Steemtux Weekly Linux News #3 - WordPress now 30% of the web, FreeTube, Fedora IoT and more

Sorry for the delay this week. The plan was to post this on Monday as I've done with the previous WLN posts, but it's been a week of illness and busy life so I had to delay it a bit. I hope the content isn't too old by now, and still gives you some value.

This week you can read about the huge market share WordPress has, a open source desktop player for YouTube, hardware encryption in the upcoming Librem 5 phone, how to make your project's open source licensing easier and Fedora IoT.

WordPress is now 30% of the web

WordPress accounts for 30% of the world's websites. 50.2% of the world's websites do not run a content management system, which means that WordPress has over 60% share among the websites that do run a content management system. That's a huge share.

For comparison, Joomla, WordPress' nearest competitor, has 3.1% share of all websites (6.3% among the ones using a CMS).

The success of WordPress is the ease of use and tons of plugins that makes it so customisable. With this huge market share, WordPress is also a target of malware, with new security flaws revealed on the regular.

FreeTube - The Open Source YouTube desktop player for people with privacy in mind

If you don't want to sign up for a Google account to subscribe to Youtube channels, there is a cool open source alternative called FreeTube. FreeTube allows you to watch and download YouTube videos, and subscribe to channels without having a Google account. It also gives you a ad free YouTube experience.

FreeTube uses a basic built-in HTML5 player. This makes it so Google can't track your views and video analytics. The only info FreeTube sends is your IP details, which can easily be changed with a VPN. FreeTube is free, open source and available for both Linux, MacOS and Windows.

I think this is a very interesting application. I'll install it myself and give it a spin to test it out, and maybe come back with a review. The GUI looks pretty darn good.

Github makes open-source licensing easier

To help with open-source licensing, which can get complicated, Github has open sourced Licensed. Licensed is an internal tool Github have used to automate some of their open-source licensing process.

Licensed helps developers with their code's open-source licesning by spotting potential problems with the dependency license. Github points out that it's not a replacement for legal advice by a human.

Check it out if you want to simplify the licensing process for your project. Go to the link in my sources list at the bottom of this post to read about how it works in more detail.

Purism brings hardware encryption to their Librem 5 phone

Purism have announced that they have partnered with Werner Koch to integrate hardware encryption to their upcoming Librem 5 phone.

Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism said "We are very excited about the partnership between Purism and Werner Koch, especially being able to work closely with a foremost expert with regard to all things cryptography. We continue to advance solutions aligned with our goals of privacy and security for everyone and this union adds to our growing roster of partnerships that represent our ideal approach to protecting users by default, without sacrificing convenience or usability".

Purism plans to leverage the GnuPG complete design and free implementation of the OpenGPG standard. Along with SmartCard integrated circuit card, Heads security firmware and Nextcloud's end-to-end encrypted storage solution, they will offer customers the highest possible encryption level by default in all of their products.

I think this is amazing. Privacy and security is a big thing for many people, and this phone really sounds to be getting it all, making it a good alternative for anyone looking for a phone with focus on security and privacy. It'll be interesting to see how big of a market there is for a phone like this.

Fedora Council approves IoT edition

The Fedora Council has approved a proposal for a IoT edition of Fedora. The aim is to have it released with Fedora 29. Check out nullr0ute's blog in the sources list to read more about it.

Sources:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/05/wordpress_is_now_30_per_cent_of_the_web/
https://www.ostechnix.com/freetube-an-open-source-desktop-youtube-player-for-privacy-minded-people/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/github-makes-open-source-project-licensing-easier-with-an-open-source-program/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/purism-to-bring-hardware-encryption-to-its-librem-5-privacy-focused-linux-phone-520140.shtml
https://nullr0ute.com/2018/03/fedora-iot-edition-is-go/