Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more »
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re storing petabytes of data Hadoop, Quantcast thinks it has the cure to your woes. Its newly open sourced Quantcast File System promises smaller clusters and better performance, and it has proven itself over exabytes of data inside Quantcast. Read more »
10gen, the company behind the popular MongoDB database, is working with the nonprofit open source education initiative edX to offer free online MongoDB courses. 10gen CEO and co-founder Dwight Merriman will teach one of the classes. Read more »
The big data world is full of small, scrappy startups using their ingenuity to build complex systems out of open source software, but the Walt Disney Company is not one of them. Here’s what goes into building a big data platform in a Fortune 100 company. Read more »
After offering its own online course, Power Searching with Google, the search giant is releasing the technology it used to support the class as an open source online learning project. The Course Builder software lets anyone with basic technical expertise to create an online class. Read more »
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
After weeks of back and forth and considerable anxiety, VMware, Intel and NEC are now Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. The news comes out of Friday afternoon’s OpenStack board meeting. Read more »
You never know what you’ll find on GitHub. Starting Thursday, you could download the source code to the Obama Administration’s “We The People” online petition application from the open source repository and start adapting it for your petition needs. Read more »
OpenStack has had a great week with eBay coming out as a user and Rackspace rebranding around the open source cloud project, but life isn’t all good in OpenStack world. There are still plenty of questions over its governance and development models that keep skepticism strong. Read more »
Cloud computing and open source software have freed IT practitioners from so much legacy vendor baggage over the past few years. Isn’t it time to free them from inane benchmark boasting, too? A crowdsourced platform where users share their real-world performance experiences could help. Read more »
VMware has made two big acquisitions this month, both focusing in part on the ability to work with competitive hypervisor and cloud computing software. The company seems to get that the future is in making it easy for customers to choose. Read more »
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System. Read more »
As Twitter clamps down on what third-party developers can do with the network, some have proposed creating an open-source alternative — but would enough users switch to a new network? Others who have tried such a move have largely failed to gain much traction. Read more »
VMware is launching a new open source project, called “Serengeti,” that aims to let the Hadoop data-processing platform run on the virtualization leader’s vSphere hypervisor. VMware apparently smells a lucrative opportunity in Hadoop and isn’t about to miss out on getting a piece of the pie. Read more »
One year after launching into the Hadoop market with much anticipation, Yahoo spinoff Hortonworks finally has a product available. The company announced version 1.0 of its flagship Hortonworks Data Platform on Tuesday, as well as a High Availability version designed with new partner VMware. Read more »
Lest storage vendors thought they were immune to disruption that open source hardware is having on the server industry, Netflix’s new Open Connect content-delivery network might make them think again. It’s inspired by open source storage designs first released by Backblaze almost three years ago. Read more »
Psion, Mesaplexx and Nujira live in the guts of the phone and on the fringes of the network. While filters, amplifiers and ruggedized devices may not sound like exciting stuff, all three of these U.K. companies are innovating in mobile in ways you should know about. Read more »
As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read more »
With its Project Sputnik laptop, Dell hopes to lure Linux-loving developers back into its camp and perhaps even get some who defected to Mac OSX to return to the open source fold. The laptop bundles Ubuntu, tools and an on-ramp to github repositories. Read more »
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” Read more »
A new Portable Consent Form could make it easier — and more palatable — for individuals to donate their anonymized genetic data to science at large. The goal of the Consent to Research project is nothing less than the open-sourcing of the genetic data pool. Read more »
The marketplace concept does a good job of bringing the simplicity of the Apple App Store model to server applications. It has the potential to revolutionize IT consumption. And if no one else steps up, Amazon is going to own this part of the cloud, too. Read more »
Already a heavy user of Apache Software Foundation projects, Twitter is now giving back to the organization financially as a sponsor. It’s difficult to think of a situation where Apache sponsorship wouldn’t be the right move and, it’s definitely the right thing for Twitter to do. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Updated: Twitter has shared numerous aspects of its infrastructure over the past few years, and its decision to open source its work on MySQL might be the social media platform’s most useful contribution yet. Sure, open source big data tools are valuable, but they’re not MySQL. Used […] Read more »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read more »
EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal Labs proves the company really understands the big data market. Namely, that big data won’t go anywhere without great applications, and EMC isn’t the company to help customers figure out how to build theirs. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Twitter has been on a tear lately when it comes to open sourcing big-data tools. The latest two are Cassie, a client for managing Cassandra clusters, and Scalding, a MapReduce framework for simplifying the creation of Hadoop jobs. Big data won’t be black magic forever. Read more »
Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL Server. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. 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 »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read more »
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel. Read more »
Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011, knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. And he thinks Hadoop has an opportunity to be bigger than the markets for JBoss, SpringSource and MySQL combined. Read more »
Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications. Read more »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read more »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — including Node.js and Hadoop — squarely at Gates’ feet. Read more »
