News briefs for April 3, 2019.

Fedora 30 Beta was released yesterday. Highlights include new desktop environment choices, DNF performance improvements, GNOME 3.32 and updated versions of many packages, such as Golang, Bash, Python and more. For more details, see the Fedora 30 Change set.

Chef has announced it is releasing all of its software as open source. According to DevOps.com, "Chef has decided to open source its entire portfolio of IT automation software as part of an effort to make it easier for organizations to construct a DevOps pipeline using the company's software. A part of that effort, Chef also launched the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack—which combines Chef Infra for managing infrastructure, Chef InSpec for maintaining compliance, Chef Habitat for managing applications, Chef Automate for managing hybrid clouds and Chef Workstation, a starter kit for launching Chef—within a single distribution of Chef software. Chef Infra is the original Chef project around which the company was launched."

elementary announced it is adopting Flatpak for AppCenter and its third-party developer ecosystem. The post makes clear that "while Flathub is a great place to get popular cross-platform apps, we still want AppCenter to be the best place to get apps that are specially developed for elementary OS." Also from the announcement: "Moving to Flatpak doesn't mean moving away from our focus on native apps, from enabling developers to get paid with pay-what-you-want downloads, or from the online AppCenter Dashboard where each app is carefully tested, reviewed, and curated before being published to users in AppCenter. We'll be providing our own hosted and curated Flatpak repo for AppCenter, much like we provide our own hosted and curated Debian repo today."

Unreal Engine 4.22 is now available. Major features with this new release include real-time ray tracing and path tracing, high-level rendering refactor, C++ iteration time improvements and much more. According to the Unreal Engine announcement, "This release includes 174 improvements submitted by the incredible community of Unreal Engine developers on GitHub!"

Linux developer Christopher Helwig has dropped the VMware lawsuit after a German court dismissed the case. ZDNet reports that "after the German Hamburg Higher Regional Court dismissed Helwig's appeal, he has decided that it would be pointless to appeal the decision." ZDNet summarized the background: "The heart of the lawsuit had been that Hypervisor vSphere VMware ESXi 5.5.0 violated Linux's copyright. That's because VMware had not licensed a derivative work from Linux under the GNU General Public License (GPL). True, VMware had disclosed the vmklinux component under the GPL, but not the associated hypervisor components. Or, as Helwig put it, 'VMware uses a badly hacked 2.4 kernel with a big binary blob hooked into it, giving a derived work of the Linux kernel that's not legally redistributable.'" See the article for more details on the history of the case.