Amazon Web Services (AWS) will create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana. The announcement comes after Elastic changed its software licensing strategy, resulting in Elasticsearch and Kibana no longer being open source. By creating an ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana, AWS says open source versions of both packages will thus continue to be available and supported.

More:

• AWS's Elasticsearch and Kibana forks will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases. New GitHub repos will be published in the next few weeks. "In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic," AWS writes.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) will be powered by this new fork in the future. Amazon reassures customers that Elastic’s license change and the decision to fork will not impact Amazon ES negatively, however.
• All 18 versions of Elasticsearch on Amazon ES are unaffected by the license updates, AWS adds.

The stable version of Chrome 88 was released. Developer-related highlights include:

• Support for the aspect-ratio property, which makes it easy to set the aspect ratio on any element.
• The ability to upload extensions using manifest v3 to the Chrome Web Store.
• The ability to use Play Billing in your Trusted Web Activity.
• The File Transport Protocol (FTP) is disabled.
• In addition to releasing Chrome 88, Google also published all of the videos from the Chrome Dev Summit.

For more details about new changes, click here.

The Visual Studio team launched its first preview release of 2021, Visual Studio 2019 v16.9 Preview 3. Highlights include new  C++, .NET Productivity, Test Explorer, Accessibility, and XAML Tools changes, such as:

• Additional command-line tools wherein, for example, Visual Studio CMake projects now offer first-class support for remote Windows development
• Improvements to the stability and functionality of providing imported modules and header units in IntelliSense
• Test Explorer now plays a customizable sound when a test run completes
• Expanded MVVM Tooling for XAML with the introduction of lightbulbs to generate commands and new view-models

Learn more about new changes here.

🔦 Resource Spotlight: The Reddit user whose "8 APIs for interesting projects in 2021" post captured attention in late December has published seven more APIs. You can either check out the original Reddit post to see the list, or watch this YouTube clip, where the Redditor also suggests ideas for the kind of projects you can build.

No-code company Blobr, a startup that aims to help non-technical product and business employees expose and monetize a company’s API, raised €1.2M, or roughly $1.46M, in pre-seed funding. 

More:

• Founded by Alexandre Airvault (CEO) and Alexandre Mai (CTO), the two believe the no-code tool will spur more innovative use of APIs. “We believe companies should stop thinking of APIs as mere pipes and start building them as products to unleash their power,” says Airvault. “This means APIs should be priced, customized, and managed with a user-oriented mindset and not only a tech one."
• By giving product and business owners the ability to “make data-sharing a profitable model" without the need to code, the co-founders argue data exchanges will move "to the next level."
• The round was led by Seedcamp, with participation from Kima and other angel investors. European venture capital firm New Wave was also one of the investors involved in the round, making Blobr the first company to take investment from the firm since it confirmed it had closed $56M in deployable capital.

This story first appeared in Inside NoCode. You can read the full issue here.

The Golang team has released security fixes Go 1.15.7 and Go 1.14.14. Users are encouraged to update to either, although the team recommends Go 1.15.7.

More:

• Security vulnerabilities patched include a flaw in packages using cgo that could cause arbitrary code execution at build time.
• Other recent Go news:
  • Go's ioutil package will be deprecated in Go 1.16
  • Go published a proposal for adding type parameter support for types and functions, which would thus make generic programming possible. If accepted, the Go team plans to have generics available by the end of 2021, potentially as a part of the Go 1.18 betas.

📅   Virtual Events and Hackathons: (with hackathons organized by deadlines)

JANUARY 18-31:

VIRTUAL EVENTS:

• Jan. 18-22: Laracon EU, a week-long Laravel conference featuring presentations, webinars, and networking events.
• Jan. 30-31: BelPy: Online Python conference open to all.

HACKATHONS:

• Jan. 5-25: Postman API Hack. "We challenge you to not just create a Postman public workspace with a Collection of APIs, but build something that is creative, has compelling value to developers, addresses a problem, or has community interest."
• Jan. 29-31: Hoyahacks. Georgetown University hackathon for all students. 
• Jan. 30-31: HackViolet. Hackathon for students of all genders with a specific focus on "becoming change agents for the gender gap in technology."

QUICK HITS:

• How are companies deciding on privacy management solutions in 2021? This eGuide breaks it down.*
• Microsoft announced it has unified all Windows APIs under one Rust library. 
• Apache Superset is a data exploration and visualization platform you can use to build dashboards through a no-code visualization builder and SQL editor developed at Airbnb. The first version is now available.
• Gutenberg 9.8 has been released and comes with rounded borders in the group block.
• Nexo manages $4B in assets and has over 1M users. See why fintech consumers are banking on crypto.*

* This is sponsored content.