Open Source

Kali Linux 2026.1 commemorates BackTrack's 20th anniversary with a retro desktop mode, adds eight new security tools including an MCP server for Metasploit, and upgrades to kernel 6.18.

NVIDIA transferred its Dynamic Resource Allocation driver for GPUs to community ownership under the Kubernetes project at KubeCon Europe 2026, while Google open-sourced the GKE Cluster Autoscaler and Broadcom donated Velero to the CNCF Sandbox.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has graduated Dragonfly to its highest maturity level, recognizing the peer-to-peer distribution system's role in scaling container and AI workloads across production environments at Alibaba, ByteDance, Datadog, and Intel.

GNOME 50 completely removes X11 from Mutter, Shell, and GDM, making Wayland the sole display protocol. The release stabilizes VRR and fractional scaling, and will ship in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44.

Linus Torvalds confirms the next kernel will be 7.0, citing confusion over large numbers, as the first RC ships with one of the largest merge windows on record.

A RedMonk study of 32 organizations reveals a fragmented policy landscape as projects from cURL to the Linux kernel draw competing lines on AI code.

A new 501(c)(3) nonprofit modeled on university endowments aims to generate sustainable returns for critical open source projects, backed by the founders of HashiCorp, cURL, and Vue.js.

Mozilla delivers on its kill switch promise: Firefox 148 adds a single toggle to block all current and future AI features, arriving February 24.

Linux 6.19 brings Rust into 'actual driver development' phase with I2C support and Nova GPU driver progress