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
- UEFI "Secure Boot Doesn’t Play Nice at the Moment"
- UEFI "Secure Boot" does not improve security. It's an artificial obstacle in service of monopoly.
- If You Want to "make your 'Windows PC' lean, mean, and fast" You Will Install GNU/Linux or Some BSD
- That kind of article says a lot about IDG
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- EPO Imitates Microsoft: "Three Days or More Per Week" Inside the Office to Get a Desk to Work on; "the Office Breaches Its Promise Towards Staff and Acts in Breach of Its Duty of Care"
- The EPO serves no actual function in Europe
- Links 15/09/2025: Political Affairs, Censorship, and Copyrights
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/09/2025: Music Genres, Invisible Networks, and Akademy 2025
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 14, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, September 14, 2025
- Satya's Plan B: Try to Hide the Massive Extent/Scale/Scope of Microsoft Layoffs
- fewer people buy Microsoft
- Red Hat News About De Facto Mass Layoffs (Bluewashing) Gone From Reddit (Censored by Gatekeepers), Still Online in The Register
- With RTOs, PIPs, relocation etc. expect IBM to "shed off" many Red Hatters
- Gemini Links 14/09/2025: ROOPHLOCH, Music, and Reddit
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News Infested With Slop (About Half of the Results for "Linux" Today)
- This is the sort of junk one finds when looking for "Linux" in Google News these days
- Links 14/09/2025: Ricky Hatton Dies and McDonald's Declares War on Tipping Culture
- Links for the day
- Links 14/09/2025: Disasters for CEOs Obsessed With Slop and Slop Companies School Like Fish
- Links for the day
- "Bad Shim Signature" (Microsoft 'Secure' Boot)
- "Fresh install not booting"
- What Microsoft Garrett and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- Similar tactics, different "wings"
- Links 14/09/2025: US "Economy Sagging", "Michigan Economy Wobbles From Tariffs"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/09/2025: Minimalist Snippet Manager and Omarchy Linux
- Links for the day
- The Face of the Digital Far Right: Microsoft Lunduke
- Microsoft Lunduke is an online extremist that belongs to and panders to the far right
- 20 Years Later and Academia Isn't the Same
- "I never dreamed of being a professor"
- 'Cancel Culture' by the Right: Microsoft Lunduke Contacts People's Employers Trying to Get Them Fired
- Microsoft Lunduke panders to extremists online
- "Bad Shim Signature"; So 'Secure' That It Overrides Users' Preferences and Turns Itself Back on (Coercive Measure)
- This was a few hours ago
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 13, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, September 13, 2025
- Microsoft is Rapidly Dropped From Web Servers, Shows Survey
- Microsoft lost about 8% "market share" in just 3 months
- Many GNU/Linux Users Report MOK (Machine Owner Key) Issues in Recent Days
- many people don't report this online and never post in Reddit
- We Covered UEFI 'Secure Boot' Scandals. The World Listened.
- To hell with UEFI 'secure boot'
- Links 13/09/2025: Escalations in East Europe and POTUS’ Health Cover-Up
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/09/2025: Lagrange Turns 5 and Lagrange 1.19.2 Released
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Inside Your Linux: "Security vulnerability that allowed an attacker to bypass UEFI Secure Boot."
- 2 hours ago
- A New Low for "Linux Journal": Promoting MICROSOFT WINDOWS Using LLM Slop
- They've just jumped the shark entirely
- Fake News With Fake Numbers About Microsoft
- "This is what happens when the world's economy is governed by sick old men"
- Slopwatch: "Google News" is Fast Becoming a Mashup of Slopfarms, Linux Journal ("LJ") is a Dump of LLM Slop
- Well done, Google News. Google itself can flourish as a slopfarm mashup.
- Torturing Users Who Just Want to Run GNU/Linux on Their Own PC
- "Linux does not want to install"
- The Register MS Still Takes Money to Hype Up "AI" in Articles by Microsoft Resellers With the Term "AI" 30+ Times in Them
- Notice how many times they mention "AI"
- The Apache Logo News is VERY Old, Racists and 'Anti-Woke' Bigots Look for Something to Incite Other Bigots With
- Nothing to see here, move along
- Linux Mint 9/11: "4th One Today..." (in Reddit)
- Remember that not everyone having an issue reports it to social control media like Reddit
- Nepal Will Fall Without a Single Shot Fired, Thanks to Social Control Media
- Or very few shots (by the authorities)
- European Corruption in the European Patent Office (EPO) Targets Culture
- "In reality, the project includes a new “legal instrument” shifting administrative burden and liability on EPO staff while creating new uncertainty and externalising Amicale activities."
- European Authorities, Already Bribed and Infiltrated by Microsoft, Won't Help You Find BigBlueButton, Jami, Ring, and Jitsi
- Because they're paid by Microsoft and are Microsoft 'addicts' themselves
- UEFI Secure Boot Failing, as Expected for Nearly 15 Years Already (Techrights Said This Since 2012)
- in the media
- Debian 9/11
- people report this issue
- Gemini and Web Links 13/09/2025: MElon's Slop Grift and "Autonomous Trains"
- Links for the day
- Moving From Content Management Systems (CMSs) to Static Site Generators (SSGs) Saves You Time, Makes You a Lot More Productive
- try to reduce the cost (financial and computational) of running your site
- Pursuing Peace Through Violence
- You cannot "see" a person's mind, until the mouth opens
- Leak: European Patent Office (EPO) is Now Attacking Amicale Clubs
- corruption has become the norm and scientists are robbed of any dignity
- Can We Please Stop Celebrating Shooters?
- "An important point to hammer on is that CoCs were never intended for uniform or symmetric application"
- Oracle Fraud (or Defrauding Shareholders)
- "the obvious [lie] is that watts are (wasted) electricity [and] and FLOPS are computing capacity"
- Geminispace is Growing Faster in 2025 Than It Did in 2024
- What matters is that corporations haven't ruined it and LLM slop is extremely rare
- Links 13/09/2025: China Punishes for 'Negative' Posts, US Police Unable to Find Shooter
- Links for the day
- Who's the Mystery Financier of SLAPP Against Techrights and Is That a Millionaire/Billionaire?
- Whose idea was it to fund meritless lawsuits against my wife and I?
- Slopwatch: Slow Slop Day
- This distracts from or may take traffic away from the original articles, actually written by actual people
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, September 12, 2025