Saturday marks the 20th Anniversary of open source, sort of. Open source led to a new software development and distribution model that offered an alternative to proprietary software. No single event takes the prize for starting the technology revolution. However, Feb. 3, 1998, is one of the more significant dates. On that day, Christine Peterson, a futurist and lecturer in the field of nanotechnology, coined the "open source" term.

Mycroft AI earlier this week announced that its Mark II smart speaker achieved full funding on Kickstarter in just 6.5 hours. As of Wednesday, pledges reached more than three times its $50K goal -- with 23 days remaining in the campaign. The Mark II is positioned as an open source alternative to the dominant Amazon Echo line of smart speakers and its main challenger, the Google Home device.

Google on Wednesday released its Cloud AutoML Vision service in Alpha. It is the first in a planned series of Cloud AutoML services designed to help people with limited machine learning expertise build their own custom models using advanced techniques such as learning2learn and transfer learning. Learning2learn is a process for automating machine learning

Many in the open source community worked feverishly this week to respond to heightened fears that software updates to fix the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities would put millions of computers at risk of slowdowns or even total disability. Updated kernels were released for mitigation of Meltdown variant 3, or CVE-2017-5754, for X86-64 architecture, said Canonical VP Dean Henrichsmeyer.

A renowned Linux innovator has developed a new mobile operating system, called "Project eelo," in an effort to provide a level of data privacy that traditional Android and iOS devices fail to offer. The new eelo system will allow mobile phone users to regain control over their personal information at a price they can afford, said Gael Duval, who created Mandrake Linux back in 1998.

"Girls in Tech is a global nonprofit. We focus on engagement, education, and empowerment of girls and women in technology," said Ishita Mandhan, a software engineer at LSQ and program director for Girls in Tech. "It's important to provide the support network to help women to develop their careers in STEM fields. Girls in Tech's Global Classroom "teaches girls and women around the world."

Open Garden has announced the launch of a new P2P service that allows users to share Internet connections and unused plan data for free, with compensation in a new cryptocurrency as an extra incentive. The company is offering the service through an app that can be downloaded from Google Play. The system requires no hardware other than an Android phone to participate in the Internet access sharing.

AWS shone a spotlight on IoT and machine learning technologies earlier this week, with the announcement of a new operating system and several new services designed to encourage radical expansion of their deployment and use across multiple industries. The new OS, Amazon FreeRTOS, simplifies development, deployment, security and maintenance of microcontroller-based edge devices, according AWS.

Four big tech players this week moved to improve their handling of open source software licensing violations. Red Hat, Google, Facebook and IBM said they would apply error standards in GNU GPLv3 to all of their open source licensing, even licenses granted under older GPL agreements. "This will make everything consistent with GPLv3," said IP attorney Lawrence Rosen.

AWS has announced Amazon Sumerian, a new Web-based platform to help developers quickly design and deploy VR, AR and 3D applications. The platform lets developers build realistic VR, AR or 3D environments, populate them with animated characters and 3D objects, and create scripts to determine how they interact with users of a particular application and with each other.

AWS has become the latest tech firm to join the deep learning community's collaboration on the Open Neural Network Exchange, recently launched to advance AI in a frictionless and interoperable environment. Facebook and Microsoft led the effort. AWS made its open source Python package, ONNX-MxNet, available as a deep learning framework that offers APIs across multiple languages.

Corporate executives know that if they don't transform their companies into digital enterprises they're going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage. Yet many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. Many executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting cloud-based applications and services.

Microsoft has released its long-anticipated and much-hyped Xbox One X console, promising to push the boundaries of modern gaming and video entertainment. It is the most powerful console in the world, with up to 40 percent more power than existing devices on the market, the company claimed. Xbox One X gamers can choose from 1,300 gaming titles -- the largest lineup in company history.

We often talk about hybrid cloud business models, but virtually always in the context of traditional processor-bound applications. What if deep learning developers and service operators could run their GPU-accelerated model training or inference delivery service anywhere they wanted? What if they could do so without having to worry about which Nvidia graphics processor unit they were using?

IBM has announced IBM Cloud Private, a software platform that allows enterprise customers to run applications and store critical data in an on-premises, private cloud environment. The new service employs a Kubernetes-based container architecture that supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. IBM also introduced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software.

The Linux Foundation has announced an agreement with AT&T and Tech Mahindra to launch the Acumos Project, a new platform for open source development of artificial intelligence. The new platform is part of a broader effort to open up opportunities for AI collaboration in the telecommunications, media and technology sectors. AT&T is a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation.

Microsoft's Sonar, released under an open source license, could help developers build more effective and secure websites. Sonar, a linting tool and site scanner, is the next evolution of the static scan tool, according to Microsoft. The team that developed Microsoft's Edge browser created Sonar as a better way for website maintainers to check performance and security issues.

Samsung has announced a new app, Linux on Galaxy, designed to work with its DeX docking station to bring a full Linux desktop experience to Galaxy smartphone users. Samsung earlier this year introduced DeX, a docking station that connects to a monitor to give Galaxy smartphone users a desktop experience. With the Linux on Galaxy app, users will be able to run full Linux desktop distributions.

Apple and General Electric on Wednesday announced a new software development kit for iOS that enables developers to create applications for Predix, an Internet of Things platform made by GE. Applications developed with the new SDK could give industrial operators more insight and visibility into the performance of their equipment and operations on an iPhone or iPad.

Many software developers and enterprise users have been lax or oblivious to the need to properly manage open source software. A new report highlights the consequences of failure to establish open source acquisition and usage policies, and to follow best practices. Flexera polled more than 400 commercial software suppliers and in-house software development teams within enterprises.

Salesforce is a large and well-disciplined development company. It's pretty good at marketing too. It continues to innovate in all product areas, from core platform to applications, and the one criticism I'd make is that it's information overload at times. Lately Salesforce has made a big deal of adding its AI product, Einstein, to every application area to provide insights and stack rank options.

AWS and Microsoft have announced the availability of Gluon, an open source deep learning library for building AI neural networks. Gluon will make it easier for researchers to define machine learning models using a collection of prebuilt, optimized neural network components. It will enable software developers and enterprise users to manipulate machine learning models like any other data structures.

Apple's use of facial recognition to unlock its iPhone X may open the gates for developers champing at the bit to bring the technology to the Android world. Face ID, which will replace fingerprint scanning in Apple's new iPhone X, uses Apple's TrueDepth 3D camera to verify the owner of a phone. Android developers have been working on similar systems, said Sensible Vision CEO George Brostoff.

Bpm'online has introduced software update 7.11 for its intelligent CRM and BPM platform, with more than 200 improvements designed to accelerate strategy execution. Among other features, it provides new machine learning capabilities and predictive algorithms that offer users relevant information and automation within a specific context based on analysis of historical data.

Cloudflare on Wednesday released the beta version of Cloudflare Stream, a new, inexpensive streaming video service. Designed for app developers who want to build businesses hosting and streaming videos, Cloudflare Stream bundles encoding, global delivery and video player software into one package. These functionalities can be separated upon request.

Microsoft has been working on a language for a computer that doesn't exist. The company unveiled the language -- as yet unnamed -- at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. Part of its Visual Studio product, it will run on a quantum simulator and quantum computer. "Quantum computing is the next phase in computing," said Jack E. Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates.

Amazon Web Services on Monday unveiled a new per-second pricing plan for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, which will take effect Oct. 2. The new pricing for Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Block Storage used with EC2 instances will allow greater flexibility and efficiency for customers wanting to expand their use of cloud computing data, AWS said.

Salesforce earlier this year introduced its Einstein Vision capability, an idea with a lot of promise but not a great deal of precedent. Who had applications that could see, and how would this be used? For decades, we've been content with scanning documents and analyzing them with OCR tools, or we've used bar codes and QR codes -- but it all came down to recognizing simple symbols.

Linux is now the dominant operating system on Amazon's AWS cloud service and is growing rapidly on Microsoft's Azure platform this year, according to a report on public cloud adoption trends Sumo Logic released on Tuesday. The company's second annual State of Modern Apps report reveals usage trends on AWS, Azure and Google clouds, and how they impact the use of modern apps in the enterprise.

Apple and Accenture on Tuesday announced a new partnership to develop iOS tools and services to help enterprises connect with their customers through iPads and iPhones. Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios, staffed by a range of visual and experience designers, programmers, data scientists and architects, as well as hardware and software designers.