Today Heroku, a platform cloud company owned by Salesforce.com, released a free PostgreSQL app for Macintosh OSX called Postgres.app. You can download the beta here today, and it will be available on the Mac App Store within the next couple weeks. The app is also on GitHub. OS X Lion and Mountain Lion are supported. → Read More
Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Now it is offering a beta program that will allow a small group of developers to get one of the laptops and join what it calls the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program.
Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking… → Read More
If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source, collaboration, and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day.
I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently… → Read More
It wasn’t that long ago that I complained about cloud fragmentation issues. There were some interesting observations in the comments on that post. Now word comes that the Linux Foundation is hosting CloudOpen, a “new conference to advance openness in the cloud.”
Most of the major players are already committed to participating at CloudOpen: Canonical, Citrix, Dell, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel… → Read More
I think we can all safely agree that open source software development is here to stay. Open, collaborative development has fundamentally changed not only how we code, but also the code we produce. It’s easier than ever to build complex solutions by reusing existing components. A new report from Sonatype examines the current state of open source in the enterprise. Although heavily slanted toward… → Read More
I’ve been harping for a while here on TechCrunch about the benefits of open source software. I often quote Canonical’s Technical Architect Allison Randal, who said “Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software.” Free and open source software enabled much of the innovation we write about here at TechCrunch, but it’s been slow to move into established enterprises, let… → Read More
ThinkUp App, the open source web application born from the non-profit Expert Labs that lets you capture, store and analyze your activity across various social networking sites, has rebooted as a commercial entity. ThinkUp the company is headed up by Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani and famed early blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, who have been working together on Expert Labs since 2009. → Read More
In his seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond put forward the claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He dubbed this Linus’ Law, in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but as the Wikipedia page points out the notion has its detractors. Michael Howard and David LeBlanc claim in their 2003 book Writing Secure Code… → Read More
If you’re sick of firmware lockdowns and failed reflashings on your other Android tablets, the Auraslate may be for you. It’s basically an Ice Cream Sandwich-compatible tablet built from the ground up for hax0rz and programmers alike.
There are two models – the 7-inch 726B and the 10-inch 1026 – and the 1026 can run the latest version of Android. You can upload any version you want, however… → Read More
Amazon has made the Android-based source code of the Kindle Fire available for download. It’s quite large — over 800 megabytes — and won’t be of any use to casual users. It will, however, enable some custom builds of the software and ROM hacking in the future.
Naturally, lots of the Kindle Fire is not, in fact, open source development. What they’re releasing is likely (no one has… → Read More
Several iPhone app developers have teamed up to launch PhotoAppLink, a new open source initiative that aims to simplify photo editing by tying multiple photo-editing apps together.
As you know, there are an incredible number of photo editing apps in iTunes today, and often, each especially excels in one particular area. For example, converting photos to black and white, cropping, compositing or… → Read More
Appsfire, a mobile application marketing platform, is introducing its own solution for the issue created by Apple’s decision to phase out developer access to the UDID (unique device identifier) on iOS devices. It’s called OpenUDID. As you may have guessed by the name, this is an open source UDID initiative.
In other words, it’s an attempt at creating a non-proprietary solution that aims to… → 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
The Robocalypse, it’s coming nearer and nearer. Case in point: POLYRO (short for “oPen sOurce friendLY RObot”), a mini humanoid that apparently costs less than $2,000 to produce, all parts included. Developed by American robot researcher Timothy Payne, the little guy is meant to be used to explore human-robot interaction and can be built following these instructions. → Read More
One of the reasons a lot of big companies shy away from using open source software is because the plethora of open source licenses can make things confusing. The licenses themselves can be confusing, as there are a lot of grey areas with very little case law to help make things clear. Some open source licenses are compatible with certain other open source licenses, but completely incompatible with… → Read More
Arduino seems like a great way to create interactive devices but historically it hasn’t been too hot for creating the ultimate in interactivity, computer gaming. That changed with the release of the Gameduino, a version of the open-source Arduino board pre-loaded with games, sprites, and inputs for various game controllers.
The Gameduino is an open source project and the creator has build a … → Read More
Bloggers Peter Kirn and James Grahame have come up with the MeeBlip, an open source virtual analog monophonic synthesizer. How can a hardware synthesizer be a community thing? For starters you have to put it together. No soldering required but you still have to put the stuff into the enclosure. The whole idea is that the story doesn’t end when you get the synthesizer. It’s a community synth… → Read More
Open source software has many benefits, but one of the greatest is the ability to not reinvent the wheel. By sharing solutions, the open source community is able to develop great software quickly and effectively. Although open source software usually stands alone, on ideological grounds, you can easily find examples of open source software in a great number of successful proprietary applications… → Read More
Haiti is still struggling to recover from the 7-point magnitude earthquake that struck on January 12th. The natural disaster disrupted everything there, including the systems that keep water clean, garbage away from homes and farm land, and people (let alone habitat and animals) healthy.
Despite an outpouring of donations and promises to help from international nonprofits, shelter, food, water… → Read More
Believe it or not, it’s actually quite hard to take an idea from concept to render to prototype to production. Sure, inside Microsoft you can do it in a couple hours (if they don’t assassinate the project), but what if you’re just a group of guys who want to put together a really awesome open-source handheld game console? We’ve had our eye on the Pandora for a long time, but the project has been… → Read More
Today marks the start of the fourth annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which is “an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today.” All the names… → Read More
MeeGo, the unification of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo, and shepherded by the Linux Foundation, is getting a lot of support from a variety of companies. From hardware developers to software houses, from games to automotive to embedded solutions providers, the recent announcement indicates an influx of potentially millions of developer-hours. Some of the new participants are no-brainers, while… → Read More
It’s no secret that I’m a big Free Software fan. It’s no secret that IBM is a giant company with more money than I can possibly imagine. So I was pretty happy in 2005 when IBM, in an obvious PR stunt to get buddy-buddy with the open source community, made its Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS, ostensibly saying that it would permit open source projects to use any of the items… → Read More
What would you do with the openFrameworks and an hour to kill? Would you create an application to detect when you’re smiling and automatically insert “:)” into whatever program is currently running? Theo Watson did, and called it Auto Smiley! 
He released it as open source! We can’t possibly have enough smiley icons embedded into our emails and IMs can we? I mean, we all spend all day… → Read More
After so many years of hoping and wishing, developers can start getting excited about coding for the Symbian platform. Sure, it’s taken a while and some might be looking forward to Maemo 6 later this year far more than a newer version of Symbian, but opening up the source code to the world’s largest operating system is nothing to sneeze at. The Symbian operating system is aging and… → Read More
[Spain] Teambox, a collaborative project management platform, is another Spanish home-grown initiative that aims to compete on an international scale, with the likes of Basecamp, incorporating a social, Yammer-like model. The startup has recently secured €140,000 in a small round through Keiretsu Forum Barcelona, a large international business angels network, mainly from Albert Feliu, ex-CTO… → Read More
When I first started using Linux, back in the late 1990s and the Red Hat 5.2 era, the skills I gained weren’t very useful to many employers. I initially hoped that learning Linux would help me spring into some kind of “real” UNIX job. Now, more than a decade later, Linux is more and more common, has replaced a lot of “real” UNIX systems, and the skills required to administer Linux systems are… → Read More
Open source software is our era’s version of the French scientific salon. In the 18th and 19th centuries, young men (mostly men) would gather at the feet of elder scientists to learn the truth of the day. In Revolutionary France it was philosophy and natural science they studied and in the open source forums of the past decades it was discussions of the finer points of kernels, interrupts… → Read More
Samsung will finally release Android-based cellphones later this year. Too bad us Americans will have to wait till the second half of the year to get ‘em, while a phone will be released outside of the U.S. in June. → Read More
Will Google Chrome signal the end of Firefox’s “geek” domination? That is, will Chrome one day replace Firefox as the computer savvy user’s browser of choice? Maybe, friends. Maybe. Reasons? Chrome is faster, it’s newer (who doesn’t love a shiny, new toy?) and it’s architecturally better—a YouTube tab crash doesn’t bring down the entire browser. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
