In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at easy installation of Arduino on Linux, MediPi open source health kit, O’Reilly Software Development Salary Survey results, and more.

Open source news roundup for April  9 – 15, 2016

Easy installation of Arduino on Linux

It’s nothing new that the Arduino is available on the Raspberry Pi (sudo apt-get install arduino), but now, “with just a simple download and typing install into a terminal, the Arduino IDE is available on just about every single board Linux computer without having to build the IDE from source.” Check out the latest Arduino build for ARM Linux on the arduino.cc downloads page. “This is the result of an incredible amount of work from dozens of open source developers across the Arduino project,” according to Hackaday.

MediPi open source health kit

When Richard Robinson’s wife, who works for a charity helping socially isolated older people, returned home from a conference, having been asked to find volunteers for a telehealth pilot, he realized that the £2,000 price tag per patient per year for the hardware could be reduced considerably. The telehealth device is intended to provide daily input from remote heart patients so that healthcare professionals can monitor their current state of health.

Richard is a technical integration specialist at the Health and Social Care Information Centre, and because of his interest in the Raspberry Pi, he developed the telehealth prototype called MediPi to prove that telehealth is affordable at scale. The hardware, which includes a blood pressure cuff, a finger oximeter, and some diagnostic scales, comes in at £250 along with the Raspberry Pi and screen. The devices were bought off-the-shelf and are connected via USB. The software is open source, programmed in Java, and JavaFX, and therefore platform agnostic. Read more from digitalhealth.net.

O’Reilly Software Development Salary Survey results

According to the O’Reilly Software Development Salary Survey of over 5,000 software engineers, developers, and other professionals are involved in programming, and 70% of respondents indicate they “write code for collaborative projects” and code for “open source.”

Years ago, open source luminary Eric Raymond correctly pointed out that while we pay a lot of attention to software vendors, “approximately 95% of code is still written in-house” for use, not sale. Though vendors had a financial incentive in keeping their code closed, enterprise IT did not. Not really. CEO Mark Curphey speculates that “90% of code could be stuff [developers] didn’t create” (i.e., that they “borrowed” from open source projects). Open source has become a staple of software development, something that reveals itself clearly in O’Reilly’s survey.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what’s happening next week in open source.