Google is planning to bring its personal computer operating system, Chrome OS, to its mobile operating system, Android. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new operating system will be unveiled in 2017, but users can expect a preview of the early version by next year.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, recently told analysts that “mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today,” the WSJ reported.

The move mirrors Microsoft’s recent move, which was to provide one operating system for its desktop and mobile devices.

Those who pirated Windows software can now come clean
Microsoft is ready to forgive those who have pirated Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.

Yesterday, Microsoft said that it will run an experiment to offer those who have pirated the chance to download a licensed copy from Microsoft itself, or use a code from a third-party reseller, according to PCWorld.

PCWorld also reported that Microsoft originally said that users with pirated Windows 7 or 8.1 copies would be able to upgrade to Windows, 10, but they would still be running an unlicensed copy.

User Groups on Slack makes developer lives easier
Slack’s new User Groups makes team administrators’ and developers’ lives easier, according to Slack’s blog.

New API methods allow for programmatic group creation and management, allowing developers to map an organization’s structure in other tools in their Slack setup.

“For teams on using Single Sign On (SSO) on the Plus plan, you can even use groups to control provisioning accounts from your SSO tools,” wrote Slack. “Users of Active Directory in OneLogin, PingOne, PingFederate or Okta can take advantage of this built-in user-provisioning support to add employees automatically into Slack User Groups matching each employee’s existing group rights, roles and permissions in your internal directory.”

User Groups will help make discussions on Slack quicker, and will help growing companies communicate.

Microsoft looking for developers with open source skills
Microsoft is looking for developers with open-source skills to join Microsoft Azure. According to the company, openness is not only important to the technology ecosystem, but also to Microsoft, and it wants to provide users with even more open-source opportunities.

“We understand that partners and customers, from startups to enterprises, want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice,” wrote Mark Hill, vice president of open-source sales and marketing strategy at Microsoft, in a blog post.

Rust 1.4 announced
The Mozilla-backed programming language Rust has announced version 1.4, with improvements and stabilizations to the language. Rust 1.4 features RFC 1214, which fixes some weaknesses in the definition and implementation of the type system.

“Given that changes to the type system like this can cause regressions, but fixes like this are important for soundness, Rust 1.4 will warn on any code that violates the new rules, but still compile. These warnings will turn into errors in Rust 1.5,” the Rust core team wrote in a blog post.

In addition, the release includes RFC 1212, upgraded Windows support, and 48 stabilized APIs.