Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: why cloud companies may need to rethink their reliance on certain kinds of carbon offset projects, why words matter when it comes to software licensing, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: why cloud companies may need to rethink their reliance on certain kinds of carbon offset projects, why words matter when it comes to software licensing, and the quote of the week.
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It's wildfire season once again in Oregon, which has become an annual summer rite and a bitter pill to swallow for a region that gets so much rain every other season. Oregon's massive forests are also attractive to private companies like Green Diamond, which sells carbon offset projects to tech companies looking to make their energy consumption stats look a little greener.
OPB published a report this week about the 2021 Bootleg Fire, which burned over 400,000 acres in Southern Oregon and damaged one of the largest carbon offset projects in the state owned by Green Diamond. The devastating 2020 Labor Day fires also damaged or destroyed several carbon offset projects in other parts of Oregon, raising a lot of questions about whether or not one of cloud computing's favorite sustainability PR tactics can actually work in the long term as climate change continues to alter long-understood weather patterns.
But the Bootleg fire will likely force Green Diamond to terminate one of the two carbon offset projects it maintains at the site, according to OPB, and Microsoft was a significant investor in that project.
Offset buyers and sellers have ways to account for damaged forestry projects, but as the hottest summer ever recorded stretches on, years worth of carbon removal projects could be in jeopardy.
It's one of the most reliable story lines in enterprise tech: Every six months or so, there will be drama surrounding some facet of open-source software.
Meta's pseudo-open release of Llama 2 earlier this month prompted a lot of hand-wringing over what it really means to be an open-source license, leading some to conclude that it might be time for the open-source purists to throw in the towel. Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk usually brings the voice of reason to these debates, and did so again this week by explaining why words actually do matter.
"When vendors willfully and knowingly apply the open source term to code that is open but carries some restrictions that the currently accepted definition of open source would not permit, what they’re implicitly asking for is the marketing bump from open source with the exclusivity of a proprietary software model," he wrote.
Open-source software is so widely used and so associated with good vibes that it's not hard to understand why companies want to appropriate the term to describe their own work. But those good vibes stem from the fact that code from open-source projects can be used freely and easily without a lot of conditions and without having to hire a lawyer.
If less-than-open-but-still-called-open licensing tactics continue to increase, it will get harder to understand the incentives for using and participating in "open" source projects designed solely to make money for somebody else.
“I believe this can happen. But that does not mean this has happened.” — Sankar Das Sarma, director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland, as quoted by the New York Times on the hottest thing since Planet of the Bass — the possibility that LK-99 is a room-temperature superconductor.
Microsoft published the patch for the Azure vulnerability that prompted Tenable's CEO to blast the company for its previous plan to delay that fix until late September.
Techcrunch published a great profile of Window Snyder, who has improved the security of products we all use every day without getting a lot of credit to this point.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!