04.11.14

FOSS News: Latest Developments and Breakthroughs

Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Free Software/Open Source Software

• DevOps amplifies your open source credentials

  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.

• Open source software a solid alternative to costly brands

  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.

• Gear Threads – Open Source Machine Embroidery

  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.

• OSI Board Changes 2014

  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…

• Leveraging Open Source

  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

• Pivotal Brings PaaS to the Enterprise Through Community Collaboration

  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.

• Open source conference at OSU April 12

  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.

• LGM 2014

  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’s ApacheCon Keynote: 3 Ways to Improve Data Science

  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 Internship Targets Student Open Source SDN Developers

  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.

• OpenDaylight Project Takes Grand Prize at Best of Interop Awards

• OpenDaylight Is the First Open Source Project to Receive Interop Event’s Grand Prize Award

Internet

• The Internet’s 25 years and future with open source

  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.

• Over a third of Brazilian SMEs use open source firewalls – Dell

• Making FLOSS circumvention tools safer for journalists and activists

SaaS/Big Data

• The Cloud and Internet of Things Loom Large in the Future of Open Source

• RightScale Survey Shows Enterprises Increasing Cloud Adoption

• CloudEthernet Forum Launches Open Cloud Project

  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.

• Open source boosts cloud innovations

  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.

• Open source cloud tools preferred, but IT skills, standards needed

• Lowering barriers to open source contributions with OpenShift Origin

  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.

• Interop Panelists Seek to Define PaaS, Comment on Its Outlook

  Executives from Microsoft, Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard debate the definition and future of the platform-as-a-service model.

• Cisco to Follow the Open Road in Building Out its Intercloud

• Open source options in cloud grow — will customer confusion follow

• Upcoming Gigaom event: Is 2015 the year of the open-source cloud at Structure?

• Don’t say big data, say big data in motion

  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

• Why open infrastructure matters in the cloud

  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.

• How to govern a project on the scale of OpenStack

• Short Stack: Inside Telstra’s OpenStack Build and Cisco CIO talks OpenStack

  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.

• Ten sessions you don’t want to miss at OpenStack Summit

• Ericsson and Mirantis OpenStack Deal Sets a Precedent in the Open Cloud

• Storing data in the cloud with GlusterFS and OpenStack Swift

• Mirantis Expands OpenStack Training Offerings

  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.

• The OpenStack Summit agenda has a track for everyone

• Why we do a feature freeze in OpenStack

  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.

• Piston’s Josh McKenty Weighs In on OpenStack Compatibility, Market Saturation

  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.

• A sneak peek of OpenStack Icehouse

• Cisco, with Partners, to Put $1 Billion into OpenStack-based “Intercloud”

• Cisco Entering Cloud Services Market with OpenStack Tech, $1B Investment

• OpenStack job market doubles, open-source opportunities abound

  OpenStack engineers make nearly 40% more than other cloud engineers

Hadoop

• Short Stack: OpenStack jobs on rise, OpenStack Cinder and considering multi-cloud strategies

• Open source sharing in government, Hadoop integration with OpenStack, and more

• Continuuity Contributes Hadoop Provisioning Tool to Open Source

  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.

• Hadoop Coming to OpenStack Juno in October 2014

• Why Hadoop Isn’t Killing The Data Warehouse

• As Hadoop Advances, Solr and Other Open Source Projects Will Too

• Nine Hadoop companies you should know

• IBM announces mainframe Hadoop for Linux and flash storage

• IBM Juices Hadoop With Java On Tesla GPUs

  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

• A “Perfect Storm” Moment for Multibillion-Dollar Open Source Companies

  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’ $100 Million Infusion Heralds Big Open Source Opportunities

  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.

• Hortonworks Eyes Wide-Open Market With Update

• Big Data is Drawing Big Investments, with Hadoop at the Center

Cloudera

• Cloudera Raises Staggering $900 Million, Cozies Up to Intel

  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.

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