IRC's 30th Birthday; Mozilla Working on New JavaScript APIs for VR; Arch Linux Answering Questions on Reddit; Microsoft Splits Its Visual Studio Team Services; and Hortonworks, IBM and Red Hat Announce the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative

News briefs for September 11, 2018.

IRC recently celebrated its 30 birthday. The internet chat system was developed in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu. See the post on the University of Oulu website for more details.

Mozilla yesterday announced it is beginning a new phase of work on JavaScript APIs "that will help everyone create and share virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects on the open web". Mozilla's new WebXR Device API has two goals: 1) "To support a wider variety of user inputs, such as voice and gestures, giving users options for navigating and interacting in virtual spaces"; and 2) "To establish a technical foundation for development of AR experiences, letting creators integrate real-world media with contextual overlays that elevate the experience." For more information, see the Immersive Web Community Group.

The Arch Linux team is answering questions on Reddit. The post also mentions they are looking for new contributors. See the Arch Linux wiki for more information.

Microsoft is splitting its Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) into five separate Azure-branded services, which will be called Azure DevOps, Ars Technica reports. In addition, the Azure Piplines component—"a continuous integration, testing, and deployment system that can connect to any Git repository"—will be available for open-source projects, and "open-source developers will have unlimited build time and up to 10 parallel jobs".

Hortonworks, IBM and Red Hat yesterday announced the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative, a "new collaborative effort the companies can use to build a common enterprise deployment model that is designed to enable big data workloads to run in a hybrid manner across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge architectures". For the initial phase, the companies will work together to "optimize Hortonworks Data Platform, Hortonworks DataFlow, Hortonworks DataPlane and IBM Cloud Private for Data for use on Red Hat OpenShift, an industry-leading enterprise container and Kubernetes application platform".

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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