The Xen project celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. It’s also moving to a new home at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project. Just like the Linux kernel, Xen enjoys contributions from a variety of different companies, so a vendor-neutral organization to host development and collaboration is a big win for the project. → Read More
The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the same cost as cheapo shared hosting, you can get your own small virtual machine at any number of providers, allowing you to tweak the entire instance to just the way you want it. If infrastructure isn’t… → Read More
At the OpenStack Summit today, Red Hat announced RDO, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” In essence, RDO will function for Red Hat OpenStack much like Fedora does for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: new features will land upstream, get integrated into RDO, and eventually make their way into the… → Read More
I’ve written a number of times about how ubiquitous Linux has become. It powers supercomputers and cell phones. It’s in automotive infotainment systems. It’s in medical equipment. It’s also now in firearms, thanks to the folks at Tracking Point. → Read More
The “free” in Free Software refers to “freedom”, rather than cost. It is largely a happy coincidence that Free Software is available gratis. Copyleft licensing certainly helps, but there’s no overarching reason that Free-as-in-Freedom software need not cost anything. As Free Software has evolved and matured over the years, several major developmental archetypes have emerged. → Read More
There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak’s approach to encryption, or ownCloud’s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and… → Read More
Rackspace, one of the original participants in the OpenStack project, has spent the last couple of years building a successful cloud business. Along the way, they’ve continued to contribute to OpenStack and even offer a streamlined installation process for people who want to “run like Rackspace” on their own hardware. → Read More
We wander the streets with tiny computers in our pockets and in our hands. We talk casually to these computers, just like Captains Kirk and Picard talked to the computers on their Enterprises. With the push of a button, our computers give us unprecedented access to the bulk of human knowledge. These computers sometimes talk back to us. But underneath all the noise and chatter of speech, the… → Read More
ownCloud is a free software suite, written in PHP, that provides file storage, synchronization, and sharing. It provides the same basic features of Dropbox or Box.net. It also provides a whole lot more. → Read More
Hot on the heels of the announcement of Ubuntu on phones comes Canonical’s latest announcement: Ubuntu on tablets. This is, in many ways, a no-brainer: Android and iOS have already demonstrated that the same OS can work on both form factors. But the story is a little more interesting when you consider what Ubuntu offers. And developers can start playing with it on Thursday. → Read More
Microsoft Office has long been the dominant office suite. Through the years there have been many contenders rise and fall: WordPerfect, Corel, StarOffice, and too many more to count. Sun Microsystem’s StarOffice eventually mutated into OpenOffice, which for a long time was the best alternative to Microsoft’s dominance. But when Oracle bought Sun, legions of developers abandoned OpenOffice, and… → Read More
DreamObjects, DreamHost’s scalable cloud storage solution built atop Ceph, is now available to the general public. DreamObjects offers APIs compatible with Amazon S3 and Swift, making data migrations (in or out) fairly easy. And to celebrate the announcement, DreamHost is offering introductory pricing for new customers. → Read More
Ubuntu isn’t exactly a stranger to the mobile space — it started showing off its Ubuntu for Android project in early 2012, but it wasn’t about to stop there. Not long after teasing the prospect of a touch-friendly future for its peculiarly-named OS, Canonical has officially pulled back the curtains on its Ubuntu phone OS and it looks, well, great. → Read More
Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to keep going. In keeping with Red Hat’s open source ethos, the product was released as an open source project called OpenShift Origin. This allowed anyone to deploy and run the Red Hat PaaS on their… → Read More
The Ubuntu Linux distribution has always been free. It’s also always welcomed donations from users. Historically, though, the donation page hasn’t been featured prominently on the Ubuntu website. As of yesterday, users who download Ubuntu are now invited to donate to Ubuntu.
It’s important to note two things. First, donations are completely voluntary. Ubuntu is still free to download and use. → Read More
It’s no surprise that the pace of technological innovation in the startup and web development world greatly eclipses the pace of technology adoption at most enterprise organizations. Enterprises are generally slow, risk averse, and demand long-term support for products in which they invest. Startups, web development shops, and open source enthusiasts move at a significantly faster pace. While some… → Read More
Ubuntu Linux, which started with the tagline “Linux for human beings,” was originally an easy-to-use Linux distribution for desktop users. Canonical picked what they considered to be the best of breed applications from the many thousands available in the Debian Linux distribution, put on a healthy dose of polish, and released their own version. They then repeated this release process every six… → Read More
It’s a classic quandary — getting people to participate in online communities can be hard, but getting people to participate well in online communities is even harder.
To that end, behavioral management platform Badgeville has announced a new effort to bring its engagement-fostering gamification service to Drupal communities that want to reward their users for quality participation.
There… → Read More
In the beginning there was Amazon Simple Storage Service. And it was good. Soon after came Rackspace Cloud Files. And it was good. Today DreamHost is announcing their DreamObjects cloud storage solution to offer customers another hosted storage option.
DreamObjects storage is provided by Ceph, the distributed object store created by DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil. Ceph itself offers API… → Read More
I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?”
The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google’s admission to… → Read More
Hardware generally doesn’t interest me too much, so when I heard about the Open Compute project I didn’t give it too much attention. Casually reading up on the subject a little more left me even less interested. Why should Facebook have to design their own hardware, I wondered? Wouldn’t hardware vendors be clambering over each other to supply Facebook with gobs and gobs of servers for their data… → Read More
The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers… → Read More
At LinuxCon and CloudOpen this week, attendees are being bombarded with cloud, cloud, cloud. Most of the cloud goings-on revolve around OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service project started by Rackspace and NASA. Today SUSE announced their SUSE Cloud product, which is a commercially supported version of OpenStack integreated with SUSE Linux. Red Hat has an unsupported preview… → Read More
The overwhelming majority of web-based services today rely on Linux. More and more of these companies are joining the Linux Foundation, the “nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.” The Linux Foundation provides a neutral ground for companies and users to discuss and collaborate on Linux’s development, so it makes sense for companies with large Linux footprints to get… → Read More
When I think of APIs, I tend to think of mostly end-user data being passed back and forth between consumer websites and various client apps. Automated uploading to Flickr, for example, or consuming Twitter data in some way. I don’t think of chemical patent searches. SureChem just announced an API for just that function, though, which goes to show that automation and ubiquitous computing is… → Read More
Most days I have only three or four browser tabs open: GMail, Twitter, Google Reader, and whatever link I’ve clicked through from one of the previous three. I know folks, though, who regularly have two dozen or more tabs open. All day. Every day. They struggle to remember which tab has their GMail, only to find no new mail when they get there. Pausing a Last.fm stream requires an inordinate number… → Read More
Gluster was founded in 2005 to productize their eponymous global distributed filesystem, GlusterFS. As an all-software solution for storing immense quantities of distributed and replicated data, it quickly caught the eye of many working with big data including Red Hat, who purchased the company late last year.
Yesterday at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat officially announced their branded solution… → Read More
Nature Publishing Group teamed up with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology to run an augmented reality advertising campaign. Point your tablet or smartphone at the print advertisement and watch the beautiful KAUST campus spring to life before you! You can click on the various departments, “talk” to virtual students, and peruse job openings hosted at Naturejobs. → Read More
Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An app guy, an ops guy, and a VMware sales guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about “The Cloud” a lot.
Eucalyptus Systems is… → Read More
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you might be excused for not knowing about this Humble Bundle thing. As a long-time Linux user, the Humble Bundles have always been of interest to me, and I’ve always tried to support them financially. It’s also always been interesting to me that Linux users typically pay more for the Bundles than their Windows or Mac counterparts. → Read More
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