It's FOSS

Anthropic Just Handed Apache $1.5M to Secure the Open Source Stack AI Depends On

Sourav Rudra — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:05:47 +0530

Anthropic has handed the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) a $1.5 million donation. The money is earmarked for build and security infrastructure, project services, and community support.

If you have used the internet today, you have almost certainly touched something the ASF maintains. Some of its projects like Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, the Apache HTTP Server, are not some niche tools, but a critical part of the modern IT infrastructure.

The ASF does not sell anything. It runs on donations, and without sustained funding, the infrastructure behind all of that software does not maintain itself.

Anthropic's framing for the donation is essentially that AI runs on this stuff and someone has to fund it. As AI development moves forward more quickly, the open source foundations underneath it need to be in good shape to keep up.

On the topic, Ruth Suehle, President of the Apache Software Foundation, added that:

Open source software is the foundation of modern digital life — largely in ways the average person is completely unaware of — and ASF projects are a critical part of that. When it works, nobody notices, and that’s exactly the goal.

But that kind of reliability isn’t a given. It is the result of sustained investment in neutral, community-governed infrastructure by each part of the ecosystem. Support like Anthropic’s helps ensure long-term strength, independence, and security of the systems that keep the world running.

Similarly, Vitaly Gudanets, Chief Information Security Officer at Anthropic, said that:

AI is accelerating rapidly, but it’s built on decades of open source infrastructure that must remain stable, secure, and independent. Supporting the Apache Software Foundation is a direct investment in the resilience and integrity of the systems that modern AI — and the broader software ecosystem — depend on.

Some thoughts

You might remember Anthropic was part of a similar donation campaign back in March, when the Linux Foundation announced $12.5 million in grants to strengthen open source software security. Anthropic was one of seven contributors to that pool, alongside AWS, Google, Google DeepMind, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

That funding was managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), with the goal of helping open source maintainers deal with the growing flood of AI-generated vulnerability reports they simply do not have the bandwidth to handle.

It is great to see open source receiving monetary support, but the smaller players who are equally important in the ecosystem also need to be supported better. Big donations like this tend to flow toward well-established foundations, while the countless smaller projects that hold up just as much critical infrastructure quietly struggle for resources.

PyTorch Foundation Expands Its Open Source AI Portfolio With Helion and Safetensors

Sourav Rudra — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:53:57 +0530

The PyTorch Foundation has taken on two new projects: Helion, a tool for writing machine learning kernels contributed by Meta, and Safetensors, a secure model file format contributed by Hugging Face.

Both were announced at PyTorch Conference Europe in Paris, and the two now join DeepSpeed, Ray, vLLM, and PyTorch itself as foundation-hosted projects.

Moreover, the foundation has confirmed that ExecuTorch, Meta's solution for running PyTorch models on edge and on-device environments, is being merged into PyTorch Core.

If you were looking for the why, it is fairly straightforward.

Both moves come as AI teams increasingly focus on getting models into production rather than just training them. Running kernels efficiently across different hardware and keeping model files safe to load are two problems the ecosystem has been dealing with for a while.

Talking about Helion joining up, Matt White, the CTO of the PyTorch Foundation, added that:

Helion gives engineers a much more productive path to writing high-performance kernels, including autotuning across hundreds of candidate implementations for a single kernel.

As part of the PyTorch Foundation community, this project strengthens the foundation for an open AI stack that is more portable and significantly easier for the community to build on.

Luc Georges, Chief Open Source Officer, Hugging Face echoed similar excitement:

Safetensors joining the PyTorch Foundation is an important step towards using a safe serialization format everywhere by default. The new ecosystem and exposure the library will gain from this move will solidify its security guarantees and usability. Safetensors is a well-established project, adopted by the ecosystem at large, but we're still convinced we're at the very beginning of its lifecycle: the coming months will see significant growth, and we couldn't think of a better home for that next chapter than the PyTorch Foundation.

What does this mean?

The PyTorch Foundation is a Linux Foundation-hosted organization that acts as the vendor-neutral home for PyTorch and a growing set of open source AI projects. The main goal here is to keep governance and technical direction community-driven rather than tied to any single company's whims.

The Linux Foundation is the broader stewardship body behind over 1,000 open source projects, covering everything from the Linux kernel and Kubernetes to OpenSSF. The PyTorch Foundation sits under that umbrella, giving its projects access to LF's governance infrastructure and oversight.

Helion comes in as a tool that makes writing the low-level code that runs AI models on GPUs significantly less painful. It handles a lot of the tedious groundwork automatically, and finds the best configuration for your hardware on its own.

Whereas Safetensors is a file format for storing and sharing AI model weights that doesn't come with the security baggage of older formats.

Glass UI Is Making a Comeback on Linux Thanks to KDE Contributors

Sourav Rudra — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:12:37 +0530

KDE Plasma's two classic themes, Oxygen and Air, are making a comeback. A group of KDE contributors is actively restoring both ahead of the Plasma 6.7 release, which is scheduled for June 16, 2026.

Both themes trace their roots back to the KDE 4 era. Oxygen shipped as the default theme from KDE 4.0, defined by its dark tones and glassy aesthetic. It held that spot until KDE 4.3, when Air took over as the default, bringing a lighter look built around transparency and white as its base color.

While Oxygen stuck around into the Plasma 5 and 6 eras, it did so in an increasingly broken condition, and Air eventually got dropped from Plasma entirely.

Now, both are getting a second shot thanks to the restoration effort led by KDE contributor Filip Fila, alongside the original Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro and several other KDE developers.

On the Oxygen side, the panel has been fully reworked and is now orientation-aware, so vertical panels actually behave correctly. A minimized window indicator and a proper switch design were both missing entirely and have now been added.

Similarly, adaptive opacity is now supported and enabled by default, and the color scheme bug that was causing readability issues in widgets like System Monitor has been fixed.

Air needed its transparency restored to match its original KDE 4 character. That is done now, with blur added behind widgets, improving readability and visual appeal in the process. The panel has also been reworked, a new header and footer design has been added, and Air now has its own switch SVGs.

Why now after all this time? Well, KDE's 30th anniversary coincides with the Plasma 6.7 release, and the people behind this want to ship these historically significant themes for the occasion.

As of writing, 26 of 40 checklist items have been completed (linked below), with some pending work including gradient banding fixes in Oxygen, missing SVGs for checkmarks, radio buttons, toolbar, and menubar items across both themes, and a timer SVG for Air.

And if you want to see what that progress looks like, continue reading! 😬

How do these compare to Breeze?

From left to right, we have Breeze, Oxygen, and Air.

I checked out how Plasma's default Breeze theme compared to Oxygen and Air on a KDE Neon setup, and I must say, things are looking promising. The themes have things like the panel styling, widget backgrounds, and the new switch designs in place.

I specifically took a look at the panel and widgets, and these looked very clean, feeling like they belonged in the modern Plasma experience, which is not something you would expect from themes this old.

One thing worth noting is that the icons stayed as Breeze regardless of which Plasma Style I picked.

As for the difference between these, Breeze is flat by design. Minimal, no frills, gets out of your way kind. Oxygen and Air are not like that, bringing visible depth and some bling to the desktop, but in different ways.

While Air leans hard into transparency, making panels and widgets look light and barely there, Oxygen goes the other direction with darker gradients and more visual weight across the board.

Personally, I prefer Oxygen as it looks a lot like Windows 7's Aero, which I quite liked back in the day.

You can try these out too!

First, you have to download the files for Oxygen and Air on a KDE Plasma-equipped system. Next, you have to go into System Settings > Appearance > Colors & Themes > Plasma Style.

Here, click on "Install from File..." and select a theme file to install it. Repeat for the other one, then select whichever theme you want and hit "Apply" on the bottom-right.

Oxygen Theme Air Theme

If you want to stay in sync with the development of these, you can keep an eye out on the GitLab issue tracker and Telegram group for this project.