Articles about Open Source

While not all open source solutions are better than the closed source alternatives, opting for the former for underlying infrastructure is generally a good idea. This will provide a business with flexibility and stability while sometimes saving money too.

A Singapore school, the Yale-NUS College, had some needs revolving around the cloud, so it wisely chose two open source friendly companies to help -- Dell and Red Hat. The OpenStack cloud solution, a product that was co-created by the two aforementioned companies, has been a huge success for the college.

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OpenStack is a popular open source tool for creating public and private clouds and is used by big companies around the world.

To make running OpenStack systems easier, open source network specialist Akanda is launching a new version of its Astara platform that radically simplifies the complexity and scale of implementations.

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Mozilla is starting an open source-supporting award program with an initial allocation of $1 million. The company has long been a proponent of open source software, and now wants to give something back to the community on which it so heavily relies.

The Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) is described as a way of both giving back to the community, but also giving forward to up and coming projects that could benefit others. A key feature of the program is a focus on improving the security of open source software, and Mozilla is looking to identify up to ten projects to help fund by the middle of December.

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Walmart is making its OneOps cloud platform open source in a bid to keep up with its main competitor Amazon. The US retailer has experienced financial disappointment in recent years as modern, predominantly digital, businesses eat away at its market share. Its chief financial officer Charles Holley recently warned that revenue is unlikely to grow until 2019.

Walmart clearly believes that it must modernize in order to stay afloat, hence the news that it will be releasing the source code for its OneOps cloud platform on GitHub before the end of the year. In doing so, the retailer is offering developers an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) where they are not tied into long term contracts and compatible technologies.

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If you have an iPhone, you're stuck with running iOS apps; if you have an Android phone, you're stuck with Android apps. At least that used to be the case. For desktop platforms such as OS X and Linux, tools and emulators exist that make it possible to run software designed for a different platform. CodeWeavers produce CrossOver which enables PC games and applications to run on non-PC platforms.

At the moment, CrossOver is available for Mac and Linux, but there are plans to bring the tool to Android. This means that, ultimately, it should be possible to run Windows software on an Android phone or tablet.

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When it comes to home networking, nothing is more iconic than the classic blue Linksys router. When I worked at CompUSA, I sold a ton of them, and for good reason -- they worked well. Over the years, some of the models proved popular for open-source firmware replacements, making them attractive to tinkerers.

Fast forward to today, and Linksys announces a new open source-friendly router, which builds upon the existing WRT1900AC. With a faster processor and double the RAM, the new model gets an "S" moniker -- reminiscent of Apple's iPhone naming -- as WRT1900ACS. Are you excited for this Linux-powered home router?

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With the volume of network traffic growing exponentially, large web-scale organizations need to scale their data centers to new levels. These organizations need scale and flexibility for their data centers to meet increasingly complex business and technology requirements.

To provide developers with the ability to accelerate innovation, avoid vendor lock in and protect their investment, HP together with a community of like-minded companies, today announced the launch of the OpenSwitch Community along with a new open source network operating system (NOS).

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While I am a GNOME fan, I recognize how wonderful KDE is too. If you prefer a traditional desktop user interface, KDE is a smart choice. Not only is it it easy to use for beginners, but it offers a ton of customization options for advanced users too.

There are quite a few KDE-based Linux distros, such as Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE, and Netrunner, but the lesser known KaOS offers a more pure experience. This distro has a goal of remaining lean, while being fairly bleeding edge regarding KDE packages -- it is a great showcase for the desktop environment. Today, version 2015.10 sees release, and you can download it now.

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Building an open-source community takes dedication, hard work and no small number of late nights. As a community gets started there is generally a sense of momentum, ownership and deep commitment. But what happens once your community becomes established and successful? Inevitably volunteers are going to cycle in and out. As a community leader, you need to consider methods to bring in new members, spread the workload and communicate where and when the project could use help. How can you maximize growth and maintain your momentum?

At the Mozilla Developer Network we've kept our community engaged and involved for 10 years.  Here are some tips on how we managed it.

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Not everybody, or everything, can be the best. In the Olympics, for instance, somebody wins the Gold medal, while someone gets the Silver. In other words, second place is still rarefied air, albeit less impressive than first, but still celebration-worthy.

Today, the runner-up to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, celebrates its 5th Birthday. Quite frankly, it is an amazing office suite, offering compatibility with Windows, Linux and OS X. The best part? It is open source and totally free -- like, no money needed. Even if it isn't as good as Microsoft's solution, it is more than enough for the average home user, and it deserves to be celebrated.

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A gift and curse of Linux-based operating systems is the large selection. It is very cool that there are so many operating systems to choose from, but a good amount of them are crap. In other words, you have to sift through hundreds of fringe distros to discover the gems.

One such gem is Manjaro Linux. This Arch-based distribution is well-designed and offers a great out-of-the-box experience. While not ideal for beginners, it is a solid choice for advanced Linux users who don't have the time or patience for a vanilla Arch install. Today, Manjaro reaches version 15.09, code-named 'Bellatrix'.

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The in-memory performance and functionality of Spark is a valuable building block for enterprises looking to implement real-time data pipelines and streaming analytics.

This becomes more important as companies are faced with an increasing number of data points across different sources, and the need to deal with varied data types. Leader in real-time databases for transactions and analytics MemSQL, today released Spark Streamliner, an integrated Spark solution to give enterprises immediate access to real-time analytics.

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As websites and online services become ever more demanding, the need for compression increases exponentially. Fans of Silicon Valley will be aware of the Pied Piper compression algorithm, and now Google has a more efficient one of its own.

Brotli is open source and is an entirely new data format that offers 20-26 percent greater compression than Zopfli, another compression algorithm from Google. Just like Zopfli, Brotli has been designed with the internet in mind, with the simple aim of making web pages load faster.

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If you are thinking of making the switch to Linux from Windows, there are many good beginner-friendly distributions from which to choose. I highlight two such operating systems here. But what if you are a bit more advanced in the ways of Linux?

Fedora is the top choice of many Linux experts, including the father of the kernel, Linus Torvalds. Today, version 23 of the operating system reaches beta status. Will you try it?

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Malware writers may feel as though they've hit the jackpot after a slip-up by D-Link. The networking company released open source firmware that revealed the private keys used to sign D-Link software.

It was discovered that the firmware for a D-Link DCS-5020L security camera included D-Link's private keys as well as the passphrases needed to sign software. Windows users could have been at risk as malicious software could have been signed allowing for the installation without alerting security software.

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