Red Hat is bullish on cloud computing. That's no surprise: Its version of GNU/Linux has been a driving force behind the last decade's infrastructure revolution, from which the idea of cloud computing arose.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is coming up on his five-year anniversary at the helm, following his arrival in December 2007. Under Whitehurst's leadership, Red Hat's revenue has grown from $523 million in its fiscal 2008 to more than $1.1 billion in its fiscal 2012, without deviating from its core strategy of open source infrastructure software.
With Adobe's divestment of Flex and mobile Flash and Microsoft's move from Silverlight to Metro, Oracle now seems all alone in believing that a fat client framework -- in the form of JavaFX -- is a worthwhile investment.
Fewer and fewer options exist for developing purely fat client desktop applications and fewer still for RAD applications with Web-based delivery (aka, "thick clients"). We are on the verge of a purely HTML/JavaScript client world.
Red Hat is planning to roll out a number of product sets for building hybrid clouds over the next few months, the company announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.
The Eclipse Foundation, which has been a staple for open source development tools for most of the past decade, will offer its annual "release train" on Wednesday, featuring tools for mobile application development and a new base platform itself.
With nearly 1 billion users worldwide and 500 million people visiting its social network every day, Facebook has its work cut out for it in managing its systems. To help do that, the company has been developing its own management and development tools tuned to its specific needs, rather than relying on commercial offerings.
There are a growing number of open source cloud infrastructure players in the market, but Eucalyptus says it is the best bet for private enterprise clouds. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with CEO Mårten Mickos, who, as the former CEO of MySQL, has loads of experience growing significant open source companies, to learn more about the company and how Mickos sees private clouds evolving.
Last week I caught up with Rackspace president Lew Moorman at the GigaOM Structure event to promote OpenStack, the open source "cloud operating system" started by Rackspace and NASA.
While some of the open source projects that Sun Microsystems created -- and which I used to work with -- have maintained a high profile, the one most associated with Sun in the minds of system administrators has been strangely forgotten. Whatever happened to OpenSolaris?
The OpenSolaris story illustrates a key value delivered by the liberties provided via open source. When your vendor changes direction, what do you do? Traditionally, you have five options:
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3, Red Hat has tweaked the enterprise grade Linux distribution to add new capabilities in storage, virtualization, security, scalability, and performance.
"This is one of largest update release to date," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering development. "It has a lot of performance scalability optimizations specifically targeted at virtualized cloud deployments in the data center."
Enterprise open source software provider Red Hat has jumped into the emerging NoSQL market, releasing an in-memory data store as part of an update of its JBoss management platform.
Since last year, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos has acknowledged that his company hasn't done a great job in engaging and retaining support from the open sour
When your Linux server starts feeling sluggish, you might benefit from looking at your swap space and gauging whether it's adequately sized for your system's workload. Fortunately, Linux has some handy commands for helping you get a good picture of your system's behavior.
Setting your swap space to be twice the size of your RAM is a good rule of thumb, but systems with very large amounts of memory likely won't likely need anywhere near that amount of swap. Besides, adding it later is easy if you have adequate disk space.
The new Defensive Patent License (DPL), launched this week by two UC Berkeley law professors, offers an improved way for businesses -- especially small businesses -- to protect themselves from patent attacks. Over time, it may also disarm patent trolls by reducing the supply of "weaponized" patents.
Running what they believe is the world's largest Hadoop-based collection of data, Facebook engineers have developed a way to circumnavigate a core weakness of the data analysis platform, that of relying on only a single name server to coordinate all operations.
In an effort to secure a spot as the de facto virtualization provider for all things Hadoop, VMware today announced an open s
via Open Source Software - Infoworld http://images.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/vmware-bets-big-data-it-brings-hadoop-virtual-world-195457?source=rss_open_source_software
Developers at open-source nonprofit organization Linaro have posted a set of code tweaks for Android, enabling up to 100 percent increases in performance, compared to a vanilla version of Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich."
For the first production release of what will be its flagship Apache Hadoop distribution, Hortonworks has focused on providing a set of tools to help deploy, manage, and extend the data analysis platform.
"Hortonworks' goal is to make Hadoop easy to use and consume," said John Kreisa, Hortonworks vice president of marketing.
The phrase "open source hardware" sounds silly. Open source software tends to come in a free version, but hardware, not so much. Yet the folks at the Open Compute Project, led by Facebook, insist on the phrase.
What they really mean is that the hardware designs, including full specs and CAD files, are open source. So why would the Open Compute Project create intellectual property of significant value and give it away?
Let's look at some basic commands that report on memory usage. The first that probably comes to mind is free. The free command will tell you about used and unused memory and about swap space. Physical memory is the random access storage provided by the RAM modules plugged into your motherboard. Swap is some portion of space on your hard drive that is used as if it is an extension of your physical memory.
