Free/Open Source Software News: Beehives, Neuroscience, Video Editing, Events, Services, Databases, CMSs, and Funding
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-19 20:07:28 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-19 21:31:45 UTC
"Open Source"
Earlier this year, Qualcomm wowed technology industry executives and analysts with a tour of its smart connected home at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tour demonstrated how the Linux-based home automation platform AllJoyn connects all of the various in-home devices from appliances and lighting to TVs and talking teddy bears.
“As they walked through the home, you could see the executives truly understand the power of various devices across brands and verticals and visualize the potential for collaboration,” says Liat Ben-Zur, senior director at Qualcomm Connected Experiences and chairperson of the AllSeen Alliance, in the interview below.
Have you ever watched a TED talk and thought, “That should be a company!” Well, that’s happened a few times, I’m sure, and one of them is right here in Silicon Valley. Years ago, wordsmith Erin McKean delivered a TED talk on her vision around the lexicography and meaning of words. This particular talk struck a chord with an investor named Roger McNamee, who in turn encouraged the team to build a company around this. Hence, Reverb Technologies was born.
The patent system. Online privacy law. Bitcoin regulations. Net neutrality rules. In the coming years, policy makers may have as much influence on technology as the world’s hackers do — if not more. So it should come as little surprise that a hacker is running for Congress.
Twenty-eight-year-old software developer David Cole spent over two years working for the White House as the deputy director of new media, where he helped build the White House website, and now, he wants to make the switch from crafting code for the government to crafting policy. He’s seeking the Democratic nomination for his home district in New Jersey, which includes Atlantic City. If he wins, he’ll challenge the incumbent Republican, Frank LoBiondo, who has represented the district since 1995 — and is not a hacker.
Is Linux a success? Certainly. The Apache Web server? You betcha. Firefox, sure. But, what about smaller or newer open source projects? How can you tell if they’re on the right path or if they’re slowly spiraling into failure? This is a subject that was discussed at great length at the recent OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, California.
It is also the time when skeptics started sharing their doubts on the success of the open source model, stating that the security vulnerabilities that come from community contributions are a barrier for the project’s reliability. Some were and still are even more pessimistic and claim that financial institutions cannot assume the potential risks that come with adopting an open source solution for critical parts of their business.
Beehive
Open source projects garner the attention of the tech community because the passionate people behind these developments occasionally cause major disruption and create opportunities to change industries, as Android and Linux did.
Tristan writes, "The Open Source Beehives project is a partnership between the Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona crowd-sourcing a solution to the bee colony collapse issue.
Neuroscience
Today’s neuroscientists need expertise in more than just the human brain. They must also be accomplished hardware engineers, capable of building new tools for analyzing the brain and collecting data from it.
Video Editing
Events
The first enterprise forum about open source ever held in Sri Lanka, ‘Open Source Forum Sri Lanka 2014’ took place at Hotel Galadari, Colombo recently. Participants included top executives and corporate leaders from Sri Lanka’s business community and the Government sector. The objective of the event was to maximise the value of big data, cloud computing, virtualization, content management systems and business intelligence through the adaptation of open source. This is aimed at bringing in affordability, control and openness.
Do you ever wish the free software was just a little bit better? As a longtime free software advocate, I certainly have had this thought many times. Sometimes nothing can be done because a particular feature is patent-encumbered, but sometimes clear user feedback is all that's needed. Enter SpinachCon -- it's a hackfest for users. The idea is that sometimes free software "has a little spinach in it's teeth" and it needs it's friends to let it know in a friendly way. People try the software, answer a few questions and get a free lunch in return.
Services/Fog Computing
Last weekend Daniel, Arthur, Morris and me were in Chemnitz where the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2014 took place. We drove a booth during the two days, the CLT host around 60 boothes of companies and FOSS projects. I like to go to the CLT because it is perfectly organized with great enthusiasm of everybody involved from the organisation team. Food, schedules, the venue, everything is perfect.
This isn't too surprising. Ubuntu has made a point of working closely with OpenStack. Although most people think of Ubuntu as just a desktop operating system with designs on becoming a smartphone power, it has also long been a major cloud player.
For the database piece, Cloudinary is using the open-source MySQL database technology.
"We are very knowledgeable in the NoSQL area but we've had a lot of discussion about our database use and for us MySQL is the answer," Lahan said.
For the image manipulation piece, Cloudinary leverages multiple technologies, including the open-source ImageMafhbj project.
All of Cloudinary's client integration libraries are open-source and available on the company's Github site.
The educational ecosystem for providing training in Linux, OpenStack and other open source software continues to grow. The latest momentum comes from Mirantis, which has announced a new milestone with more than 200 organizations now adopting the company's training and certification program for OpenStack that launched in late 2013.
OpenStack, the very hot open source cloud platform, is emerging as a generator of a lot of top tech jobs, and, as we've reported, open source skills in general are highly valued in the current job market. In answer to that, a lot of OpenStack certification programs have been on the rise, and Mirantis announced an interesting platform-agnostic program in December of last year. Today, the company has announced that more than 200 companies and organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms.
OwnCloud, the company behind the open-source ownCloud Community Edition, announced on March 11 what the business claims is the "only fully self-hosted enterprise-ready file sync and share software, ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition."
Databases
When I started teaching PostgreSQL education courses in 2001, PostgreSQL was the ugly one in the data center. Many of the people who were learning how to work with it were doing so grudgingly because of some specific requirement. They had inherited a PostgreSQL database, for example. As a result, many of them tried to learn just enough to do what they needed to do. The other population of students were serious technologists, die-hard open source devotees who wanted to use only open source solutions and were learning PostgreSQL because they needed a relational database for their operations.
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PostgreSQL has picked up a new feature of logical decoding.
This new PostgreSQL database feature adds over ten thousand lines of new code to the open-source server and allows the write-ahead log stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes, per this commit.
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"Development is slower because we do not take shortcuts, but over the years, we have made a name for the [PostgreSQL] database as a product that is reliable and is backed by communities and companies that felt strongly about the value they were providing its users. ... We have played the long game in not taking shortcuts and focusing on making the best database possible."
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Amazon Web Services is a juggernaut in the infrastructure as a service market, but GoGrid, a midsize IaaS competitor that aims to be the cloud for big data, says it wants to offer an alternative to AWS's platform. And it's hoping to do so through open source databases.
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Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (23.59%)
Server Distribution of the Year - Slackware (31.83%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year - Android (59.15%)
Database of the Year - MariaDB (36.41%)
NoSQL Database of the Year - MongoDB (46.15%)
Office Suite of the Year - LibreOffice (85.50%)
Browser of the Year - Firefox (63.54%)
Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (35.77%)
Window Manager of the Year - Openbox (18.88%)
Messaghng Application of the Year - Pidgin (47.83%)
VoIP Application of the Year - Skype (44.95%)
Virtualization Product of the Year - VirtualBox (54.38%)
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The company offers a community edition of VoltDB under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3, but it omits a number of features found in the commercial version.
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The open-source MariaDB database has emerged in recent years to be a real competitor to MySQL from which it was forked. Now at long last there is a generally available version of MariaDB Enterprise edition.
Collaboration
Zimbra has rolled out a new version of its cloud-friendly groupware collaboration software. Titled Zimbra Community 8.0, the release introduces a free edition of the platform, which the company is offering to businesses and individuals alongside the standard and professional editions it traditionally provided.
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Diaspora really could be the answer. It’s open source, it’s decentralized and it has Aaron Swartz in its DNA. Its security people are answerable only to the community. Because it’s decentralized, there’s a node or “pod” element. Different servers offer users slightly different experiences, sort of like neighborhoods within a city. This is much different from Facebook where everything is the downtown business district.
Content Management
It’s the age old question when considering a content management system (CMS) for your new or renewed website: Is it best to go with open source or proprietary software? David Hartstein, writing for WiredImpact, suggests that the right answer is pretty obvious. (If you want some basic definitions of the terms “CMS,” “open source,” and “proprietary,” please consult his article directly.)
Joomla! has been known for Joomla! Platform and Joomla! Content Managment System (CMS). The newest addition to the mix late last year was Joomla! Framework. Many say it's an exciting project with innovative development, so we interviewed our own Don Gilbert, who has been coordinating the project's efforts, to find out how it's going and what's new with the project.
Attackers have abused the WordPress pingback feature, which allows sites to cross-reference blog posts, to launch a large-scale, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to researchers from Web security firm Sucuri.
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is under going a major leadership change this week.
Company founder Matt Mullenweg is stepping up to the role of chief executive officer, replacing Toni Schneider.
Funding
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Bethesda-based Spree, which this week raised a $5 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital, is simultaneously a startup and a popular open-source project. But open-source projects — on their own, at least — don't pay the bills.
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At first glance, open source and crowdfunding seem an inevitable match. After all, what could be more natural than software that nobody owns being funded by popularity? In theory, crowdfunding should allow developers to concentrate on what interests them, freeing them from the need to make a living or answer to an employer.
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Chances are free and open source projects have made their way into your workflow, your entertainment, your communications. Why not set 2014 off by vowing to give back to those projects which enrich your life?
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News is a bit slow in these last remaining days of what many consider the holiday season, but some headlines stood out today. Our old friend Jack Wallen is back with another top 10 list. iTWire's David Williams resolves to donate to Linux and Open Source projects this year and opensource.com has suggestions for others way to help out in this new year.
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George Church created the Personal Genome Project, a big plan to sequence more than 100,000 human genomes in the U.S. Now the database he’s been using to store all that information has become the basis for a new startup.
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