open-source

Twitter at a crossroads once again

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and that this spring one-upped critics by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability … Read more

Intel seeks consumers for MeeGo

TAIPEI--Intel has released more details and the deployment road map for the company's MeeGo operating system, highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open-source platform.

During his keynote here Wednesday at Computex 2010, Peter Biddle, director of Intel's AppUp products and services, noted that while he is "no longer worried" about attracting developers to create content for the MeeGo platform, it is consumer adoption that now preoccupies his thoughts. "We need more consumers," he declared.

MeeGo version 1.0 was unveiled last week and the chipmaker said Netbooks running the OS will … Read more

Sourceforge eats its open-source dogfood

You might not recognize the name Geeknet, but you probably know its popular tech sites such as Sourceforge, Slashdot, Ohloh, Think Geek, Freshmeat, and the recently acquired Geek.com.

When Geeknet opened a new data center in Chicago two years ago, the network operations team wanted to centralize management of hundreds of systems serving the Geeknet Web network.

Geeknet's servers run 100 percent open-source software, including CentOS Linux, and a number of open-source Web servers, mail servers, databases (MySQL, Postgres, Memchache), along with a large number of source code repositories running Subversion.

The company needed a monitoring and management … Read more

Firefox for Windows starts 64-bit transition

Mainstream microprocessors have been 64-bit for years. Operating systems have followed suit. Now it's time for a program used by hundreds of millions of people to make the leap: Firefox.

Programmer Armen Zambrano Gasparnian announced the first 64-bit Firefox builds for Windows on Friday, offering an FTP site for those who want to download it. But the software isn't for mainstream users yet.

For one thing, there's no installer included yet, though that work is under way, too. For another, the software is still one of the very raw "nightly" builds for developers.

Support for … Read more

Novell auction could be patent troll bonanza

On Thursday Novell reported another poor quarter with fiscal second-quarter earnings down 5.4 percent to $204 million and a declining cash balance of $980 million. That's bad for Novell investors, of course, but it may portend something even worse for the wider industry.

Patent lawsuits. Lots of them.

As reported, as many as 20 organizations have registered bids for Novell, most (or all) of them private equity firms. While an Oracle or a Cisco might acquire Novell for its maintenance streams and product portfolio, it's unclear that private equity firms will have the same motivation. For at … Read more

Willow Garage gets robots into researchers' hands

MENLO PARK, California--If you've never seen 11 all-purpose robots doing a choreographed flag-waving dance--and really, who has?--Willow Garage was the place to be Wednesday night.

That's because Willow Garage, a developer of robotics hardware and software, threw a party to celebrate the "graduation" of 11 teams (see video below) from around the world, each of which has won the right to take possession for two years of one of Willow Garage's PR2 open-source robots and work on a series of innovative and unique research projects.

The idea is that each team, using the PR2 … Read more

Cute Qbot aims to be Model T of robots

Where's the robot revolution already? It's 2010! Aren't we supposed to be hip-deep in droids by now? Well, Spanish robot developer Francisco Paz thinks he's got the makings of a proverbial Ford Model T for robots, a cute little number called Qbot.

Qbot may lack arms and legs, and it may look like a knockoff of NEC's perennially underemployed PaPeRo, but it's got several features that make it interesting. One is that it's designed to be an interactive home robot based on readily available open-source software and hardware for DIY upgrades. Another is … Read more

Microsoft allows outsiders to peek inside Outlook

Microsoft announced on Monday two open-source projects that let developers view data from Outlook without the need for the e-mail and calendar program itself.

One is a software development kit for reading the .pst files that Outlook uses to save personal files; the other is a graphical tool for viewing the internal data structure of the .pst files.

"Combined, the documentation and tools advance interoperability with data stored in .pst files, reflecting customer requests for greater access to data stored and shared in digital formats generated by Microsoft Outlook and for enhanced data portability," Microsoft said on its … Read more

Google open-sources My Tracks GPS Android app

Google has released the source code for an an Android phone GPS program called My Tracks, which lets people record where they've been, log journeys in Google Docs, and post their trip maps online.

"You can expect My Tracks to become better than ever with the contributions we hope it will receive from other developers, and also that many applications which work side-by-side with My Tracks will be written," Google engineer Rodrigo Damazio said in an e-mail list posting Friday. "For instance, one could easily build an application for tracking fitness activities, geocaching, aviation, and so … Read more

Does cloud computing need LAMP?

The LAMP stack is a collection of open-source technologies commonly integrated to create a platform capable of supporting a wide variety of Web applications. LAMP typically consists of Linux, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, and either the PHP, Python or Perl scripting languages. Famously used at some of the best known Web businesses (such as Wikipedia), LAMP has seen widespread adopting in corporate and government settings in the last several years.

My cohost on the occasional Overcast podcast, Geva Perry, recently wrote a blog post asking a simple but profound question: who will build the LAMP cloud? Who will create the first … Read more