Legal scholars are always searching for ways to improve the patent system, sometimes via sweeping changes, but big data — especially techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing — could help provide a technological fix to a big part of the problem. Read More »
Matt Howard of Norwest Venture Partners predicts that 2012 and 2013 will be Hadoop’s breakout years. Howard gives us insight into the five factors that will accelerate Hadoop’s mainstream adoption over the next 18 months. 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Wow.. just like that Linux is 20-years-old. The Linux Foundation as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations has come up with this infographic that includes stats that illustrate the changes in Linux over the years. There are some great nuggets of information in here. Read More »
Just 12 days later the entire Mono team was laid off from Novell, the Mono Project’s founder and lead developer Miguel de Icaza has announced the launch of Xamarin, a new startup that bills itself “the new home of the engineers that created Mono.” Read More »
For anyone trying to understand why bloggers would give their content for free to a site like The Huffington Post — which is being sued by contributors for as much as $100 million — here’s a related question: Why do some programmers choose to create open-source … Read More »
Do you have any idea what your incessant status updates require Facebook to do on the back end? Supporting 100 million photo uploads each day and as many as 18,000 comments requires the social network to perform 24 billion calculations a second at peak times. Read More »
Nokia hoped to revive Symbian’s importance by reinvigorating its developer base in light of a rush of Linux-based operating platforms like Android and LiMo. It hoped in vain and a lack of source code is the foundation for many its problems. Read More »
Freedom-loving developers have long used open-source licenses as a tactic to maintain the open availability of their source code. With the rise of closed hardware/software platforms like Apple’s iPhone, however, that tactic is being challenged. And that may not be a bad thing. Read More »
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The latest release of the free Ubuntu Linux operating system scheduled for this Sunday includes an expansion of its personal cloud service to iPhone and Android devices as well as a new netbook edition made for smaller screens. Read More »
A number of factors — cost, security, control — make large-scale open source adoption both a valid option and a difficult choice for enterprises. On the one hand, it’s cost-effective, inherently agile and reliable. On the other, it’s innovative, disruptive and therefore risky to business owners. Read More »
The promise of a completely open-source enterprise is near, but the nagging question remains: Will it work as a business for the technology industry? On Sept. 29, about 75 entrepreneurs, executives and investors will gather at the GigaOM San Francisco offices to discuss that very question. Read More »
Novell has put itself on the auction block, but a deal has been slow in closing. According to sources close to the company, this likely stems from the difficulty of accurately assessing the value of Novell’s patent portfolio in conjunction with its legacy product portfolio … Read More »
The just released the annual 2010 Open Source Management Survey found that open source is seen to be easier to deploy than previously, IT professionals are articulating a preference for open source., and no longer focusing on whether it’s open source or proprietary Read More »
Flash has stood out as an exception in the web development world otherwise dominated by open source, but Flash’s banishment by Apple suggests that this exceptional position may not last much longer. The reason is explained by an economic theory called the “hold up” problem. Read More »
The iPhone Application List, an iPhone app review site, on Monday launched its App Exchange, a repository of source code for iPhone apps. However, Apple should launch its own open-source code repository for apps, especially since it’s fighting for mindshare against the open source Android platform. Read More »
I’m all for openness, but as I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, it’s do not too difficult to play devil’s advocate and make the case that open source cloud platform OpenStack won’t create true rivals for leading cloud providers or cloud software vendors. Read More »
Puppet Labs has raised a $5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for open source configuration management software provider to more than $7 million. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software. Read More »
A few months ago, I posited that additional funding for Cloudera and Karmasphere signifies a large market opportunity for solutions that utilize the open-source analytics tool Hadoop. From the news generated this week by Yahoo’s third annual Hadoop Summit, my beliefs of this have only been … Read More »
The most successful vendors of software-as-a-service, or SaaS will be those who can offer a model similar to banks, giving customers the option to withdraw data at any time. Read More »
Most clouds of any appreciable scale are built on open-source software and, in fact, might not even exist without it. As to whether there’s any money to be made with open source, however, that’s up for debate. Read More »
Cloudkick today launched Hybrid Cloudkick, an extension to its cloud-monitoring service that brings non-cloud servers into the fold via the same API and dashboard. With businesses looking for easy and low-risk methods for cloud adoption, anything “hybrid” is sure to draw some eyes. Read More »
On Tuesday afternoon, Elliott Associates, L.P., a hedge fund with a significant position in shares of Novell, placed an unsolicited offer to buy the company for approximately $2 billion. The offer places a high valuation on Novell, and the troubled company must consider it carefully. Read More »
Apple, since its 1970s launch, has enjoyed special favor and even worship from the open source community, free thinkers and supporters of open standards. And yet, with each new step, Apple becomes more closed. That’s why, as the cash registers ring in Cupertino, peril lies ahead. Read More »
A battle is raging in the blogosphere about whether Apple’s new iPad is good or evil, since it is a closed and proprietary platform with a locked-down content system built in. But the iPad is unlikely to mean the end of hacker culture. Read More »
While the recession has battered many U.S. software companies, Red Hat–which has staked its future on open-source Linux software, virtualization and cloud computing — has flourished. The company has a number of secrets behind its success, some of them unique. Read More »
Google, nearly six years since it first applied for it, has finally received a patent for its MapReduce parallel programming model. The question now is how this will affect the various products and projects that utilize MapReduce, such as Apache’s MapReduce-inspired Hadoop project. Read More »
Facebook is today joining the Apache Software Foundation as a “Gold” sponsor — only a $40,000-a-year commitment, but part of a broader effort to open source Facebook’s infrastructure and developer tools. Read More »
While the term open source used to conjure up socially lost Linux cave-dwellers, in recent years, open source has gone decidedly mainstream. Even as open source-focused startups spread out, proprietary software players are acquiring open source companies and spreading their influence. Are these healthy trends? Read More »
Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg, senior VP of product management, late Monday put what was more of a tome than a post up on the company’s blog, entitled “The Meaning of Open.” Originally sent to Google employees as an email, it reads like a manifesto. Read More »
This year, open-source platforms and applications have shown how disruptive they can be. The companies that have built successful businesses based on open source have done so by being shrewd, and understanding that their models have to be different from firms that simply sell software. Read More »
By Derrick Harris
Nov. 19, 2009, 8:30am PT
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Java scalability specialist Terracotta has acquired the intellectual property associated with Quartz, a popular open-source job scheduler, part of Terracotta’s mission to integrate common open-source Java application components into its middleware solution. Terracotta has already integrated SQL-query service Hibernate, and it acquired … Read More »
MindTouch, an open-source provider of enterprise collaboration software, announced today that its platform is now available in the cloud. You can find a video on how the platform, dubbed MindTouch Cloud, creates “a federated collaboration network” here. MindTouch competes with Microsoft’s SharePoint, but … Read More »
“When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare,” writes John Mark Walker on OStatic, “it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open-source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half … Read More »
Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, … Read More »
By Sebastian Rupley
Nov. 6, 2009, 6:30am PT
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“Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn’t really that far-fetched, and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making … Read More »
Digg and Slashdot were abuzz earlier this morning with the news that Skype was going to go open source. The buzz was based on a post on a French blog by Olivier Faurax. The news is true and false at the same time. “It is … Read More »
Qualcomm has joined its rival Intel in jumping aboard the open source bandwagon. The San Diego-based chipmaker today unveiled the Qualcomm Innovation Center, a subsidiary created to “optimize open source software with Qualcomm technology.” The QuIC, as Qualcomm has dubbed it, will be … Read More »
Hadoop, an open-source software program that helps process incredibly large data sets, has been generating plenty of buzz. The upcoming Hadoop Summit on June 10 marks a midway point in an eventful year for the technology. Cloudera, a … Read More »
“Hadoop is going to find potential markets in any industry where there are large data sets that need complex analysis,” Mike Olson, chief executive officer and one of the four co-founders of Cloudera, the startup that’s commercializing the open-source software framework Hadoop, told me … Read More »
You know the saying, “If you build it, they will come”? Well that certainly holds true for GPS functionality and mobile phones. Nearly 48 percent of the mobile app developers surveyed by Boston-based Skyhook Wireless said that location is what “sets their app apart, or … Read More »
When Acclaim Games publicly unveiled its Rockfree project, a free-to-play, web-based riff on the rhythm genre, last November, it did something unusual. It invited gamers to play an early version of the game so they could weigh in on the project as it was being … Read More »
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