Open Source Latest News

Seems just the other day – actually it was two weeks ago – that we divined that HP, imagining blowing Google away, would pull out the stops to get the webOS that it bought, put in a tablet that failed in the market, dropped, then open sourced – life’s funny like that – in shape to publish the code in stages. And what do you know – surprise, surprise – HP Wednesday committed to a timetable for getting the thing out in steps by September under the lenient Apache 2.0 license. HP is making much of the fact that it materialized the roadmap 47 days after it said it would open source webOS. God knows whether HP or anybody else will ever really exploit the thing. For HP it depends on the auspices – like two bald eagles seen circling Google or Apple talons extended.

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When it comes to procurement, any technology or service should be evaluated with a good set of criteria. Executive decisions should not be weighted solely on a single selection criterion such as price. This applies to any cloud computing service as well. The twelve criteria listed below (see Chart 1) forces executives to take a broader review of the many elements of the total cloud computing service, and not just price. Each criteria starts with an R, F, or P which makes it easy to remember the total framework for the Yardstick for Technology Procurement (RFP).

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Apple has taken the International Trade Commission’s month-old decision finding HTC’s Android gismos infringe only one of the patents it asserted and letting it ship the products while it fixes the problem to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The patent-watching Foss Patents blog says Apple quietly lodged the appeal on December 29. The blog learned from an Apple filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a case against Motorola Mobility that the ITC’s administrative law judge had sided with Apple and found HTC guilty of infringing Apple’s US 6,343,263 real-time API patent but that that decision had been overturned by the ITC’s panel of six commissioners.

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EMC CEO Joe Tucci is gonna keep his eventual replacement waiting a while longer. When the company posted pretty Q4 results the other day Tucci said he won’t be stepping down this year as planned. He said the board asked him to stay into 2013 and that “after much soul-searching” he agreed. “As I’ve said in the past, the board and I fully expect that my successor will come from within the existing, talented and experienced ranks of the EMC management team” – who reportedly all asked him to reconsider his transition plans.

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This is the second of two articles about open source ecommerce software that we hope will help web developers and system administrators in selecting what is best for their needs. The first article Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) reviewed: HikaShop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redSHOP and RokQuickCart. The following article details our own analysis of the last 5 vendors in our article series. Founded in 2005, the company VirtueMart has developed a free and open source shopping cart software as an extension for Joomla. Formerly known as mambo-phpShop, VirtueMart is a popular Joomla extension written in PHP, within a MySQL database environment.

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This is the second of two articles about open source ecommerce software that we hope will help web developers and system administrators in selecting what is best for their needs. The first article Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) reviewed: HikaShop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redSHOP and RokQuickCart. The following article details our own analysis of the last 5 vendors in our article series. Founded in 2005, the company VirtueMart has developed a free and open source shopping cart software as an extension for Joomla. Formerly known as mambo-phpShop, VirtueMart is a popular Joomla extension written in PHP, within a MySQL database environment.

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Red Hat Storage (née Gluster) has recruited open source experts at Facebook, OpenStack and Eucalyptus for an independent GlusterFS advisory board meant to push the open source GlusterFS project and foster contributions and participation from third-party sys admins, developers and ISVs. Board members include chairman John Mark Walker, GlusterFS Community Manager at Red Hat; GlusterFS project co-founder Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy; Facebook storage engineer Richard Wareing; Citrix Xen engineer and OpenStack core contributor Ewan Mellor; Citrix CloudStack community manager and Fedora advisory board member David Nalley; Picture Marketing senior system administrator Louis Zuckerman; Ed Wyse Beauty Products senior system administrator Joe Julian; Red Hat Filesystem engineer and HekaFS project founder Jeff Darcy, and Eucalyptus community VP Greg DeKoenigsberg. Walker said, “We have established this advisory board to help ensure the future success of GlusterFS and facilitate communication between community members and the project. Each of these board members was selected based on their past contributions to GlusterFS or their standing in related communities.” Examples of items that will be voted on soon include approval or modifications of the board charter, approval of new initiatives for GlusterFS and approval of release schedules and roadmaps.

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Open-Xchange, the supplier of business-class email and collaboration software for cloud providers, has announced the appointment of Carsten Dirks as chief operating officer (COO). Responsible for engineering, professional services, support, key account management and administration, Dirks joins a company that grew to more than 42 million users in 2011 - an increase of 75 percent over the prior year - with plans to increase to more than 80 million in 2012. "We have enormous growth potential as our products serve the increasing demand for communication and collaboration software delivered via the cloud," said Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange. "In combination with the mobile and web-based computing opportunities, Open-Xchange is growing to support the market demand. Carsten will help us move ahead from our pole position in this market to further grow our business with our worldwide partner ecosystem."

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Open-Xchange, the supplier of business-class email and collaboration software for cloud providers, has announced the appointment of Carsten Dirks as chief operating officer (COO). Responsible for engineering, professional services, support, key account management and administration, Dirks joins a company that grew to more than 42 million users in 2011 - an increase of 75 percent over the prior year - with plans to increase to more than 80 million in 2012. "We have enormous growth potential as our products serve the increasing demand for communication and collaboration software delivered via the cloud," said Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange. "In combination with the mobile and web-based computing opportunities, Open-Xchange is growing to support the market demand. Carsten will help us move ahead from our pole position in this market to further grow our business with our worldwide partner ecosystem."

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“CloudStack grew out of Cloud.com. It’s an open source product, and as the product gains maturity and gains market share we have started to see real contribution coming back,” observes Shannon Williams, President and Vice President, Market Development, Cloud Platforms at Citrix Systems, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“CloudStack grew out of Cloud.com. It’s an open source product, and as the product gains maturity and gains market share we have started to see real contribution coming back,” observes Shannon Williams, President and Vice President, Market Development, Cloud Platforms at Citrix Systems, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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The Apache Software Foundation, where Oracle sent OpenOffice in June after it adjured the stuff, said Tuesday that it will put out OpenOffice 3.4 in the first quarter whose code will all be under the Apache license, resolving lingering incompatibility issues. It used what was ostensibly an open letter to the Open Document Format community to distance itself from the new German Team OpenOffice.com fork and its fund-raising attempts and warn it about misusing its trademark including “OpenOffice.org and all related marks.”

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The Apache Software Foundation, where Oracle sent OpenOffice in June after it adjured the stuff, said Tuesday that it will put out OpenOffice 3.4 in the first quarter whose code will all be under the Apache license, resolving lingering incompatibility issues. It used what was ostensibly an open letter to the Open Document Format community to distance itself from the new German Team OpenOffice.com fork and its fund-raising attempts and warn it about misusing its trademark including “OpenOffice.org and all related marks.”

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Reuters says IP firm IPCom has sued maybe 30 German retailers so far for patent infringement for selling HTC phones. HTC last month dropped an appeal of an injunction IPCom got from a German court in 2009. That made the injunction enforceable. The phones enjoined are any devices using UMTS technology, which is everything HTC sells. IPCom subsequently sent maybe 100 retailers a notice to stop selling the phones by December 20. They didn’t cooperate so it started suing. The penalty is supposed to be a fine of up to €250,000 ($326,000) for each violation. To head off IPCom HTC rushed into a court in Düsseldorf last week and got a preliminary injunction to stop IPCom from sending retailers the cease and desist letter. IPCom told Bloomberg the amended language doesn’t stop it from threatening legal action.

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Reuters says IP firm IPCom has sued maybe 30 German retailers so far for patent infringement for selling HTC phones. HTC last month dropped an appeal of an injunction IPCom got from a German court in 2009. That made the injunction enforceable. The phones enjoined are any devices using UMTS technology, which is everything HTC sells. IPCom subsequently sent maybe 100 retailers a notice to stop selling the phones by December 20. They didn’t cooperate so it started suing. The penalty is supposed to be a fine of up to €250,000 ($326,000) for each violation. To head off IPCom HTC rushed into a court in Düsseldorf last week and got a preliminary injunction to stop IPCom from sending retailers the cease and desist letter. IPCom told Bloomberg the amended language doesn’t stop it from threatening legal action.

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After lauding Steve Jobs as the “Michelangelo of our time,” combining visionary genius with extraordinary engineering smarts, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that Google means to bring its own tablet to market in the next six months as good if not better than the iPad. “Noi nei prossimi sei mesi contiamo di mettere sul mercato un tablet di altissima qualità.” Now if that’s true, do you suppose such a thing will come from Google as the failed Nexus One did or from Motorola Mobility or from Android OEMs generally? He also said competition between the iPhone and Android will be “brutal” because that’s capitalism.

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After lauding Steve Jobs as the “Michelangelo of our time,” combining visionary genius with extraordinary engineering smarts, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that Google means to bring its own tablet to market in the next six months as good if not better than the iPad. “Noi nei prossimi sei mesi contiamo di mettere sul mercato un tablet di altissima qualità.” Now if that’s true, do you suppose such a thing will come from Google as the failed Nexus One did or from Motorola Mobility or from Android OEMs generally? He also said competition between the iPhone and Android will be “brutal” because that’s capitalism.

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Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we’ve seen how, in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud, VMWare’s Cloud Foundry or Red Hat’s OpenShift have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies. The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offering is very simple: these platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, and MySQL. When we start exploring these technologies in detail, we will quickly realize that they could have a profound impact on the enterprise software industry, changing the economics and cultural aspects of the open source model. For the last 20 something years, open source technologies have been fighting an uphill battle to gain a wide adoption within traditional business that favors commercial software alternatives. Lack of support options, poor documentation, or vendor commitment are some of the reasons (or prejudices  ) that are often seen as limitations of open source technology stacks. Those years of anti-open source religion have had a deep influence on the software markets. If you think about it, other than JBoss, MySQL or SpringSource, we can’t cite many other big exits of open source technology vendors. While it is true that the number of exits or acquisitions is not in direct correlation to the viability of a business model, it’s a pretty good indicator of the health and stability of a specific market segment.

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HP is expanding its Big Data analytics appliance alliance with SAP, moving SAP’s HANA in-memory database widgetry to its BladeSystem. Used to query multiple types of SAP and non-SAP data sources in near-real-time or batch, HANA hasn’t been on blades before – unless you count Hitachi’s. HP is king of the blades but more importantly 47% of SAP’s applications run on HP hardware and this stuff is going to be targeted at SAP’s installed base. The new scale-out addition to the HP AppSystem for SAP HANA portfolio includes the HP X9300 IBRIX Network Storage System – expected in time to be the dominant storage type for HANA – with the HP P6500 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), part of HP’s Converged Infrastructure. IBM prefers local storage, plus replication for HANA.

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In the next two weeks Amazon said Monday that it’s going to update the software in its $199 Kindle Fire over-the-air to address buyer complaints about the performance of the vaunted seven-inch Android tablet. It’s supposed to make the balky touchscreen easier to navigate and let users erase recent activity as well as choose what items are displayed. If that’s all, it won’t address all the gripes including scrolling, Wi-Fi and Internet access and stodgy apps. Some of the widgets have reportedly been returned. TechCrunch says the Fire is just fine inside Amazon’s “walled garden.”

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