Google’s Web Fonts collection of open source fonts is now available on the desktop (Mac and Windows). At first glance, that doesn’t make all that much sense, given that the whole idea of Web Fonts is that they bring new typography options to the Web that were previously only available on the desktop. As Google notes, however, having these fonts available locally on your desktop means… → Read More
Donay, a Dutch startup that’s officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 NY, wants to make it easier for companies and users to provide incentives to open source developers. Say your company is using a popular open-source application, but you find a bug or need a new feature. Currently, there is no easy way to pay open source developers for their work and, Donay argues, that makes it… → Read More
Sony has decided to release a sequel to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for Xperia S it began in August of 2012, and took over from Google in November of last year. This time, the Xperia Z is getting its own project, which means that the company’s water resistant flagship phone will get to participate in the kind of Android development work normally reserved for Google-blessed Nexus… → Read More
Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection. Since Napster, and it getting sued into oblivion (and then acquired for bits… → Read More
The biggest change I’ve seen in the tech industry in the past decade isn’t social media, cloud computing, big data, consumerization or even mobile. It’s the mainstream acceptance of open source. Even 10 years ago open source was controversial. Back then “open vs. proprietary” arguments would still erupt at meetings and parties. Back then vendors spread FUD about open source. Today, every vendor… → Read More
Google today pledged that it will not sue any users, distributors or developers who have implemented open-source versions of its MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets, even though these implementations (including, for example, Apache Hadoop) probably infringe upon 10 patents Google holds for this technology. This move, the company’s senior patent counsel Duane Valz… → 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
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
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
Over the last few years, Netflix has been making its cloud management tools open source and available to other developers. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them. → Read More
A few weeks ago the Crazyflie Nano captured our collective imaginations by winging its way around an open plan office and looking like a cross between a hummingbird and the robotic butterfly that steals things in Dora the Explorer. The tiny quadrotor robot is now available for pre-order for $173 for the multi-sensor version and $143 for a basic version with position sensors. The product should… → Read More
The world of ed-tech is ramping up another notch, and getting a lot more open in the process: educational publishing giant Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Mendeley, a London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics to share research and collaborate with each other via a social network. TechCrunch understands from sources close to the companies that the deal is underway and should… → Read More
Microsoft Open Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, just announced the launch of VM Depot, “a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure.” Azure, of course, already has a store that allows developers to deploy premium applications to its Azure cloud computing service. With VM Depot, Microsoft now also offers a service that’s similar to what… → Read More
Acquia was founded by Dries Buytaert, the creator of the open source content management system Drupal, to monetize the project offering hosting and support. Today the company launched a beta of a new service called Acquia Media Cloud and released a new version of Drupal Commons, a distribution of Drupal that comes bundled with a set of addons for building community sites. → Read More
Today the Apache Foundation released a major update to the open source search engine building tools Lucene and Solr. Version 4.0 adds several new features aimed at making Solr easier to use, more scalable and more customizable. → Read More
In August, Twitter acquired the small A/B testing service and development framework Clutch.io and announced that it would shut the service down on November 1st. Clutch, which Twitter describes as “an easy-to-integrate library for native iOS applications designed to help you develop faster, deploy instantly and run A/B tests,” will live on, however. The company today announced that it is… → Read More
Open source IT management and monitoring company Zenoss raised a $25 million series C lead by Summit Partners with participation from previous investors Grotech Ventures, Intersouth Partners and Boulder Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $45 million. → Read More
Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress. → Read More
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.
That’s perhaps the most famous and beloved quote from Sir Thomas More‘s Utopia. If you haven’t read it yet, you… → Read More
Open source fear mongering is still a reality. But in today’s world, it is nuanced with the belief that an open enterprise means open APIs.
They are not the same and should not be confused. → Read More
A new chapter today for Digsby, the social/instant messaging client bought by social network Tagged in April 2011 and effectively put into an idle state soon after. It has now been taken open source, with its code now living on GitHub. The intention to make Digsby open source was first announced in July of this year, but TechCrunch understands that it’s only been in the last day that the source… → Read More
Google today announced that its third Code-in contest for high school students will start on November 26. The contest, which aims to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to open source software development, will run from November to mid January and the 20 grand prize winners (and one of their parents or legal guardians) will get a trip to Mountain View to explore the Google campus and… → Read More
The cost of higher education in the U.S. today is ridiculous. Student debt shot north of $1 trillion earlier this year, for example. It’s not surprising, then, that we’re seeing growing adoption of online learning platforms and tools. MOOCs, or massive online open courses, have been the stars of a new educational model, thanks to their potential to offer quality, affordable education at a scale… → 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
Twitter’s Chris Aniszcyk gave the keynote this morning at CloudOpen and talked about how Twitter uses open source.
His talk provided insights into how open source technology can also be used in an enterprise environment for scaling infrastructure. That’s an emerging topic of interest in the enterprise world. → Read More
Notational Velocity is a cult favorite open source note taking app for OSX. The phrase “life changing” gets thrown around a lot by it devotees. It’s simple, fast and it can sync with either Simplenote or Dropbox, giving you access to all your text notes from virtually any device.
But it’s only for OSX. Now there’s an open source clone called nvPY that runs on OSX, Windows and Linux. → Read More
Walt Disney Corporation added a bit of nonsensical anti-open source fear, uncertainty and doubt to a kid’s sitcom that it aired this past weekend. But the dialogue is so ridiculous that you have to wonder if they have any clue about what they are doing.
In an episode that aired Friday on the Disney Channel, the show Shake It Up features two teenagers begging the stereotypical geeky kid for help… → Read More
Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.
The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release has bug fixes but without a single one having any test cases associated with it. That creates… → Read More
Microsoft continues to make in-roads into open source development. Early last year it open sourced several development related tools, including NuGet and several libraries for its ASP.Net language. And by the end of the year the company announced sponsorship of projects to port both the Node.js development platform and the big data analytics tool Apache Hadoop to Windows. It’s even making Linux… → Read More
I wrote last week that GitHub is the Library of Alexandria of code. That’s not quite accurate since there are still many important open source projects hosted else where, including other repositories like Sourceforge as well as open source foundations like the Apache. Google Code Search, introduced in 2006 was meant to make it easy to search for open source code no matter where it’s stored, but … → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
