Open-source software is an important part of many web workers’ toolkits. Whether you just use an open-source browser like Firefox or you’re a die-hard Linux fan who actively contributes to open-source projects, we cover the most important open-source news and most useful apps here.
The line between car and home entertainment center is getting blurrier by the minute as electronics makers and car companies take to the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 and concurrent Detroit Auto show to strut their stuff. Here’s a sampling of the news. Read More »
GrabCAD, a specialist in open-source CAD software, has netted $4.2 million in new funding from its existing VC backers. It has also added Matrix Partners’ David Skok to its board, according to a new blog post by GrabCAD President Hardi Meybaum. Read More »
Everyone likes to share their predictions for what the future will bring in technology as a new year dawns. But some things seem to manage to stay the same, despite anticipation to the contrary. Here’s where I think the boat won’t rock in 2012. Read More »
Imagine citizen journalists could remix radio programs or TV news features simply by copy and pasting text fragments of their manuscripts and closed captions: That’s the idea behind hypermedia, and first tools to make it happen could become available as early as next year. Read More »
LinkedIn has announced that the technology behind IndexTank, the search engine startup it acquired back in October, has been released as open source software. It was pretty clear that IndexTank was bought largely for its talent, so it’s good news that its technology will live … Read More »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for …
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read More »
Xamarin, the company born earlier this year when Novell laid off the entire workforce dedicated to maintaining Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET development framework, was up against big odds. But at just seven months old, Xamarin is now profitable without VC backing. Read More »
Never content with good enough when it comes to speed, Facebook has taken its open-source PHP-boosting HipHop technology to the next level for programmers. With the new HipHop Virtual Machine, Facebook claims it has improved upon HipHop interpreter performance by 60 percent. Read More »
After on-again, off-again news about the webOS mobile platform, HP has made a final decision: WebOS will be offered to the open source community. HP will still be involved to help platform progression, but it’s not clear if any HP hardware will ever run webOS again. Read More »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a …
Facebook held a Tech Talk on Monday night explaining how it built a MySQL environment capable of handling everything the company needs in terms of scale, performance and availability. Based on what I heard, it looks like critics of Facebook’s MySQL environment might be wrong. Read More »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who …
Advocates of the public cloud tend to dismiss private cloud deployments within individual companies, arguing that they are too small to deliver the cost or flexibility advantages of the public cloud. But recent developments in the UK refute that argument. The University Modernization Fund’s Cloud Pilot, …
HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis that’s pushing a big-data processing-and-delivery platform to compete with Hadoop, has tuned its software to run on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Interested developers can now experiment with the open source software without having to wrangle physical servers. Read More »
Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just been setting the stage for what should be a big year. Read More »
Platform-as-a-Service provider Heroku is expanding its horizons by offering an on-demand version of the PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service. Heroku Postgres is a commercial version of what Heroku has been providing for years, only it’s now available to all developers regardless where they host their applications. Read More »
VMware’s Cloud Foundry is already catching on among companies wanting to become PaaS providers, and now it might start finding a home in private data centers too. ActiveState has created a commercial Cloud Foundry distribution called Stackato that’s meant to give customers their own private PaaS. Read More »
Matt Mullenweg, who created the Wordpress blogging platform and co-founded a spinoff called Automattic, says he is committed to supporting the open-source movement because he and Wordpress have benefited from it so much. Matt will be speaking about this and other topics at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference. Read More »
Chrome will soon feature an open-source and open-codec implementation of Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts voice and video chat, thanks to the WebRTC framework the company open-sourced earlier this year. This implementation will replace the proprietary plugin that’s currently bundled with Chrome. Read More »
Hortonworks is getting into software after all with today’s release of the open-source Hortonworks Data Platform. This is a smart move by Hortonworks, which will need more than name recognition to displace Hadoop elder statesman Cloudera as well as mega-vendors EMC, Oracle and IBM. Read More »
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It will be a tough go: Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play. Read More »
Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform, but it’s likely only the first of many. Read More »
With myriad applications fighting for limited gigabytes on a mobile broadband plan or multiple users fighting for access to a wired home connection, what broadband users need is a connectivity thermostat that they can use to control how they can access their ISP’s pipes. It’s coming. Read More »
Opscode has brought it cloud-configuration-management technology, Chef, to Microsoft Windows environments. Chef lets users create “recipes” for configuring and managing infrastructure in an automated and scalable manner, which has made it popular for a variety of complex use cases such as cloud computing and scale-out clusters. Read More »
Cloudera and Hortonworks have been playing a game of oneupsmanship over the past few weeks in an attempt to prove whose contributions to the Apache Hadoop project matter most. Reputation matters to both companies, but maybe not as much as fending off encroachments to their turf. Read More »
The OpenStack community is pleased that RackSpace will relinquish control of the open-source cloud infrastructure effort, but many OpenStack Conference attendees want to see the details before they fully endorse the effort. The foundation is expected to be operational next year. Read More »
Rackspace will be giving up control over its OpenStack cloud computing project to an indepedent foundation. OpenStack is the open-source cloud computing platform that Rackspace and co-founder NASA began pushing last year, but it has been somewhat plagued by concerns over Rackspace’s control of the community. Read More »
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data. … Read More »
John S. Wilson of Policy Diary sees some strong similarities between Google’s mobile operating system Android: They’re both open, free (aside from patent issues), and just a utility. Android means different things to different companies, and ultimately, this could be Android’s downfall into irrelevance. Read More »
It looks as if Oracle’s official forays into Hadoop and NoSQL spaces will come at next week’s OpenWorld conference. The company appears to be working on an Oracle Loader for Hadoop and a NoSQL database as part of an all-encompassing big data platform. Read More »
In its new Diablo release, the OpenStack cloud OS gets perks including a dashboard to give IT a peak into what’s happening in the cloud, better authentication that ties into existing directories, and an API to ease integration into big, dynamic networks. Read More »
Graph databases are a pretty specialized product — but as NoSQL keeps gaining mainstream acceptance, they seem to be catching on, and the latest evidence comes in the form of a $10.6 million funding found for Silicon Valley firm Neo Technology. Read More »
Storage giant EMC is adding more muscle to its Hadoop strategy with a 1,000-node cluster for testing new Apache Hadoop releases and a new analytics appliance combining EMC’s Hadoop distribution with the EMC Greenplum Database. Read More »
There’s talk today of Samsung open-sourcing its Bada smartphone platform next year, but the company has little to gain and much to lose if it does. Why give up control of the one asset Samsung has that no successful handset maker outside of Apple enjoys? Read More »
Now that Amazon’s highest-end Compute Clusters support Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft-centric customers can use Amazon’s “compute intensive beasts” to run heavy-duty media processing, rendering or computational finance work loads. the move also brings Microsoft more parity with Linux on the Amazon platform. Read More »
Balancing an open-source community with commercial interests can be difficult, which is why HPCC Systems sought the help of Bruce Perens before open-sourcing its eponymous big-data-processing software. Essentially, the company either ensures the existence of a free version or pulls contributed code. Read More »
Last week Google disclosed the details of its energy consumption, and its data center engineers argued that the leading figure cited to assess how energy-efficient a data center is, power usage effectiveness (PUE), must be continuously measured and averaged over a twelve-month period. This was a …
On Wednesday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, some details of which were leaked in the spring, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Read More »
Despite OpenStack’s continued growth, a combination of product updates and acquisitions from Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and VMware over the past week demonstrate that the race to become the dominant private cloud provider, as well as win over the enterprise, is far from over. Is one of …
MapR Technologies, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup that sells it own Hadoop distribution for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, has raised a $20 million Series B round, which will helps its positioning as a worthy alternative in a space that Cloudera has dominated since 2009. Read More »
The open source movement has the potential to empower developing countries to use IT to communicate to its citizenry, expand its educational platform and address national disasters. But for many nations, software is not enough, and Silicon Valley companies need to pitch in. Read More »
VMware has added support for the PHP and Python programming languages to Cloud Foundry, it open source Platform as a Service. Such news isn’t necessarily groundbreaking considering the project’s focus on multi-language support, but how it added PHP, at least, is very noteworthy. Read More »
Eucalyptus Systems released the third generation of its pioneering private cloud computing software on Wednesday, complete with high-availability capabilities to ensure maximum uptime. Rumors of Eucalyptus’s demise have been circulating since OpenStack launched its open-source cloud project last summer, but the company isn’t slowing down. Read More »
VMware has released Micro Cloud Foundry, a fully functional version of its open-source, Platform-as-a-Service software condensed into a virtual image that runs on developers’ personal computers or laptops. The aim is to make it easier to create cutting-edge applications without the hassle. Read More »
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