FOSS News: Latest Developments and Breakthroughs
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-11 10:24:23 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-11 13:47:03 UTC
Free Software/Open Source Software
Can you really do DevOps without sharing scripts or code? DevOps manifesto proponents value cross-functional teams, symbiotic relationships, and continual feedback loops. Effective DevOps initiatives create engaged communities where team interactions amplify personal actions. When technology teams find adopting a DevOps culture is more difficult than using DevOps tools, suggest the open source way as a path forward.
WANT to save money on software? While it's hard to beat premium industry products with all of their bells and whistles, many small firms could be using free (or almost-free) open source rivals that can do the job just as well for a fraction of the cost. Here's a look at popular alternatives to the best known premium design and editing tools: Photoshop and InDesign.
So usually this column features nifty art in machine embroidered form. Today brings something a bit more behind-the-scenes, but if you’re as into shaking up the machine embroidery world as we are, this’ll be relevant to your interests.
The new OSI Board will be meeting soon in Boston to make plans for the coming year. During this meeting we'll welcome the new Directors, select a President for 2014...
Going forward, having open source skills will be imperative for partners. For partners to evolve an open source practice they will need to come out of the comfort zones of the vendor brands. Many open source practitioners opine that to embrace open source the management of a partner organization needs service-centric mindset.
Events
Open source in the enterprise has changed dramatically since Pivotal Software's Head of Product James Watters worked on the OpenSolaris operating system for Sun at the start of the new millenium. Back then companies used open source software mainly for the cost savings and didn't see much benefit to participating in the open source community, he said in his ApacheCon keynote in Denver this week.
Beaver Bar Camp 14, an informal conference where participants can explore anything from science to art, technology, food, culture or other topics is scheduled for Saturday, April 12, at Oregon State University.
I have just returned home from this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, which was held in Leipzig, Germany. As always, it was a great event, which is somewhat unique in bringing together art and design practitioners with programmers and engineers.
Hilary Mason at ApacheCon in DenverData science still has a long way to go in developing systems that solve real-world, human problems, said Hilary Mason, data scientist in residence at Accel Partners, in her keynote at ApacheCon in Denver today. The open source community will be key to helping big data evolve into a more accessible technology, she said.
OpenDaylight
OpenDaylight, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) project sponsored by the Linux Foundation, turned one year old this week. And in the hope of celebrating many more birthdays to come, the project has announced a summer internship program designed to help grow the next generation of open source SDN developers.
Internet
Sharing has many meanings in an open source ecosystem. It can mean sharing skills, sharing knowledge, and modifying those processes and bits of information to innovate new ways of doing things. The Internet has helped remove barriers to production and cooperation that has made creating in the open possible on a global scale.
SaaS/Big Data
The CloudEthernet Forum unveiled the Open Cloud Project at Interop this week, and the industry organization is working with the MetroEthernet Forum to make it happen. Together, the two organizations are hoping to create an open test and iterative standards development program for service providers, vendors and over-the-top cloud services providers.
That's according to Michel Isnard, VP southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat. In an interview with ITWeb, Isnard noted that most of the cloud infrastructures in the world are open source.
This past week, the OpenShift Origin repository on Github saw some major code merges from external contributors that added MSFT .Net functionality to the OpenShift Origin platform. Thousands of new lines of code were tested and merged successfully into the OpenShift Origin codebase, which was then instantly made available for anyone to download and deploy.
Executives from Microsoft, Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard debate the definition and future of the platform-as-a-service model.
As you will know, in computing terms we talk about real time processing (or perhaps "computer responsiveness") as being that level of compute power and speed such that users PERCIEVE that the systems they use are operating at the same speed as human (or indeed machine-based) life events.
OpenStack
When reading a recent article by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, I was struck by a comparison made between OpenStack and the interstate highway system. The article in Wall Street and Technology, called "OpenStack: Five things every executive needs to know," mostly focused on the high points of where OpenStack is in its development cycle. But the highway analogy stuck with me.
Welcome to the Short Stack, our weekly feature where we search for the most intriguing OpenStack links to share with you. These links may come fromtraditional publications or company blogs, but if it's about OpenStack, we'll find the best links we can to share with you every week. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing.
OpenStack, the red hot open source cloud platform, has been a generator of a lot of top tech jobs for some time now, and we've been chronicling the new training and certification programs arising around it. If you have OpenStack skills, you can work for big companies doing cloud deployments or startups focusing on OpenStack managed services.
A few weeks ago we entered the Icehouse development cycle feature freeze. But with the incredible growth of the OpenStack development community (508 different contributors over the last 30 days, including 101 new ones!), I hear a lot of questions about it. I’ve explained it on various forums in the past, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to write something a bit more definitive about it.
McKenty was, of course, one of the initial project drivers for OpenStack, and he knows the platform's roots as well as its roadmap. There have been many recent initiatives surrounding structured compatibility testing for OpenStack, and Red Hat, among others, is certifying technologies for compatibility with OpenStack.
OpenStack engineers make nearly 40% more than other cloud engineers
Hadoop
Continuuity CEO Jonathan Gray says it is a byproduct of the company’s effort to provide an application development environment for Hadoop that can be deployed on a private or public cloud. As customers began to build applications on the Continuuity platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, it became apparent they needed help with the DevOps elements of Hadoop.
Initially, Continuuity tried to use scripts and Chef open source tools to solve that problem. But Gray says it quickly became apparent that providing an orchestration tool in the form of Loom that leverages application programming interfaces would be a simpler and more elegant approach to solving the problem.
Commercial applications written in Java have plenty of parallel tasks that can be accelerated through the use of GPU coprocessors. IBM is very keen on leveraging the combination of its Power processors, which have high memory and I/O bandwidth, and Tesla GPU coprocessors from Nvidia, which have lots of cores and high memory bandwidth as well, to gain back some market share from X86 systems. The software stack for the Power-Tesla combo, and at the GPU Technical Conference last week in San Jose, IBM showed off a prototype Hadoop setup that got a significant performance speedup from running portions of its code on Tesla engines.
Hortonworks
At Index Ventures, we have been investing in open source for 12 years, and we’ve never seen such a “perfect storm” moment for open source companies to make the jump from scrappy-and-free to large-and-profitable. With today’s news that Hortonworks, one of our investments, has raised another $100 million in funding, it’s clear that the industry is finally ready to accept and value open source startups as real businesses poised for long-term growth.
Hortonworks, the company focused on the open source Big Data crunching platform Hadoop, has been making waves for some time now, and now the company has announced that it has raised a whopping $100 million in an investment round led by BlackRock and Passport Capital managed funds. The company was formed in 2011, and previously got a hefty $120 million round of financing. Even more notably, this level of funding for Hortonworks, along with a number of other cash infusions for companies focused on open source, is being heralded as a "perfect storm" moment for commercial open source.
Cloudera
Everyone heralded a new era for commercial efforts surrounding open source when Red Hat became the first open source company to hit $1 billion in revenue. Now it's time to mark another milestone as Cloudera, the pioneering startup focused on enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, has announced a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. You read it right: $900 million.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
- And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
- Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
- Answers must be given
- Layoffs and Shutdowns at IBM, Not Just Microsoft
- Same as Microsoft
- With Workers Back From a Holiday Weekend, Microsoft Layoffs Carry on, More Waves to Come
- Now it's Monday and people are bad to work, even some journalists
- You Need Not Wave a Rainbow Flag This Month to Basically Oppose Arseholes Looking to Disrupt and Divide the Community
- Don't fall for it
- What Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- Similar aims, different methods
- The 'Corporate Neckbeard' is Not the "Good Guy"
- Works for IBM
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- More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- "pepe the frogs"
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025
- The FSF's (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) 2025 Summer Fundraiser Already Past Halfway Line
- This is where GNU/Linux actually started
- Mozilla Had No Good Reason to Outsource Firefox Development to Microsoft
- What does Mozilla plan to do when GitHub shuts down?
- Mozilla Firefox Did Not Die, It Got Killed
- To me it'll always look like Mozilla got killed by its sponsors, especially Google, which had a conflict of interest as a sponsor
- Dan Neidle, Whom Brett Wilson LLP SLAPPed (on Behalf of Corrupt Rich Tax Evaders), Still Fighting the Good Fight
- Neidle fights for the poor people
- Wayland Should Start by Dumping Its Very Ugly Logo
- Wayland wins the "ugliest logo" award every year
- Stop Focusing on Hair Colours, Focus on Corporate Agenda
- If someone commits a crime, it does not matter if his or her hair was mostly white or there was no hair or a wig or whatever
- Links 07/07/2025: Science, Conflicts, and a Fictional K-pop Group
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: Being a Luddite and Announcement of Gotify
- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- The Nasty Smear (and Stereotype) of "Neckbeard" or "Greybeard" is Ageism
- This is the sort of stuff they might try to volley at critics of Wayland
- Why Many of Us Use X Server and Will Continue to Use It For Many Years to Come
- Don't make this about politics
- Microsoft's Nat Friedman Became Unemployed the Same Time the SLAPPs Against Techrights Started Coming From His Friends (Weeks After We Had Exposed Scandals About Him and the Serial Strangler, His Best Friend, Who Got Arrested a Few Days Later)
- Nat Friedman is not "Investor, entrepreneur"
- Brett Wilson LLP Uses Threats to Demand Changes to Pages or Removal of Pages Without Even Revealing Which Staff Member Does That (Sometimes People From Another Firm!)
- This has been in the public for years
- Dan Neidle Said "It Really Then Became a Job of Tormenting" Lawyers Like Brett Wilson LLP (Who Threatened Him for Exposing Crimes, Just Like They Threatened My Wife a Few Months Later)
- he and his wife decided to take on the evil people and their evil lawyers
- Large Language Models (LLMs) Externalise Their Cost to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- "The forty-sixth Free Software Bulletin is now available online!"
- Weeding Out Extremism in Our Community
- To me it seems like Microsoft Lunduke is rapidly becoming like a "hate preacher" who operates online, breeding an extremist ideology or trying to soften its image
- Censorship Versus Fact-Checking and Quality Control
- It's not censorship but a matter of quality control
- Reinforcing the Allegations Some More, Bryan Lunduke Digs His Own Grave
- In his latest episodes he merely repeats his own lies, which I debunked using evidence right from his own mouth
- Global Warming and Free Software as a Force of Mitigation
- we'll need to think about Software Freedom, not just brands like "Linux"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 06, 2025
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and TUI Rant
- Links for the day
- [Video] "Copyleft Isn't a Bug."
- "Copyleft isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. GNU GPL forced the world to treat code like a public good."
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- Richard Stallman does not (either himself or directly) post to any social control media
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- Links for the day
- Two Risks to Companies: The Microsoft Culture and the Microsoft Tools
- Novell was killed by a form of "social engineering" by Microsoft
- It's Hard to Trust People Who Worked - Not Only Those Who Still Work - at Microsoft
- Bryan Lunduke is just what people would call an "arsehole of a person"
- For the Second Time, Bryan Lunduke From Microsoft is Siccing Racist Trolls and Vandals at Me
- You're only reinforcing the point we made yesterday
- Links 06/07/2025: End to End Encryption at Risk, Reuters Twitter ("X") Account Withheld in India
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/07/2025: Tinylog and Certification Rotation
- Links for the day
- Links 06/07/2025: Climate Change and "The Right to Criticise"
- Links for the day
- PCLinuxOS Sites Coming Back, Gradually
- let's just be patient
- Social Control Media, Even If Based on Free Software, Still Has Many Problems
- a distraction from what actually mattered and still matters
- IBM is Not Your Master
- IBM makes friends with people who exclude the majority of the population: women
- Help Fund the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- If you have some dollars to spare, go support the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 05, 2025
- A Short History of Attacks on Techrights (and Boycott Novell Before That)
- good opportunity to tell again the story of several (not all) attempts to silence us
- The Mainstream Media Took 4 Days to Realise Microsoft Shut Down Its Operations in Pakistan and Fired Everybody
- We estimate that Microsoft has had about 29,000 layoffs since January
- Leadership in Free Software
- Don't let IBM lead. It's a terrible flag bearer.