Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST
This month marks the fifth anniversary of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as an industry standard. On May 1, 2005, ODF (OpenDocument v1.0 specification) was approved as an OASIS Standard, marking the beginning of a campaign for document freedom that many people probably didn't expect wou...
Although I haven’t seen a thoroughly researched study, I figure there must be at least 250,000 FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools available to every systems administrator on the planet (230,000 at SourceForge + 15,000 at Launchpad + 12,000 at CodePlex + 5,000 at Google Code and...
In our constant pursuit of exploring new technologies, we stumbled upon the Eucalyptus and greatly contemplated on its installation. Being driven by our leaning towards cloud. Eucalyptus really clouded our minds and we decided, "no pain, no gain". And here we are having successfully in...
Federal Computer Week published a great, succinct quote from Richard Schaeffer Jr., the NSA’s (National Security Agency) information assurance director, on three approaches that are effective in protecting systems from security attacks: We believe that if one institutes best practices,...
For small and mid-sized businesses, there often is a question about whether to stick with tried and true software providers such as Microsoft for your servers, e-mail and business applications or consider adoption of open-source products such as Linux. I've witnessed in this region som...
Some people say “oh, you’re dual licensing like MySQL. So does that mean that I get to use it and not pay as I don’t with my MySQL based website?” Companies such as Google have thousands of MySQL servers running without paying license fees for it, due to a loophole in the GPL (in both ...
The November 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM) has a very interesting article by Paul Stachour and David Collier-Brown entitled “You Don’t Know Jack About Software Maintenance”. The authors argue energetically for using versioned data structures and “continuous upgrading” ...
Everyone knows that the longevity and ultimate success of a platform lies in the developers willing to create on that platform. Creating a healthy developer ecosystem in which both the developer and the platform vendor can grow and prosper is very important. No one knows this better th...
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, took its second major step in five months towards open-source cloud computing today, debuting an open source version of Traffic Server, a high performance application server for builders of cloud services. Traffic Server ena...
Wow, look at me, I'm famous. Oh wait, what have I done. Are people going to follow me to the grocery store with cameras now?
Probably not, unless the world turns it's attention from Jon and Kate to SAP Business One. But in our little world, this is pretty cool.
Orchestra and myse...
Software designed by open source standards has security built in and has been found to be fielded with far fewer faults per unit of code than proprietary development houses. There are many reasons for this. This factor is especially true when the open source code is commercially supp...
In a Linux system, files, blocks, directories, sockets and other items are referred by corresponding file descriptors. If your system is reporting errors that the file descriptor is bad, one of possible causes is that file system is corrupt and thus, you require restoring from backup
"I liked it better in Portland," said one OSCON attendee to another during Thursday's lunch. This comment summed up the feeling of OSCON 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nice people, wrong venue.
Portland's progressive reputation and its status as the North American home of o...
A common question small business owners ask themselves is when their business is ready to implement an ERP software application that will replace their existing small business software. Fortunately for the small business owner, there are a number of small business ERP software solution...
Most readers of this blog are probably well aware that a new version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution is coming this week, and that it will be putting code from the Open Source EUCALYPTUS Project to work in simplifying the creation of private Clouds that look remarkably like Amazon’s E...
Unemployment is rising and competition for the few jobs that are available is becoming tougher than ever. With each open job requisition, hiring managers are receiving hundreds of résumés. How do you stand out of the crowd? What can you do to get noticed? How can you start an interesti...
"At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud." That, in no uncertain terms, is Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's vision for Java and stresses the...
Wind River says it's collaborating with Intel and will develop an open, extensible Moblin-based Linux platform for Atom-bearing MIDs. Both open source and commercial versions should be available next year. The commercial Wind River Linux Platform for Mobile Internet Devices is supposed...
Just as we have become dependent on oil as an energy resource, we have also become dependent on a single vendor solution for saving our digital history - in the form of our word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. Last year, it was estimated that more than 90 percent o...
Wind River and Intel are putting their heads together to create an extensible open source Linux platform for the automotive industry - an infotainment (gad, that horrid word) platform for Intel's newfangled Atom chip. It's part of a major new product strategy for Wind River, which is g...
It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is b...
Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the softw...
Is software development a science or an art? The software industry treats it as a science. It uses processes like MRDs, PRDs, and functional specs to convert customer needs into software that solves their problems. Various roles like product managers, engineering managers, project mana...
With only two weeks to go now before JavaOne, its annual Javaganza for developers, Sun has revealed that Java is at long last to be made 100% open source. 'We're trying to get Java into places it's never been before,' Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, told an in...
Anyone who's ever been involved in the beginning of a nonprofit consortium will tell you that the first year is the hardest. The initial high of coming together in the name of a shared cause gives way to the drudgery of meetings, working groups and member politics. The realities of exe...
Josep Mitjà, COO of Openbravo and OSA board member, argues that while technological advances in open source software should be viewed on a worldwide basis, its ultimate success in the market requires a localized approach. The secret, he says, is to 'think global, but act local.'
Although organizations are not realizing the full potential benefits of open source due to the way open source projects are currently managed, this does not mean that there are no benefits from developing in open source. Once you get past the 'free developer' presumption and carefully ...
Enterprise networks are growing increasingly complex. Over the past five years, the increased focus on unified security, network optimization, and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices, and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed ...
One of the most exciting things about the software industry is how fast it moves. Software is constantly optimizing itself around the state-of-the-art. Inherent industry bottlenecks change cyclically every five years or so. Architectures and solutions change too. CPUs too costly? Enter...
Governance is currently a key topic for many IT functions. Its definition varies, but its key themes are true for all companies: effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Business value and risk mitigation are also at its center and represent a significant part of enterprise governan...
Efforts to modernize enterprise infrastructure have never been more complex. While the need is certainly there on multiple fronts - competitive edge, cost savings and new business initiatives, to name just a few - new hurdles seem to pop up no matter where an IT administrator might loo...
There's a great deal of interest in open source software development these days. While the concept of open source (if not the name itself) is hardly new - people have been freely sharing source code since the beginning of the computer industry - the convergence of commercial interest i...
