Whether or not you rely on open source software in your daily business activities at the moment, its crucial youre aware of it and understand how it can help your business grow.

Open source software is, to put it simply, software made by the public and available for free.

There are so many projects out there being developed right now by volunteers all over the world and its changing the fundamental way businesses operate. Read on to find out more about what this means for your business.

Any software that is made open source by its creators is free for you to use for whatever youd like. This means that if something open source is the perfect tool for you, youll enjoy lower costs than a premium alternative and no contracts or subscription plans holding you hostage to a closed eco-system.

Typically, open source software is licensed under either what is known as the GPL or MIT licenses which gives you the freedom to do what you like without posing any restrictions and terms on you for how and when you use it.

In 2017, security is a big deal and theres no denying that almost anything is prone to hacking attempts.

Open source software can still be affected, but due to the nature of how its made, it means that anyone from the public can contribute to building it. Not only does this mean that you can build feature rich applications, it means you get the security ideas from talented developers from all over the world.

The software is open for everyone to inspect and pull apart which means nothing can hide within the code to give you a nasty surprise later on.

The common adage is if you want something done right, do it yourself. Thankfully, that feature you wanted that doesnt usually exist in the core product may well be available for free for you to add into the system if you so wish.

The idea that something is so easily customisable means that you can reshape the software into anything you want to use it for. It also means that you are able to make your own added extras and give back to the community of the project.

Of course, theres plenty of popular software tools out there that help you get your job done quickly and effectively. However, if youre not using a well-known tool, you may make it harder for you and your organisation to pick things up and get the training to help them get up to speed.

The amount of paid software tools out in the wild is plentiful, and some are popular and well-documented but dont let that fool you. Not all paid for products have helpful resources and support on hand if things go wrong.

Closed off, premium software can sometimes have poor and undocumented tools and features that are hard to understand. With a community of contributors on an open source project, you need not worry. Not everyone is a developer. Not everyone is a server administrator. Some people who want to contribute may be copywriters or even linguists.

Its great having a super piece of software with all the bells and whistles, but not so great if there isnt a help guide to get going or no one to translate it into a common language you might speak.

This touches on some previous points, but its very important to remember that with an open community of volunteers that build and maintain a piece of software can often come a stamp of guarantee that it adheres to current standards. Your data is kept safe and secure, which means you dont have to worry about common hacking attacks. Its audited and put through its paces to make sure its user friendly and works for people with disabilities and different systems.

Theres too many out there to list them all, but to name just a few. There is the ever so popular content management system that is used by millions of people all over the world, every single day; WordPress. The desktop operating system Linux, which is what the popular MacOS is based on! WebKit, built by Apple that is the engine that powers your web browsers like Googles Chrome and Apples Safari. phpBB, one of the most well known communication tools available for forum based communities.

As mentioned earlier, you dont need to be a development ninja to contribute. Regardless of what your day to day job is, you can help in some way and the best way to do that is to just ask and find out what needs doing.

If you want to volunteer your time to learn something new, help out a stranger with a problem or something completely different to fill your Saturday evenings. Jump right in.

As fantastic as open source software is, there are a couple of issues you may find with it. Firstly, open source means its free for people to use. That means you dont get an income from it, but you can sell extras and perks if you want to. For the most part, youll be donating time and effort into something for free.

Secondly, it will take time to manage the project and steer it into the direction it needs to go. With a small team sat next to each other, its easy to get something finished without too much effort. Coordinating people from all over the world in different time zones speaking different languages with varying degrees of experience, youre not going to be able to always get things done just by clicking your fingers.

Lastly, it relies on the will of you and others to keep pushing with the project and keep it alive. A premium product is able to continue due to funding but working on something without an incentive, you might find that the project has stagnated and is no longer worthy of any progress.

Now you know the challenges alongside the positives. If it all sounds good to you, then what are you waiting for? Find a project and get involved.

What are your favourite pieces of open source software? Are you currently involved in an open source project? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Why Is Open Source Software Important For Business? - Coast Digital (blog)

Chinese search giant Baidu today announced that more than 50 companies, including big names in the auto and tech industries, have joined its Apollo self-driving car platform. Those companies include Ford, Daimler, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, and popular LIDAR-supplier Velodyne. The partnerships alone arent a huge milestone. Rather, its how Baidu plans to work with these companies to turn Apollo into a global initiative that can compete with the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Apollo, which Baidu first announced back in April, arrived with an ambitious goal of putting fully autonomous vehicles on roads and highways by 2020. Baidu, which operates the largest search engine in China, is moving quickly to compete with self-driving car efforts from Western tech companies and automakers, including Alphabets Waymo, Uber, and traditional car makers like Ford, BMW, and GM. Its doing so by positioning Apollo as as an open source software platform that will allow any hardware maker to quickly deploy and customize an autonomous driving system.

Apollo is an important milestone for the automotive industry, Qi Lu, Baidus chief operating officer, said yesterday at Baidu Create, the companys inaugural artificial intelligence conference. It is in essence the Android of the autonomous driving industry, but more open and more powerful. Apollo is not solely Baidus. It belongs to everyone in the ecosystem. And as we and our partners contribute to the platform in our areas of specialty, we all gain more, with the results far greater than just our own.

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Baidu partners with Ford, Nvidia, and others to boost its self-driving car platform - The Verge

On Saturday, the folks in Canada celebrated Canada Day, while today we here in the States are celebrating our Independence Day. Both countries celebrate with parades, fireworks and by eating too many hot dogs, and oddly enough, in the U.S. we include outdoor performances of the 1812 Overture -- which celebrates the defeat of a Western nation by Russia. Go figure.

Both holidays offer an opportunity to overindulge in national pride and to reflect on what it means to be a good citizen, which always evokes some variation on JFK's advice to "ask what you can do for your country." Of course, in this global world you might reword that to "ask what you can do for humankind." The choice is yours.

If you're a developer -- especially if you or your organization uses open source software -- GitHub has a potential answer to the question JFK would have you ask. You can pledge time to contribute to open source projects. It won't cost you anything but time, and you'll get to use your skills for the greater good.

GitHub is all about open source. While the development platform and code repository does host a number of proprietary projects, it's mostly a home for open source projects. And practically everyone uses it for at least a portion of their developmental needs -- even Microsoft which recently moved nearly all of it's open source projects to the platform.

And since we're on the subject of the Fourth of July, GitHub has also been a good open source citizen.

Already this year it has documented best practices with Open Source Guides that cover everything from how to make code contributions or start open source projects to finding users and building communities. It's released a balanced employee IP agreement, which any company or organization that requires employee IP agreements might find useful. In addition, it conducted an extensive Open Source Survey to provide insight into the state of open source.

It's latest project, Open Source Friday, was announced last week and it fits today's stateside celebrations -- or what those celebrations are meant to inspire.

"Open Source Friday is a structured program for contributing to open source," Mike McQuaid, a senior engineer at GitHub wrote in a blog announcing the project. "Contribution to open source is part of our DNA with GitHub employees maintaining projects like gh-ost, Rails, Atom, Homebrew, HospitalRun and Exercism. Over the last three years, we've encouraged GitHub employees to take time at least every fourth Friday to work on open source and share what we're working on with each other. Open Source Friday has grown from this into a program anyone can take part in."

It's doubtful that McQuaid, who hails from Scotland where they probably have a different take on our Independence Day than we, or GitHub made the connection with today's U.S. holiday -- you can blame me for that. But whether you agree there's a connection or not, Open Source Friday is still a good idea.

"Open Source Friday isn't limited to individuals," he added. "Your team, department, or company can take part, too. Contributing to the software you already use isn't altruisticit's an investment in the tools your company relies on. And you can always start small: spend two hours every Friday working on an open source project relevant to your business."

Heck, if you play your cards right, you might even get the bosses to let you contribute on company time. And businesses that frequently use open source software might want to offer all employees the opportunity to contribute a couple of hours a week on the company's dime. This could include even those who aren't coders:

"A common misconception about contributing to open source is that you need to contribute code," GitHub points out in its guide on contributing to open source. "In fact, its often the other parts of a project that are most neglected or overlooked. Youll do the project a huge favor by offering to pitch in with these types of contributions!"

Getting started is easy. Just go to the Open Source Friday webpage and click the "sign up" button. If you don't have at least a free GitHub account, you'll be prompted to open one. Once signed up, you'll find resources, including help finding open source projects that could use your help if you need it.

Now, go and enjoy your Fourth.

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GitHub's Advice to 'Ask What You Can Do for Open Source' - Windows IT Pro

AT&T is set trial 10-gigabit symmetric passive optical network technology (XGS-PON), tapping its growing virtualization and software expertise to drive down the cost of next-generation PON deployments.

The carrier said it plans to later this year conduct the XGS-PON trial as part of its plan to virtualize access functions within the last mile network. Testing is expected to show support for multi-gigabit per second Internet speeds and allow for merging of services onto a single network. Services to be supported include broadband and backhaul of wired and 5G wireless services.

Eddy Barker, assistant vice president for access architecture and design at AT&T, said the carriers goal was to develop a more cost-efficient network platform to support growing demand.

In working on next-generation PON, we have focused on trying to get the economics to where we are with GPON, Barker said. A big aspect is just the equipment costs and more significantly the silicon and optics costs.

Barker explained the XGS-PON technology is a fixed wavelength symmetrical 10 Gb/s platform. Compared with traditional gigabit PON (GPON), Barker said XGS-PON provides up to four-times greater downlink bandwidth and up to eight-times greater uplink bandwidth capacity.

The trial is to take place in at least two locations, with Barker stating a likely different focus for each location.

Some will have greenfield and some will have brownfield elements, Barker said. This will allow for strict XGS trials and then some interoperability trials with current GPON.

The carrier is looking to expand the XGS-PON deployment into the cloud with software.

AT&T said it has worked with ON.Lab to develop and test Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Virtual Optical Line Terminator Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA) software to hide the lower level details of the silicon.

AT&T said it was waiting approval on submissions of open white box XGS optical line terminal (OLT) designs to the Open Compute Project (OCP).

Barker said his team has had a big focus on using software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). However, a bigger challenge was in building a community of suppliers and service providers that are part of ON.Lab and building open source code mirroring what has traditionally been proprietary access micro services that have run on supplier access equipment.

We are now in the latter part of the development with ON.Lab, Barker said, noting some of that work has included the organizations Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center (CORD) initiative.We have been trying to bundle up the access components of CORD, he said. Its not that we plan to do it in a turnkey manner as in ON.Lab, but so we can disaggregate it and use parts with what we have already done within AT&T independently of CORD.

As an example of those plans, Barker said AT&T would use the Linux Foundations Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) instead of the CORD XOS operating system. This was done because CORD was missing the emphasis on SDN control and virtualization in the access piece, Barker said.

ONAP sprung from the merger of AT&Ts ECOMP and the Linux Foundations Open-O project.

Barker said the OCP submissions are part of the carriers open access strategy, and led to the creation and sharing of the OpenOMCI specification. That spec is designed to provide an interoperable interface between the OLT and home devices, and has been distributed to the open source community.

We are shooting for a common control system that is reusable across multiple access technologies, Barker said. A few things are specific, but we want to reuse as much as possible.

AT&Ts XGS-PON plans are in contrast to competitor Verizon, which last month commissioned Calix to demonstrate channel bonding using next-generation passive-optical network two (NG-PON2) technology.

The trial used a software platform sitting in a SDN environment to combine transport channels over a single fiber strand to support speeds up to 80 Gb/s.

We believe channel bonding holds the potential to more than double the bandwidth to individual subscribers or network locations and anticipate it could be a means of moving from 10 Gb/s to 20 Gb/s and beyond without deploying new technologies, said Vincent OByrne, director of access technology at Verizon, connected with the Calix trial.

Verizon earlier this year said it completed an interoperability trial of NG-PON technology at its lab in Massachusetts. Vendors involved in the trial includedAdtran,Broadcom, Cortina Access, andEricssonin partnership with Calix. Verizon used its open optical network terminal management and control interface specifications for the trial, which the carrier said it plans to share with the industry.

AT&Ts Barker said the carrier has looked at NG-PON2, but felt the financial model around XGS-PON was more compelling. Barker added that AT&T may ultimately decide it needs more capacity and go with NG-PON2, though the ongoing evolution of PON could override that need.

We can see going forward if we need to go there or if we jump over NG-PON2 with the next iteration, Barker said. Standards bodies are working today on next-generation plans that can support up to 100 GB/s, so we will continue to see where we need to go.

Dan Meyer is a Senior Editor at SDxCentral, with a focus on containers, lifecycle service orchestration, cloud automation and DevOps. Dan has been covering the telecommunications space for more than 17 years. Prior to SDxCentral, Dan was Editor-In-Chief at RCR Wireless News.

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AT&T Passive Optical Network Trial to Test Open Source Software - SDxCentral

Fossbytes

GitHub Declares Every Friday Open Source Day And Wants You to Take Part XDA Developers (blog) Even if all of the products you use on a daily basis are based on closed source software, much of the technology world operates using software based on open source software. A lot of servers are based off of various GNU/Linux based operating systems ... GitHub Invites Developers to Open Source FridayInfoQ.com Open Source Friday: GitHub Declares Friday As Open Source DayFossbytes GitHub Open Source Friday, TypeScript 2.4 and Datameer's SmartAI SD Times news digest: June 28, 2017SDTimes.com all 5 news articles »

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GitHub Declares Every Friday Open Source Day And Wants You to Take Part - XDA Developers (blog)

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University is a bustling open source community, from the FOSS projects it hosts, including the Linux Master Kernel and Apache Web server, to the open source awareness it promotes through educational programs, such as a data center run by OSU computer science students.

Earlier this month, the Open Source Lab (OSL) announced its newest team member, Leslie Hawthorn, a former program manager at Google, who joins the OSL as Open Source Outreach Manager. In this role, she will develop educational programs with the aim of increasing awareness and adoption of open source development both in the classroom and the FOSS community. I recently spoke with Leslie about her OSU and FOSS community goals, and on teaching the future leaders of FOSS.

What led you from Google to Oregon State University and its Open Source Lab? How will your work at Google supplement your new role in increasing open source awareness and adoption in the classroom? I had a wonderful run at Google -- more than six years -- and decided it was time for a change of scene, both career-wise and geographically. I had worked extensively with the team at OSU's Open Source Lab during my time at Google and had consistently been impressed with their support of the open source community and their leadership in bringing open source into computer science education. My new role allows me to support both aspects of their mission, and I am very excited to join them.

I made many connections in the open source world during my time at Google. I also became an active member in several communities working to lower barriers to the teaching of open source in undergraduate education, including the Teaching Open Source community and the Humanitarian FOSS Project. The network I built during my time at Google will be invaluable in continuing to match eager students with the right open source projects for their mutual benefit.

What will you do to ensure your programs for undergrads and grads prepare the next generation for a career in open source development? A lot of CIOs are currently having trouble finding the right candidates with Linux skills to run open source environments. We're still thinking through what our programs will be, but as to how to make them relevant to the needs of industry -- that will involve the usual: market research, interviews with industry players, etc. I think the most significant piece will be a hands-on development requirement -- for example, a requirement that students participate actively in an open source project. Students who graduate from university with a useful body of work that they can show to prospective employers will be much more attractive candidates.

As the open source outreach manager at OSU, what will you do outside of the classroom to ensure that the OSU Open Source Lab stays connected to the FOSS community as a whole? The Lab does a tremendous job supporting the community -- we're hosting more than 100 key open source projects, including Apache, Debian and Drupal. I'd like to see us do more to communicate with the community and the business world about our efforts -- what we do, how we do it and how we need support in these efforts. Everyone here is so busy doing wonderful things that they don't take much time to talk about it, and we'll be improving that as time goes on. What are your short- or long-term goals in your new position as open source outreach manager? Short-term, I am helping our team promote the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), our annual nonprofit event to connect government IT Management and Government 2.0 advocates with one another to share best practices and tips for successful, transparent governance. Long-term, I am looking forward to helping Oregon State continue its outstanding track record of supporting the open source community and teaching students about open source software.

Open source is certainly growing, but Windows still predominantly runs the show. How much of a curriculum, then, should be dedicated to FOSS when this is still the case? Do you think it will be a challenge for training programs such as OSUs Open Source Lab to become the norm in colleges around the country? I think that answer largely depends on what careers a college is preparing its students for. I think a rigorous education in computer science covers both Windows and open source software, but if students want to specialize in a given area, then they may require more in-depth knowledge of open source than other areas. The most important part is giving students the opportunity to increase the breadth of their knowledge and to explore different ways to tinker with what they're creating. That creative energy is what fuels innovation, and I think open source software caters to that creativity in significant ways.

Whats the biggest challenge you face in the FOSS community? I think the biggest challenge all of us in the FOSS community face is too many good things to do, not enough time to do all of them. Many developers are paid to work on various FOSS projects as part of their day job. Those same developers spend many hours off-the-clock working on those projects that interest them, and there still tends to be much to do. Recruiting new members to a project, be it coders, documentation experts or user-experience gurus, can be difficult, which makes sharing the load, and training one's future replacements, a less achievable goal.

What is the next big FOSS movement or growth area you see for 2011 and beyond? Health IT and FOSS are a big story right now and I think that's only going to become more significant in the next year and beyond. Given how many different systems must interoperate securely, open source and open standards just make sense in this arena. I think the CONNECT project is a great example of this principle in action.

I also see a lot of energy around humanitarian FOSS, in areas like disaster management (Sahana & Usahidi), healthcare for the developing world (OpenMRS), microlending (Mifos) and beyond. People are much happier when they feel their work has a deeper meaning, and working on humanitarian-focused projects is a real win-win: real-world technical problems to be solved while simultaneously improving others' lives. Groups like CrisisCommons and Random Hacks of Kindness are spreading this meme worldwide with great results.

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OSU Open Source Lab leader looks to further FOSS community outreach - TechTarget

AMD is looking to penetrate the deep learning market with a new line of Radeon GPU cards optimized for processing neural networks, along with a suite of open source software meant to offer an alternative to NVIDIAs more proprietary CUDA ecosystem.

The company used the opportunity of the ISC17 conference to lay out its deep learning strategy and fill in a few more details on both the hardware and software side. In a presentation titled Deep Learning: The Killer App for GPUs, AMDs Mayank Daga admitted that the company hasfallen behind in this area, but claimed its new Radeon Instinct line it will roll out later this year is on par with the best the competition has to offer.

The initial Radeon Instinct GPUs the MI25, MI8, and MI6 were first announced back in December 2016 and reviewed here by TOP500 News. All of these accelerators provide high levels of 16-bit and 32-bit performance the most common data types for deep learning codes. Apparently, there is some 64-bit capability buried in them as well, but not enough to be useful for more traditional HPC applications. Integrated high bandwidth memory (HBM2) is included in the MI25 and MI8 packages. The three GPUs spec out as follows:

While all of these GPUs are focused on the same application set, they cut across multiple architectures. The MI25 is built on the new Vega architecture, while the MI8 and MI6 are based on the older Fuji and Polaris platforms, respectively.

The top-of-the-line MI25 is built for large-scale training and inferencing applications, while the MI8 and MI6 devices are geared mostly for inferencing. AMD says they are also suitable for HPC workloads, but the lower precision limits the application set principally to some seismic and genomics codes. According to an unnamed source manning the AMD booth at ISC, they are planning to deliver 64-bit-capable Radeon GPUs in the next go-around, presumably to serve a broader array of HPC applications.

For comparisons sake, NVIDIAs P100 delivers 21.2 teraflops of FP16 and 10.6 teraflops of FP32. So from a raw flops perspective, the new MI25 compares rather favorably. However, once NVIDIA starts shipping the Volta-class V100 GPU later this year, its 120 teraflops delivered by the new Tensor Cores will blow that comparison out of the water.

A major difference is that AMD is apparently building specialized accelerators for deep learning inference and training, as well as HPC applications, while NVIDIA has abandoned this approach with the Volta generation. The V100 is an all-in-one device that can be used across these three application buckets. It remains to be seen which approach will be preferred by users.

The bigger difference is on the software side for GPU computing. AMD says it plans to keep everything in its deep learning/HPC stack as open source. That starts with the Radeon Open Compute platform, aka ROCm. It includes things such as GPU drivers, a C/C++ compilers for heterogeneous computing, and the HIP CUDA conversion tool. OpenCl and Python are also supported.

New to ROCm is MIOpen, a GPU-accelerated library that encompasses a broad array of deep learning functions. AMD plans to add support for Caffe, TensorFlow and Torch in the near future. Although everything here is open source, the breadth of support and functionality is a fraction of what is currently available to CUDA users. As a consequence, the chipmakerhas its work cut out for itto capture deep learning customers.

AMD plans to ship the new Radeon Instinct cardsin Q3 of this year.

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AMD Plays Catch-Up in Deep Learning with New GPUs and Open Source Strategy - TOP500 News

GitHub wants to help more people become open source contributors with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. As the name implies, the program encourages companies to set aside time at the end of the week for their employees to work on open source projects.

Its designed to bolster the ranks of open source contributors at a time when many businesses rely on freely available projects for mission-critical applications. Open Source Friday isnt just about getting businesses to offer their employees time as a form of charity, its also a way to improve key business infrastructure, according to Mike McQuaid, a senior software engineer at GitHub.

We see this as kind of a mutually beneficial arrangement, both for businesses and their employees, be they aspiring contributors, active contributors, or current maintainers, he said. Because if [businesses] provide those people with time to work on these things during their work hours, thats beneficial to the company, and thats beneficial to the individuals as well.

The idea behind the program came about as a result of GitHubs work with the open source community, which showed that people who want to contribute to open source software dont feel as though they have the time or resources to do so. McQuaid hopes that carving out employees time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem.

The Open Source Friday website includes resources to help convince employers of the importance of open source work, as well as information about how they can make it a habit at the office. For contributors, the site includes a link to a guide GitHub released last year on how to start adding to an open source project.

Maintainers, the people who shepherd and manage open source projects, get their own resources to help them welcome new contributors, as well as tools to help them explain why their extensive participation in the open source ecosystem is good for business.

GitHub also allows users to set up profile pages that make it easy for people to take what theyve done on these Fridays and show it off to the wider world.

Users dont need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.

Basically, if you have done any programming before, or if youve improved documentation thats related to software before, you can contribute to an open source project, McQuaid said. Maybe not every open source project, but youll definitely be able to find something that you can get involved with.

GitHub is part of a broader consortium of tech companies thats known as the TodoGroup and is designed to encourage the growth and use of open source contributions among industry heavyweights like Facebook, Google, and Dropbox.

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GitHub declares every Friday open source day - VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NodeSource, the Node.js company, has announced the results of a new survey fielded among enterprise software developers ranking open source projects across a variety of factors, including hiring, entrepreneurism and the likelihood of IPOs in the near future.

The survey, which was aimed at gauging the momentum of Node.js within the open source software ecosystem, revealed that fully 91 percent of enterprise software developers believe new companies will be created from open source projects. While Node.js was the most-chosen option, with 74 percent of respondents expecting new Node companies to appear in the market, Docker came in closely behind at 51 percent, and 22 percent believe it will be MongoDB.

In addition, 89 percent said Node.js projects increase hiring, followed by:

A further 28 percent even said that a surge in IPOs for open-source companies in the next year is extremely or very likely, and 79 percent say it is at least somewhat likely.

Joe McCann, NodeSource Founder and CEO, commented, Open source is truly open for business. Open source projects are permeating every aspect of business operations and digital transformations. They are integral to mission-critical functionality. Node.js is emerging as the runtime of choice for DevOps, because Node.js enables enterprises to be operationally efficient, fast-to-market and fast in the market.

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built onChrome's V8 JavaScript engine. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Companies like Walmart, Mastercard, PayPal, Intuit, F5, Fidelity, and Netflix rely on Node.js to deliver mission-critical experiences and to ensure quality and reliability. In addition, Node.js' package ecosystem,npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source packages in the world.

The survey further confirms the popularity of Node.js. As reported in TechCrunch, venture firm Battery Ventures has developed the Battery Open-Source Software Index (BOSS Index). It evaluates and ranks 40 open source projects. Not surprisingly, the sprawling and long-established Linux community in the category of IT Operations topped the index. Node.js ranked fourth, just behind Git and MySQL but ahead of Docker, Hadoop and Elasticsearch. McCann added, As witnessed by Node.js projects being used as foundational in developing capabilities for many of the worlds most trafficked sites, the survey underscores recognition of the Node.js communitys efforts to push the envelope by constantly enhancing and expanding the Node.js ecosystem and its value to enterprises.

More information about NodeSource will be available at the upcoming Node Summit conference, taking place at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, July 26-27, 2017. Node Summit is the largest conference focused exclusively on Node.js and the ecosystem of Node. The event will feature presentations by business leaders and technology experts as they discuss Node.js transformative role in the future of computing.

About NodeSource

NodeSource is a technology company dedicated to delivering enterprise-grade solutions in support of a sustainable ecosystem for the open source Node.js project. We aim to drive and expand the Node.js ecosystem by providing best-of-breed solutions that specifically target the needs of businesses deploying Node.js. Customers include NASA, Uber, PayPal, Cond Nast, and other progressive Node.js adopters. NodeSource is a founding member of the Node.js Foundation, a Heavybit member company, backed by RRE Ventures, Crosslink Capital and Resolute.vc and our AngelList Open Source Syndicate. For more information, visit NodeSource.com and follow @NodeSource on Twitter.

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Enterprise DevOps Bullish on Open Source Software | Business Wire - Business Wire (press release)

TOKYO -- Sony will break from tradition among Japanese tech peers by making its artificial intelligence software freely available, as the company seeks to expand its presence in the field through outside collaboration with other businesses and research institutions.

The Japanese electronics company has developed AI independentlysince the 1990s but has decided to open-source its deep learning software known as a neural network library. The software, which learns by mimicking the neural networks inhuman brains, can be used in products.

Sony's software can be usedforface and voice recognition based ondeep learning abilities. The technology has been applied to predict the contract price of real estate transactions, for instance, and it is expected to be used in the development of home appliances and robots by third parties.

Though Japanese companies have made products that became worldwide hits, the development and application of such technology have been kept from the outside world. Sony has worked on AI since the technology's early days with products such as the Aibo robot dog but has allowed only itself to access the software.

In the global information technology industry, Google and other major U.S. companies have made their deep learning software freely available. Microsoft and Facebook are building followers through open source software, which leads to better quality since the opportunities for improvement increase.

Sony establishedan investment fund targeting AI startups last year. It has become the first Japanese business to join an AI industry group set up by Facebook and others.

(Nikkei)

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Sony's AI software to become open source - Nikkei Asian Review