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Pivotal Doubles Down on Open Source in a Sign of a Changing Software World

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Pivotalthe rather ambitious business software outfit spun off from big-name tech companies EMC and VMwareis open sourcing three of its key products, sharing the underlying software code with the world at large.

Today, the San Francisco-based company announced that in the coming year, it will open source GemFire, HAWQ, and GreenplumDB, three big data tools designed to help businesses analyze large amounts of digital information. Our customers are starting to look to open source, and theyre looking to projects that have communities around them, says Pivotals Sunny Madra, who oversees the companys data work. Customers want a say in the direction of software.

The move is yet another sign that the world of business software is changing, moving away from proprietary software built and licensed by individual vendors like Oracle and Microsoft, towards open source tools that anyone can freely use and modify. With so many businesses now erecting their online operations atop open source software, were even seeing the traditional vendors change their approach.

Microsoft is open sourcing some of its key software tools. And Pivotal, with its roots in old-school software companies VMware and Greenplum, is another notable example. The company previously offered an open source cloud computing tool called Cloud Foundry as well as software based on the open source data-crunching software Hadoop, and now, its open sourcing the rest of its major tools.

Pivotal is doing this in a way that a broader foundation of vendors and end users can collaborate on this software, says Shaun Connolly, vice president of corporate strategy at open source software company Hortonworks, which plans to work in tandem with Pivotal on these tools. The expectation this days is that software be driven through an open source model.

Pivotal plans to open source HAWQ and GreenplumDB through the Apache Software Foundation and push the GemFire code into the community that oversees the open source database PostgreSQL. This should mean not only that the code is freely available to anyone, but that a broad community of developerssome inside Pivotal, others outsidewill drive the evolution of these tools. Like many other open source software companies, Pivotal will make its money by helping businesses use the software and by selling specialized versions of the tools.

According to Madra, Pivotals big-data tools pulled in over $100 million in bookings from business in 2014. But he also says that businesses increasingly want to spend money on software that isnt controlled by a single vendor, and he says that Pivotal has already built successful businesses around open source tools such as Cloud Foundry. Open source, Madra says, is a trend growing bigger by the day.

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Pivotal Doubles Down on Open Source in a Sign of a Changing Software World

Big data vendors back open source tools

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IBM, GE, Teradata, Infosys, VMware, Pivotal, SAS and others will develop on and test out Apache Hadoop open source tools

Major players in the big data space are joining forces to support open source software with the creation of industry association, Open Data Platform (ODP).

IBM, GE, Teradata, Infosys, VMware, Pivotal, SAS and others will develop on and test out Apache Hadoop open source tools to help enterprises build and implement data apps. The initiative will also encourage vendor interoperability and compatibility for enterprises working with complex big data software ecosystems.

ODP will adhere to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) guidelines for the contribution of ideas and code, and provide a test once, use everywhere platform of Apache Hadoop, Apache Ambari and related Apache source artifacts.

The open source movement is fundamentally changing the way that software is being developed in the industry today. Common frameworks and standards such as Open Data Platform will help solidify open source as a proven option for enterprises, Ben Fathi, chief technology officer of VMware, said in a statement.

Infosys is seeing rapid adoption of open source software in the worlds largest enterprises across all major industry segments, added Navin Budhiraja, head architecture and technology at Infosys.

As all businesses strive to become digital, they see an increasing need for a platform that can support real-time and actionable insights, self-service exploration, and fluid data schemas to quickly adapt to the dynamic business needs.

"This will require them to deploy new web-scale architectures, and the adoption of these modern architectures can be greatly accelerated if they are based on open standards, and easy access to trained talent.

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Big data vendors back open source tools

Pivotal Open Sources Key Parts of Its Big Data Suite

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Pivotal announced today that it was moving three core pieces of its Big Data Suite to open source, while continuing to offer advanced features and support in a commercial version.

The three components moving to open sourceare GemFire, the platforms in-Memory NoSQL Database, the enterprise SQL on Hadoop component, HAWQ and the suites massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics database, Greenplum DB.

One of the reasons it felt comfortable movingin this direction with the Big Data Suite was its success with Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service offering that followed an identical model of open source and commercial versions.

We have had a lot of success with Cloud Foundry and weve been able to monetizeit, explained Sundeep Madra, VP and GM of the data product group at Pivotal. The company felt it could build on this success by taking the same tack with the Big Data Suite.

Pivotal was hearing from customers that they wanted the flexibility of open source software in other areas, which also helped pushed the company to make this move. One of the things weve realized is that open source is critical to enterprise buying patterns, Madra said. Pivotal has actually been seeing open source show up as anRFP requirement, and companies have expressed a need for freedom from vendor lock-in.

There is definitely a notion that if you are a customer using an enterprise distribution of open source, youre not locked into anything, Madra explained.

Whats more, customers using open source software dont have to wait for the company to get around to developing a requiredfeature. They can work with the company or a third party or build it themselves.Customers can take control of the project and solve it on their timeline, he explained.

Its worth pointing out that Pivotal is a joint venture of General Electric, EMC and VMware, but it operatesindependent of these organization. The idea was to create a company that could make its own way and use technology in ways that the parent companies might not have the agility orcreativity to do.

This type of move is precisely what theyhad in mind when they spun out Pivotal. Even thoughtools such as Greenplum DB were developed at great expense, Pivotal is showing it isnt afraid to try new approachessuch asmoving thesecomponents to open source.

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Pivotal Open Sources Key Parts of Its Big Data Suite

$15 million Assange security is ‘sucking resources in …

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Story highlights There's an operation guarding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London London Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe says the operation is being reviewed, as there's "no doubt it's a drain" Assange has been in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer to sex assault claims

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe says the operation is being reviewed, as there's "no doubt it's a drain."

Assange has been living in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors want to question him about 2010 allegations that he raped one woman and sexually molested another.

The Australian national has not been charged and denies the claims, saying he fears Sweden would extradite him to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing government secrets through WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy to seek asylum in June 2012.

On the operation to prevent Assange from fleeing the embassy, Hogan-Howe told LBC Radio that Metropolitan Police were looking at "how we can do that differently in the future, because it's sucking our resources in."

Asked if that meant fewer officers stationed around the clock outside the embassy, Hogan-Howe added: "We won't talk specifically about our tactics, but we are reviewing what options we have."

The cost of providing a constant police presence ready to arrest Assange should he emerge from the embassy in Knightsbridge, central London, is estimated at 10 million pounds, a Scotland Yard spokesman told CNN.

Assange has said the extradition warrant should be thrown out because, in part, Swedish authorities refuse to interview him at the Ecuadorian Embassy, thereby prolonging a preliminary investigation that he says should have concluded long ago.

Assange rocketed to international fame when WikiLeaks began publishing secret government documents online.

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Cryptography to prevent satellite collisions

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Cryptography, the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties, could help prevent collisions among the thousands of commercial and spy satellites currently in orbit around the Earth. It would also maintain privacy, according to experts.

In an article written last month for Scientific American, Brett Hemenway, a research assistant professor with the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on cryptography, and William Welser IV, a space policy expert, explain how it can help avoid potential satellite collisions.

One such collision took place in February 2009, the authors explained, when the US Iridium 33 satellite and the Russian Cosmos 2251 collided and were both destroyed. Telescopes tracking the two probes from the ground indicated that they should have missed one another, but data from instruments on board either of them would have revealed that they were on a collision course.

That information was not used, however, because it was deemed to be top-secret.

Satellite owners view the locations and trajectories of their on-orbit assets as private, Welser and Hemenway wrote. Companies fear that sharing the exact positions of their satellites could help the competition determine the full extent of their capabilities, while governments are afraid that revealing such information could compromise their national security, they explained.

Yet even minor collisions could cause millions of dollars worth of damage. Debris can be knocked into the path of other satellites, spacecraft carrying a human crew, or even the International Space Station (ISS), the authors wrote. The 2009 incident served as a warning to officials to find a way to fix the problem, but without revealing too much information.

Adding a third party

In the current working solution, the worlds four largest satellite communications providers have teamed up with a trusted third party: Analytical Graphics. The company aggregates their orbital data and alerts participants when satellites are at risk, wrote Hemenway and Welser, adding that the arrangement requires that all participants maintain mutual trust of the third party.

Analytical Graphics, also known as AGI, makes commercial modeling and analysis software for the aerospace, defense, and intelligence communities. The company was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, though it also has offices located in Colorado, California, Washington DC, the UK, and Singapore. Its current CEO is Paul Graziani.

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Turing And The Increasingly Important Case For Theory

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Editors note:Zavain Dar is an early-stage VC at Lux Capital and Lecturer at Stanford University. He invests and supports deep technology companies leveraging advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Infrastructure, and emerging data and has taught courses on cryptocurrency and the intersections of AI, philosophy and venture.

Like many in Silicon Valley, I recently saw Morten Tyldums The Imitation Game. I have a soft spot for underdog academic narratives and actually teared up. However, I couldnt shake the feeling the film pigeonholed the breadth and depth of Turings work to early cryptography and its mechanized instantiation duringWWII.

Cryptography aside, Turings work, theory and models still underline undergraduate curriculums in computer science, mathematics and philosophy. His models for computation form the basis for how mathematicians and computer scientists structure both what is solvable and the efficiency with which we can algorithmically solve answerable questions. His Church-Turing Thesis coupled with Godels Incompleteness Theorems still has philosophers debating the existence of universal constraints around human knowledge.

Finally, and perhaps most pressing given the ongoing renaissance in machine learning, the Turing Test remains the de facto yardstick against which we measure progress and traction in artificial intelligence.

Whereas The Imitation Game focuseson cryptography and wartime technology, there is no doubt that Turings work also includesAI, theoretical computer science, mathematics and even epistemology.

The realization that Turings work still has high relevance in both academia and industry got me thinking about how and why this is the case. What lessons can todays technology entrepreneurs and investors pull from Turings intellectual longevity?

I start with a few very basic and generalized broad-stroke assumptions. (The focus on high level Big-O approximations only seems fitting for this piece).

How does Turings work relate to this pseudo-anthropologic and economic postulating? Well, etched in Turings work was his ability to cut through the engineering limitations of his time and grapple with the underlying theory. By decoupling the current state of the art from the theoretical ground truth, Turing produced work that hasnt lost applicability and has shown a near infinite shelf life.

His work today carries just as much, if not more (given the just-now relevant engineering possibilities), applicability as it did duringhis own time. This isnt wholly dissimilar from how theoretical physicists working on chalk boards view their work in juxtaposition to applied physicists in cutting-edge linear accelerators.

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WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange leads hidden, busy life in …

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The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy since June 19, 2012, avoiding extradition to Sweden for questioning concerning sexual assault allegations. Ecuador has granted Assange political asylum, but he cannot get to South America because British police remain stationed around the embassy, ready to detain him if he steps outside.

The situation recently returned to the forefront when a freedom of information request from LBC Radio revealed that maintaining 24-hour guard around his hide-out has cost taxpayers $15.4 million.

"It is sucking our resources," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe told reporters, and a review was underway of "what options we have."

For Assange, the options appear limited. If he leaves the embassy and is caught, he will be sent to Sweden. And once he is in Sweden, he could be extradited to the United States for prosecution on espionage charges related to WikiLeaks' massive release of classified U.S. military documentsand diplomatic records.

If found guilty, he could face life in prison or even the death penalty.

The statute of limitations on the rape case will expire in August 2020, but no one wants the situation to drag on unresolved for that long.

From the start, Assange's team has offered Swedish prosecutors the chance to question him in the embassy.

The move was "actively welcomed" by the British Foreign Office, but prosecutors are adamant that the interview must take place on Swedish soil.

In August, Assange cryptically told reporters that he planned to leave his hide-out soon but had no plans to hand himself in to British police. Nothing dramatic ensued.

In November, there were hints that the diplomatic logjam could clear.

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