to other open source companies as well.
Tom says Chunga's observation is spot on, and it's a huge problem, a scary problem that will have far reaching impact in the world of open source. In fact, Tom is particularly worried about same thing, but from an infrastructure perspective. Infrastructure? Why? It seems to Chunga that infrastructure is on the rebound with more and more companies choosing to move away from the cloud. 
Tom is deeply interested in something called DBOS, or Data Base Operating System. He says its brand new, and REALLY weird. It doesn't use the Linux kernel, and... it's in the cloud. Is this a revolutionary game changer? Tom doesn't know for sure, but he thinks it has the potential due to the fact that open source has always struggled to solve the "Last Mile" problem. Also, smaller open source operations are disappearing at a record rate, while the larger open source organizations are choosing to go "Proprietary".  
Then... Tom drops a bombshell on Chunga with a huge rumor thats looking more and more real by the day!  What is it?  Listen NOW to find out!!
Get started using Salt in just a few minutes!

Score another one for Tom Hatch!  He and Chunga have been trying to get to this episode for weeks!  
As all of you know, Nvidia is king.  At the first of the year, Tom said that if AMD and Intel wanted to have any hope being competetive and gaining ground against Nvidia's AI strangle hold, they'd have to do something "Unthinkable", and team up.  Good call Tom!
One of the main reasons Nvidia has been so dominant isn't because their chips are so fast (which they are), it's because the majority of their open source framework is built on top of CUDA. AMD and Intel have invested heavily in trying to come up with an answer to CUDA because their own open source offerings, HIP and ROCm, don't have an open source CUDA compatibility layer. They've both tried for years on their own, to develop one, with each company investing milliions and millions of dollars, only to come up short, and give up. Well, it sounds like both AMD and Intel have been listening to Tom, and their problems may be solved. Listen now to see what they've done! 
Get started using Salt in just a few minutes!