Category Archives: Open Source Software

Ryan Paul: Build a realtime RethinkDB cluster monitoring app with live graphs – Video

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Ryan Paul: Build a realtime RethinkDB cluster monitoring app with live graphs
Ryan Paul is a developer evangelist at RethinkDB. He is also a Linux enthusiast and open source software developer. He was previously a contributing editor at Ars Technica, where he wrote articles...

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Ryan Paul: Build a realtime RethinkDB cluster monitoring app with live graphs - Video

How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

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Chris DiBona was worried everything would end up in one place.

This was a decade ago, before the idea of open source software flipped the tech world upside-down. The open source Linux operating system was already running an enormous number of machines on Wall Street and beyond, proving you can generate big valueand big moneyby freely sharing software code with the world at large. But the open source community was still relatively small. When coders started new open source projects, they typically did so on a rather geeky and sometimes unreliable internet site called SourceForge.

DiBona, the long-haired open source guru inside Google, was worried that all of the worlds open source software would end up in that one basket. There was only one, and that was SourceForge, he says.

So, like many other companies, Google created its own site where people could host open source projects. It was called Google Code. The company had built its online empire on top of Linux and other open source software, and in providing an alternative to SourceForce, it was trying to ensure open source would continue to evolve, trying to spread this religion across the net.

But then GitHub came along and spread it faster.

Today, Google announced that after ten years, its shutting down Google Code. The decision wasnt hard to predict. Over the past three years or so, the company has moved about a thousand projects off of the site. But its official demise is worth noting. Google Code is dying because most of the open source worlda vast swath of the tech world in generalnow houses its code on GitHub, a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name. All but a few of those thousand projects are now on GitHub.

Some argue that Google had other, more selfish reasons for creating Google Code: It wanted control, or it was working to get as much digital data onto its machines as it could (as the company is wont to do). But ultimately, GitHub was more valuable than any of that. GitHub democratized software development in a more complete way than SourceForge or Google Code or any other service that came before. And thats the most valuable currency in the software development world.

After just seven years on the net, GitHub now boasts almost 9 million registered users. Each month, about 20 million others visit without registering. According to web traffic monitor Alexa, GitHub is now among the top 100 most popular sites on earth.

Its popularity is remarkable for a site thats typically used by software coders, not people looking for celebrity news, cat videos, or social chatter. If you look at the top 100 sites, says Brian Doll, GitHubs vice president of strategy, youve got a handful of social sites, thirty flavors of Google with national footprints, a lot of media outletsand GitHub.

The irony of GitHubs success, however, is the open source world has returned to a central repository for all its free code. But this time, DiBonalike most other codersis rather pleased that everything is in one place. Having one central location allows people to collaborate more easily on, well, almost anything. And because of the unique way GitHub is designed, the eggs-in-the-same-basket issue isnt as pressing as it was with SourceForge. GitHub matters a lot, but its not like youre stuck there, DiBona says.

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How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

Open source software and hardware is central to Facebook’s future | #OCPSummit2015

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Open sourcing hardware and software is core to [Facebook, Inc.s] mission, according to Matt Corddry, Director of Hardware Engineering at Facebook. In a live interview with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly during OCP Summit 2015, Corddry explained that the benefit to the internet behemoth, he explained, is that it actually helps us move faster. By open sourcing hardware, Corddry added, Facebook intends to connect more folks, and get more smart minds on the problem.

Part of Facebooks recent software innovations blur the boundaries of open hardware and open software, Corddry said. He called out FBOSS and Open VMC as particularly exciting products software products that Facebook is announcing at a hardware summit precisely because they bridge hardware and software.FBOSS allows you to program you won network switches, enabling folks to hack [their] own software on [their] own network switch. Open VMC, he said, allows you to roll your own code in the little baseboard management controller Both these innovations are uncharted territory, he explained, because they enable people to hack and innovate down at the hardware platform management level.

While Facebooks announcements at the Open Compute Project Summit leverage bridge hardware and software, the company also has invested in innovating in both areas separately.

Recent software innovations, like the HipHop Virtual Machine, are designed to make it easier for Facebook to connect the world. The HipHop Virtual Machine allows people to scale out large web properties thanks to much more efficient PHP execution.

Corddry also highlighted the System on a Chip design that Facebook recently announced. A lot of it is the disaggregation of our infrastructure, he said, adding: Instead of cramming all bits and resources into one big boxwere going to really focus on solving one problem at a time. The intention, Corddry explained is to scale out massive amounts of compute without needing to put a bunch of local storage and other resources in the box at the same time.

Hardware-based innovations are in Corddrys wheelhouse. My team, he explained, mostly focuses on the gear in the data center. Contrary to popular trends, Facebook is building big, ugly tin boxes instead of going smaller, smaller, smaller servers. The benefit of theses servers, said Corddry, is that theyre super efficient, and built to work at massive scale. In particular, Corddry highlighted that the amount of power required to cool one of their designs is only three to six watts, whereas traditional OEM designs take 80 watts of power. That efficiency, he commented, makes a tremendous difference.

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Open source software and hardware is central to Facebook’s future | #OCPSummit2015

HP’s Marten Mickos: Open Source Is Not a Business Model

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By Jack M. Germain 02/23/15 2:58 PM PT

Marten Mickos, senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud unit, advocates making money from open source. He preaches what at first glance may appear to be two opposing business models.

One is the notion that developing open source software entails meeting a reciprocity requirement. The other is the idea that using open source software does not require any reciprocity.

Marten Mickos, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the HP Cloud Unit

Mickos is a seasoned open source executive with a passion for infrastructure software. He was previously the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, an open source, AWS-compatible cloud provider. Before that he was CEO of MySQL, where he grew the company from garage startup to the second-largest open source company in the world.

In learning to adapt his business strategies to make open source profitable, Mickos succeeded where many others have failed.

Unlike some who develop open source software or sell services surrounding it, Mickos fervently believes that open source is not a business model unto itself. If you try to upsell free users to paying customers, your business likely will fail.

Mickos should know the risky business of trying to convert free users into paying customers. At MySQL, he had 15 million users of the product and 15 thousand paying customers.

In this exclusive interview, LinuxInsider discusses with Marten Mickos some of the misconceptions about open source as a standalone business model.

LinuxInsider: You once said that the only two ways a company makes money with open source is to affiliate with a foundation or have a business model where the open source project and the open source company are practically the same thing. Is that philosophy still valid with today's open source dominance in the cloud?

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HP's Marten Mickos: Open Source Is Not a Business Model

Demand for Linux jobs shooting up fast

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The Linux Foundation released a report this week that says employees with Linux skills are in high demand, with hiring managers working hard to bring them in.

If you're an open-source expert, the job market is your oyster the Linux Foundation released a report this week that says that employees with Linux skills are in high demand, with hiring managers working hard to bring them in.

According to the survey, the prevalence of open-source in the cloud and other important areas of business technology is helping to push the demand for Linux- and open-source-savvy workers higher. Forty-two percent of respondents said that CloudStack or OpenStack experience would be a valuable addition to a resume, and 19% said the same about open-source SDN skills.

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Demand is higher than supply, according to the Linux Foundation. Nearly nine in 10 88% - of hiring managers said that it's difficult to find workers with those qualifications, and 70% said that they're working hard to retain the open-source talent they already have, by offering better pay and more flexible working schedules.

Nine out of 10 Linux-skilled workers who responded to the survey said that those skills had helped them advance their careers, and 55% said that they expected finding a new job would be relatively easy in 2015.

Jay Lyman, an open-source analyst with 451 Research, said that the survey's findings are similar to his understanding of the job market as it relates to open-source technology.

"We certainly see continued demand and dearth for talent when it comes to open source cloud software such as OpenStack, which is consistent with the report," he said. "I also think that Linux and open source software are intertwined with some key trends -- cloud computing, DevOps and big data for example -- that continue to drive this type of demand for experience and talent."

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Demand for Linux jobs shooting up fast