Big Red’s called this a Java SE Subscription and pitched it as “a commonly used model, popular with Linux distributions”.

Peter Jansen of Oracle licensing consultancy Navicle told The Register Oracle has made an exception for general purpose use of Java, but that the definition of such use means almost nobody other than code tinkerers will be able to get Java for free.

This approach frees administrators from managing backup agents, servers, storage and other components that are typically required to maintain database backups and recover data when disaster strikes, explained Anurag Mehrotra, a Microsoft Azure Backup program manager, in a blog post.

"We love developers, and we love open source developers," he said on a call formally announcing the deal on Monday morning before promising, repeatedly, that GitHub will remain open and independent.

The desire to soothe fears took up most of the call, a situation that was most apparent when Nadella pleaded with software developers to "judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today and in the future."

There is a direct correlation between vague marketing speak and the likelihood that a company is planning to do something you won't like.

As rumored, Microsoft said Monday that it has acquired code repository website GitHub for a whopping sum of $7.5B in Microsoft stock. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will assume the role of GitHub CEO. GitHub's current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, to work on strategic software initiatives.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source," and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future. GitHub will remain open and independent, Mr. Nadella said.

Microsoft officials have been talking to GitHub about possibly acquiring the company, according to a June 1 report in Business Insider.

Some open-source backers who've continued to question Microsoft's open-source change-of-heart will no doubt look askance at the idea of former open-source enemy Microsoft becoming the steward of GitHub.

Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.

Opening a file written on macOS, Mac OS, Linux, or Unix-flavored computers in Windows Notepad therefore looked like a long wall of text with no separation between paragraphs and lines. Relief arrives in the current Windows 10 Insider Build.

The team behind secure messaging app Signal says Amazon has threatened to kick the app off its CloudFront web service unless Signal drops the anti-censorship practice known as domain-fronting. Google recently banned the practice, which lets developers disguise web traffic to look like it’s coming from a different source, allowing apps like Signal to evade country-level bans.

Software called etcd, used for storing data across clusters of containers, has a problem – it does not implement authentication by default and so poses a security risk if deployed without further fiddling.

Troy Mursch, a security researcher with Bad Packets Report, said in an email to The Register, said, "I've independently verified [this issue] and confirmed it's a serious concern for anyone running etcd open to the internet."

Thanks to a new upgrade process, the next update—expected to be released in April—should result in substantially less downtime. The install process is split into two portions: the "online" portion, during which your PC is still usable, and the "offline" portion after the reboot, during which your PC is a spinning percentage counter.

Microsoft estimates that the Creators Update, released almost a year ago, would take about 82 minutes on average during the offline phase. Improvements made in the Fall Creators Update cut that to about 51 minutes, and the next update (which still hasn't actually been blessed with an official name) will cut this further still, to just 30 minutes.

Slack, a team collaboration communication service, has updated its IRC support page to note that it is ending support for IRC on its platform.

"As Slack has evolved over the years, we've built features and capabilities -- like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) -- that the IRC and XMPP gateways aren't able to handle. Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways."