Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.
“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades. → Read More
Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved “cloud” in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there’s no single definition of “cloud”. There’s no doubt that Amazon has really pioneered the default cloud offering, but there’s a lot of work going on to build better, more robust, and more open cloud solutions.
Red Hat has OpenShift, their Platform as a Service offering, and CloudForms, their Infrastructure as a Service offering. The long-term vision, according to Whitehurst, is that a company’s developers would begin building something on OpenShift, and not worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. When that product is ready to be deployed internally, it would go on the customer’s CloudForms installation inside the company’s firewall. Basically, developers will select the platform and operations can then own and manage that platform. → Read More
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, just delivered a terrific opening keynote presentation for LinuxCon. Whitehurst isn’t just a businessman, he’s also a geek. He used Linux and open source before joining Red Hat, and the opportunity to be CEO of the world’s most successful open source company was a dream come true for him. After a quick summary of some of the major milestones Linux has seen over the last twenty years, he jumped into the heart of his keynote: what’s next? Whitehurst wasted no time in answering this question: “I have no idea.”
This is a somewhat uncommon response from a CEO, but it makes perfect sense for anyone even moderately familiar with Linux. Linux has seen so much growth in so many markets that it is almost a foolish exercise to try to make predictions about what’s next for Linux. Nevertheless, he had some thoughts about what the OS and ecosystem might soon be enabling. → Read More
Following up on yesterday’s 20 Years of Linux, the Linux Foundation is releasing today an infographic highlighting some of the remarkable changes in Linux and the larger computer industry over the last twenty years. The Linux kernel had 250,000 lines of code in 1995, but had 14 million lines of code in 2010. Linux users are using it increasingly at home and at work today, rather than just at home for personal purposes. LinuxCon is officially kicking off today, and I’ll be meeting with a number of folks from all around the Linux ecosystem, from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to Canonical’s Allison Randal to Nithya Ruff of Wind River Linux. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to see put to these folks, feel free to leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. → Read More
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the non-profit Linux Foundation, has been using Linux for about as long as I have, which is roughly half the time that Linux has been around. I recently spoke with Jim about the Linux Foundation’s upcoming LinuxCon, the history of Linux, and what might be in store for the next twenty years.
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Happy International Beer Day! I just finished celebrating by brewing ten gallons of smoked stout, and I’m looking forward to a draught of blonde ale from my kegerator later today. I’ve been homebrewing for about two years, and it’s a fun, practical hobby. Variety is the name of the game, both in terms of beer styles to produce but also in terms of the methods used to produce beer: extract, partial mash, all grain, single infusion, decoction, boil-in-a-bag, 1 gallon, 5 gallons, 10 gallons — you get the idea. The hobby facilitates the purchase of a tremendous amount of equipment for each of these different methods. The latest addition to my zymurgy hobby is the cask widge.
Like most homebrewers, I started out bottling the beer I produced. While this makes it easy to share my work with friends and colleagues, I find it to be a tedious, time consuming process. When I bought my first keg, I swore I’d never bottle beer again! Kegging is so much easier, so much faster, than bottling. But it’s not without its problems. → Read More
Rick: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?”
Captain Renault: “I’m shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in here!”
Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”
Captain Renault: “Oh, thank you very much.”
One has to mourn such a collective loss of innocence. The innocence of the British parliament tearfully quizzing News Corp executives over revelations that phone hacking was used in the pursuit of tabloid scoops. The innocence of those same executives who were “shocked, appalled and ashamed” at the means used by their staff to keep delivering front page gold. The innocence of senior Metropolitan Police officers on learning that underpaid colleagues routinely sold information to tabloid reporters.
And most of all the innocence of the Great British Public — the same public who made books like Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Scoop‘ into a 1938 best-seller, and did the same to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade two generations later. How shocked — shocked! — they all are to learn that tabloid journalists are, at heart, scumbags. → Read More
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, announced yesterday that Toyota is its newest Gold-level member. This is a pretty interesting development for both organizations. From the official press release: “Toyota is joining The Linux Foundation as a Gold member to maximize its own investment in Linux while fostering open innovation throughout the automotive ecosystem.” The continued proliferation of Linux into products across all markets means that it’s more and more likely that a mostly off-the-shelf system can be quickly tweaked for your specific industry. By supporting the Linux Foundation financially, Toyota and other members help ensure that development continues on the Linux core, atop of which they can add their own special sauce. → Read More
Linus Torvalds leads the largest software development project in the world. Thousands of people across the globe contribute to what started out as his little research project. Individuals and multi-national corporations have opinions on where Linux should go next, and it’s ultimately Linus’ job to shepherd all those (sometimes competing) interests. The Linux Foundation is running a fun little Facebook quiz “Could You Do Linus Torvalds’ Job?” It’s five simple questions, and you get 25% off the cost of LinuxCon registration just for taking it! → Read More
In John’s review of the new HP TouchPad, he claimed that “WebOS is the real star of this show. The OS offers true multi-tasking and uses a system of “cards” and “stacks” to display active applications.” I think it’s worthwhile to remind everyone that WebOS is built atop the Linux kernel, and that has several interesting ramifications. HP has continued Palm’s dedication to user experience, and WebOS should make it abundantly clear that “Linux” need not be synonymous with “complex and arcane”. But there’s a lot more than just superficial window dressing to consider.
Read on for more. → Read More
Behold, the winner of the Linux Foundation‘s “20 Years of Linux” t-shirt contest! “After twenty years of hard work, this penguin has managed to take off,” says artist Kim Blanche, creator of the winning image. “Tux is now sailing smoothly above the competition into a very bright future.” Kim has won a free trip to Vancouver to attend LinuxCon in August. Her design, aptly entitled “Flying Penguins”, will be the basis for the official LinuxCon t-shirt and will soon be available for purchase from the Linux.com store. Congratulations, Kim! → Read More
Customer Relationship Management is an old business. There are tons of CRM solutions, both generic and industry specific. Mobile development shop MConcierge has recently announced a new solution for CRM in the hospitality industry that they’re calling GRM: Guest Relationship Management. According to MConcierge, the point of GRM is to provide a top quality experience for guests that goes beyond just an average hotel stay. “Guests aren’t simply buying a room but an experience. By building more unique preferences the hotel brand can better customize the stay,” says Anthony Zebrowski-Rubin, CEO of MConcierge. “By building a profile of a guest based on onsite transactions, on and offsite interests, hotel preferences, and real time social profiled preferences contextualized to the type of property, the guest profile arms the hotel with information to action real positive communication with the guests.” → Read More
We reviewed Addonics‘s first NAS adapter in early 2009, somehow missed the second version of the same, and now present our review of their NAS 3.0 Adapter. Like the previous iterations, the NAS 3.0 Adapter is an extremely small device. It sports two USB ports, an RJ-45 port, and a power socket. As with the original version, the power adapter is not a wall wart. Say what you want about Addonics products, at least they understand that consumers hate wall warts. → Read More
Evernote, the record-everything app for smartphones and desktops, is launching on Windows Phone 7 today. Built specifically for Windows Phone 7, this is Evernote’s 14th supported platform and looks as solid as every other Evernote release. The home panorama leverages Windows Phone 7 panels for notes, notebooks, tags, and recent notes. At the bottom of each screen is a context-aware Application Bar providing access to additional features. If you’re a Windows Phone 7 user, don’t delay: Evernote is free! → Read More
The Linux Foundation‘s 20th anniversary of Linux celebration is happening in August at LinuxCon. As part of the buildup to the big shindig they had a t-shirt design contest for LinuxCon. The creator of the winning design will get a free trip to LinuxCon to rub elbows with the likes of Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself. In addition, the winning design will be the official shirt of LinuxCon. This year’s contest had more than 130 submissions, and the Linux Foundation has narrowed this down to six finalists. → Read More
Condé Nast has unveiled a new iPad app called Idea Flight that they claim “is a new tool designed to share ideas, presentations, documents and designs easily and effectively.” One iPad user is a the “pilot” for a presentation and up to 15 “passenger” iPads can follow along via WiFi or Bluetooth. Idea Flight isn’t a general purpose presentation app, but it does look to make the iPad a more useful business device. Video and more after the jump. → Read More
Evernote, once described to me as “my remote brain”, is releasing a new Google Chrome extension today to make clipping and saving webpages easier than ever. It’s optimized to grab the body of any blog post on any site. It automatically recognizes the structure of any post, and “captures it beautifully without any need for the user to select anything.” → Read More
Nature, the folks who brought you the free life sciences learning community Scitable, are today announcing “Principles of Biology”, a college level electronic textbook. Building upon the cross-platform success of Scitable, the new textbook offers a variety of fully interactive features, including quizzes and assessments, an online gradebook for instructors, and more. Perhaps most notable in this era of constant upgrades and in-app purchases is that this text will be continually updated with top-notch content from Nature’s editing team at no additional cost to anyone who has purchased a copy. “Our interactive textbooks, since they are “born digital”, are designed to capitalize to the maximum degree on the progressive possibilities which digital media opens up for the education space: new distribution models, new learning models, new pricing models. Our textbooks are designed to make students active rather than passive learners throughout the learning process,” says Vikram Savkar, SVP & Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group. → Read More
OpenLogic, makers of open source license compliance scanning software, have released some stats about open source license proliferation and popularity and it makes for some interesting reading. The big takeaway is that developers generally prefer the GNU General Public License while their enterprise employers prefer the Apache Software License. There are a number of ways to interpret this data. → Read More
