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
- Next Month 'New Techrights' Turns Two
- Next month, on the fourth week, it'll be 2 years since the migration
- Online Safety Act Tries to Accomplish the Impossible
- All I can say is, "good luck with that!"
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- They Tell Us That "Cloud Storage" is Safe and Robust to Incidents Like Fires
- Do you have backups? Where are they and who controls them?
- "Allowing SDL to default to Wayland caused a number of customer issues so keep the default at X11 for now"
- 2025 is another year of Wayland ambitions. It's also a year of self-fulfilling prophecies.
- In The United Kingdom (UK), Microsoft Search (Bing) Falls to All-Time Low
- Grow? What grow??? It's collapsing.
- GNU/Linux Reaches 5% in Oman
- Some GNU/Linux distros are made in Oman
- Google's "AI Mode" is a Pathetic Joke Prematurely Introduced in the UK (Like "Bard", Which Sank the Company's Shares)
- what Google "thinks" about PCLinuxOS
- What the Free Software Foundation Started Four Decades Ago is Becoming Mainstream
- "Four decades; Four freedoms; For all users"
- Doing a Better Job at Labelling Slop Images
- we'll label screenshots that contain slop, typically with red-coloured text overlay
- Social Control Media is Out of Style
- What's your excuse for wasting time on (or in) it?
- Maldives: GNU/Linux at All-Time High, Windows at New Lows
- data from statCounter shows a reassuring trend
- Efficiency is Good, So Why Won't Governments Cull LLM Companies Using Stronger, Stringent Policies?
- Like every bubble that ever existed, including some recent ones, an end will come
- The Defunct Site LinuxConfig Has Published a Fake Article About Richard Stallman Using LLM Slop, Which Stallman Calls "Bullshit Generator"
- Worse yet, it is writing using a "Bullshit Generator" (the term used by Stallman) about Stallman's health
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- About 70% or even less
- StopGenAI in the Cyber Show (C|S)
- covering a theme that we too covered a lot lately
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- Brittany Day Entered LLM Slop Into LinuxSecurity.com and Something Hilarious Happened: The Site is "Exploited"
- The brainless, effortless copypasta of "slop artists" shows its limits
- Links 03/08/2025: Microsoft Exchange 0-day Exploited and Avoidable Nuclear Escalation
- Links for the day
- Definitely Not a Ponzi Scheme
- Bitcoin v Microsoft
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a Billionaires' Lobby
- Billionaires that control tech companies
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- if Windows (and Office) "market share" fell from about 90% to barely 30%, how come Microsoft is now "valued" at 20 times more?
- It's Even Worse Than Microsoft Lunduke Puts It; GNOME is SLAPPing Journalists
- In our experience, GNOME is so malicious - some elements of it in particular - that it would launch multiple simultaneous SLAPP campaigns not only against journalists but also their spouses
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- This month marks 4 years since Vista 11 came out (as a fake "leak") and some surveys still measure its adoption at less than 40%
- Slop Will Not Change the World
- Some of us grow up sooner and leave that nonsense behind (or altogether avoid/skip it)
- Gemini Links 03/08/2025: Nostalgia and TOFU
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- IRC logs for Saturday, August 02, 2025
- Google Throwing Out the Search Engine With the Bathwater is a Complete and Utter 'Shi---ow' as the Company Drowns in Debt, Layoffs, and Worse
- The mainstream media almost never mentions GAFAM debt
- Operating Systems' Statistics in New Zealand: GNU/Linux Up, Windows Down to All-Time Lows
- Remember all this when the media says that Microsoft became like 10 times more valuable in those 15 years (from 400 billion to 4,000 billion in alleged "worth")
- Microsoft Windows "Market Share" Measured Around 2.7% in Iraq, Plunges to 6.5% in Saudi Arabia
- Microsoft isn't on the agenda in Iraq
- GNU/Linux Share in Sweden Has Doubled Since PewDiePie, A Swede, Recommended It
- months ago he moved to GNU/Linux, then told others to consider doing the same
- GNU/Linux Hits Record High in Portugal
- GNU/Linux picking up in Portugal
- Gemini Protocol is Not Dying, It's Growing
- When people say things like "Gemini Protocol is dying" the data does not support them
- GNU/Linux is Thriving This Summer
- It is meanwhile acknowledged, even by Microsoft pushers, that many GNU/Linux PCs will get sabotaged next month
- The End of Microsoft's Reign in Spain: Windows Falls to All-Time Lows in Spanish Web Traffic
- Windows sank to new lows in Spain
- The Bots Never Sleep: In The Weekends, Slopfarms Dominate Google News, Majority of Entries in Google Are Fake Articles About 'Linux'
- Google is fast becoming an ocean of plagiarism; the same goes for Google News, which was supposed to have extra quality control
- Russia's Yandex Has Caught Up With Bing in Terms of "Market Share"
- Microsoft has been firing loads of Bing workers for over 2 years already
- Canada: GNU/Linux Up to Records Highs, Windows Down to Record Lows
- Microsoft already announcing some plans to shut down Vista 11
- Gemini Links 02/08/2025: Transducers in Typed Racket and American ISPs
- Links for the day
- Links 02/08/2025: Microsoft Already Kills Vista 11 SE, Smartphone Sales Down, Truth Gets "You're Fired!" in the US
- Links for the day
- Video: The Rise of GNU/Linux and Free Software as Seen by RMS in 2004
- DTP's founder argued that when Windows goes below 85% "market share", it'll lose its grip in the monopoly sense
- Russia: GNU/Linux Rises to Highest Adoption Level Since Invasion of Ukraine
- Moving up in the north
- Microsoft's Latest Financial Report: We "Gained" 300 Million Dollars in "Goodwill" and Liabilities Grew by 32 Billion Dollars
- Microsoft's debt has reached an all-time high
- The Register US = The Register MS
- Formerly The Register UK
- Weeks After Microsoft Shut Down Its Operations in Pakistan Windows Falls to All-Time Lows
- Only less than a month ago it was quietly revealed, based on laid-off staff, that Microsoft shut down in Pakistan
- Criminal Behaviour is the Standard Operating Procedure at Microsoft
- In the future I'll be able to tell how, when dealing with SLAPPs from Microsofters, their Microsoft services failed me and sometimes even blocked my contacts
- GNU/Linux Rises to All-Time Highs in Europe
- many people will get fired for buying Microsoft
- All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux on the Client Desktop/Laptop, Based on Steam Survey
- GNU/Linux rose to 2.89% in Steam
- Links 02/08/2025: Blaugust 2025 and "Russia Declares Navalny Memoir ‘Extremist’"
- Links for the day
- Free Software is Not a Business Model
- Go ahead, ask your friend, "how do you plan to monetise your children?"
- When (Almost) One-Man Operations Are Disguised as Medium-Sized Companies
- the CEO hides in the US (hiding from his ex-wives, 4 daughters from those wives, and Sirius staff that he defrauded)
- LLM Slop Harms Real Literature, Real Web Sites, Real Journalism
- LLM slop is a parasite and it'll run out of legitimate outputs
- Upcoming OSI Scandal Series
- The OSI is a rogue actor because it serves Microsoft in exchange for money
- Slopwatch: The Issue Persists, But the Consensus in the Media Changes as Google Enrages It With LLM Plagiarism
- We've meanwhile assessed the latest output from Linuxiac
- Microsoft Actually in Trouble, Microsofters Unable to Obey Judges' Orders
- For the second time in a week, Microsofters are unable to obey orders
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 01, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, August 01, 2025
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Links 02/08/2025: İstanbul Retail Inflation Reaches 42.48%, US FBI Opens Office in New Zealand
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 02/08/2025: ZFS, LLM Hype, and Fake Modules
- Links for the day
- Links 01/08/2025: Health, Conflict, and Attacks on Freedom of the Press
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Debt Exploded by 15.4 Billion Dollars in the Past 9 Months Alone (Despite All the Layoffs)
- As of minutes ago, at 6PM on a Friday, the numbers are made public
- Meeting (Webchat) With Maria Arranz Gomez, Florian Grundies, Jürgen Janda and Konstantinos Kortsaris Confronts EPO Management About Breaking Promises and Crushing Workers
- The lack of consistent messages suggests plans other than what's advertised and the lack of consultation (secrecy) likewise
- Links 01/08/2025: "The Great British Firewall" and U.S. Army Sponsors Palantir
- Links for the day
- For Second Day in a Row, Top Story in The Register MS is "Microsoft Says"
- The editor in chief exercises control over everybody else
- LLMs as Attack Method Against Free Software and Programming
- DDoS in "hey hi" (slop) clothing
- Stability and Reliability, Backward Compatibility
- I don't fancy relying on social control media as "sources"
- What "the News" Looks Like in 2025
- The "says" (or "sez") phenomenon
- History Will Be Distorted, Sometimes Intentionally, Under the Guise of Intelligence (Manipulated/Curated Slop)
- Militarised misinformation or military-grade chaff is a national security threat, even domestically
- Financial Engineering Companies: A Company Worth 4 Trillion Dollars Would Not Borrow 100+ Billion Dollars at Interest Rates Like Today's
- Many headlines perpetuate the lie Microsoft had just 2 waves of layoffs
- Microsoft is Googlebombing "Linux" While Paying Former News Sites to Publish SPAM
- How much lower will IDG sink?
- Google as a 'Bullshit Generator' Disguised as Intelligence
- It'll probably cause Google to get sued a lot, both by individuals and companies
- As Expected, Google in the UK Now Experiments With Slop Instead of Web Search
- At this point more people ought to stop and think: Does Google's search engine deserve trust?
- The Data You Don't Give Away is Your Advantage
- stop sharing data that does not need to be shared
- Being Obedient or Doing the Right Thing
- The world always changes for the better because of people who think "Outside the Box", not the cogs
- Gemini Links 01/08/2025: Happy Hacking Keyboards and New Gemini Arrivals
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 31, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 31, 2025