Open source

Cloud platforms of the future: Hadoop and Eucalyptus

Without a doubt, the cloud and all its forms and meanings were big news in 2008. Besides the huge growth of Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, we saw Salesforce launch Force.com, a true platform-as-a-service.

My picks for the most interesting software of 2008 are Hadoop and Eucalyptus.

Hadoop is an Apache project, the "open source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for the detailed analysis and transformation of very large data sets," which basically means you can process a ton of data on commodity hardware.

Hadoop is going commercial through Cloudera and while details are not publicly available, let's just say there are some very important and interesting foundations being laid for the way that people deal with computing and processing power. … Read more

Red Hat's new support product demonstrates subscription value

Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them.

From the announcement:

Extended Update Support allows a customer with a large mission-critical deployment to reduce server administration and management costs by standardizing on a single update release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for up … Read more

The Linux desktop isn't your father's PC

This post by Michael Dolan at IBM is spot on:

Here's the thing, everyone who hears "Linux desktop" has a knee-jerk reaction and thinks of all the things they do on their own PC, laptop, Mac. The reality is you're probably not the target market for virtual desktops. The market is large desktop environments that have thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of users and who are not doing consumer-oriented work (or shouldn't be). The cost savings of moving from physical PCs in a 1 user to 1 PC model to a managed model with virtual … Read more

How 2007's hot trends played out in 2008

About this time last year, I took a look back at some of the macro trends that hit their stride during 2007. I thought it would be interesting to see which of those trends are still noteworthy, which new ones are on the radar, and generally how the landscape has changed.

Server virtualization remains perhaps the hottest trend in IT. It may no longer be pegging the hype meter quite as hard, but that's only because server virtualization has moved into the mainstream. It's ever more clearly one of those fundamental developments that touches and transforms all manner of associated technologies, products, and processes. … Read more

Open Sources Episode 4: Now with guests!

Matt Asay and I finally broke down and got a guest on our Open Sources podcast series. It wasn't that we didn't want to before, just that we were too stupid to figure out how to make Skype work properly.

In this episode we are joined by Robin Yellow, a British man-of-mystery (misery?) not unlike Austin Powers.

You can get the mp3 directly, or the OGG if you are feeling frisky.

Highlights: * We discuss the furor of stupidity related to Macworld * Matt refuses to answer questions with a simple yes/no * Robin assures us that open source will … Read more

I'm a guest on the IT Management Podcast this week

I joined the IT Management podcast today to talk about some wacky predictions for 2009 with Redmonk's Michael Cote, John M. Willis and Zenoss' Matt Ray.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Some show notes and our outlandish theories for 2009

* Apple launches its own cloud * A net-celeberty lives off their iPhone for a year * US government web-sites get APIs * Amazon starts a marketplace for virtual goods * Open source startups begin to consolidate as … Read more

'Myst Online' to be released fully open-source

Cyan Worlds has decided to release all of the Myst Online: Uru Live assets to the public as open source, including the client and server architecture.

Cyan will also hold one Myst Online server shard open for players to have a centralized world, while others can now freely put up their own Myst Online servers.

This will be an interesting experiment to see whether a development community forms around this massively multiplayer online game. Unlike many open-source projects that solve developer problems (and therefore have a direct audience), a game casts a broader net to a nondeveloper community.

I also … Read more

Teacher Confiscates Linux CDs, says "No Software Is Free"

Who needs Microsoft FUD when brainwashed teachers are doing free marketing?

A teacher in Texas recently confiscated Linux OS discs that a kid was passing out in class. She also sent a nastygram to HeliOS, the nonprofit that built and donated the Linux-loaded computer.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your … Read more

Monetizing open source and killing Adobe AIR

Appcelerator, an open-source company that makes it easier to build and manage rich Web applications with aim to bring them to the desktop, today announced Titanium, its new platform to do just this.

Titanium is primed to be the open-source Adobe AIR killer so I sat down with Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator's CEO, to drill him on the preview release.

Q: What is Titanium and why should we care? Haynie: We started Appcelerator with the dream of developing an open platform to make it faster, cheaper and easier to build rich Web applications and deploy them in various environments such as the desktop and mobile device.

We first came out with the Appcelerator SDK that allows you to rapidly build a rich Web app with fully integrated front-end and back-end plug-ins. The back-end supports a ton of programming languages and frameworks and on the front-end we have a tool kit to support building the apps--so it makes it super easy. We wanted to take it one step further though and so came out with Titanium today.

In simple terms, Titanium is an open-source platform that allows you to build desktop and mobile applications using standard Web technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Titanium means you can easily work with your existing Web development skills, you can build native desktop applications with all the traditional functionality of a desktop app and you are completely free to innovate and push the boundaries since the platform is entirely open. You don't even need to use the Appcelerator SDK at all. … Read more

AT&T drops Java on mobile phones, Sun updates JavaFX to no avail

Just as Sun announced the latest rev of JavaFX, AT&T announced that they would drop Java-based phones, favoring Symbian.

Tom Krazit reported earlier today on the news, quoting Roger Smith, director of next-generation services at AT&T who said "Java has not been a success," Smith said. "It's not because Java is bad, but we didn't manage it effectively."

The basic premise of the argument against Java is that it became fragmented with every manufacturer using its own version and defeating much of the purpose of Java as a … Read more