Weka development stays at Waikato Uni
Reports that the University of Waikato's Weka open source software project has been sold and staff transferred to a US software company have been somewhat exaggerated.
Reports that the University of Waikato's Weka open source software project has been sold and staff transferred to a US software company have been somewhat exaggerated.
The open source community doesn’t always deliver software that customers want, says Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems.
There’s no shortage of open source programmers out there. According to a recent study of 5,000 developers by research firm IDC, 71% say they have used open source software, and half reported that use of open source is increasing within their organisations.
IBM has launched an updated and more open version of its corporate instant messaging and collaboration software, Sametime.
Traditional hardware design is a top-down process. If you need a CPU, you choose one from the various manufacturers’ catalogues and then build your device around its specifications. If a given part doesn’t suit your needs perfectly, you can sometimes work around its limitations in software, but otherwise you’re stuck. Only the largest electronics vendors can afford to dabble with custom components.
Ingres was one of the mainstream relational databases till it was bought by Computer Associates in 1994. Now, it is making a comeback as an open source option, having been purchased by a private equity firm, Garnett & Helfrich Capital. CA retains a 20% stake in the new Ingres Corporation, which was officially launched in November 2005, coincidentally on the same day Microsoft released SQL Server 2005.
The Sahana project was originally developed to help cope with the disastrous consequences of 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. A free and open source disaster management solution, the integrated system is a set of web-based disaster management applications for managing information before, during and after a disaster.
Python developers had reason to celebrate this week, with the release of IronPython 1.0, a full implementation of the Python language for Microsoft’s CLR (Common Language Runtime). With IronPython, Python programs can run as first-class managed code on the .Net platform.
The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project. The organisation has gained support from vendors ranging from IBM (which helped found Eclipse in 2001) to Borland Software, BEA Systems, and seemingly every other major player in the software industry except Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
If you support open source, one of the initial things you learn is that you must bash Microsoft. It’s understandable; of all the proprietary software companies in the world the one in Redmond takes the cake for ill-will towards the open-source community. Just look at the famed “Halloween documents” to see the extent of the bad blood.
Server virtualisation may be enterprise computing's latest technology, but a recent survey of corporate IT buyers shows that near-term adoption may not match the hype.
My column last week on virtualisation and the Linux kernel drew some flak from readers who didn’t agree that VMware’s VMI (Virtual Machine Interface) proposal offered a better approach than that of the open-source Xen project.
We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system, Mac OS X. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised?
According to the editor’s letter in the recently released inaugural edition of Sage, a magazine produced by anti-malware vendor McAfee: “Open source is not to blame for current security trends.” Maybe not, but apparently it’s still expected to take the blame.
Hackers are taking a page from the open-source playbook, using the same techniques that made Linux and Apache successes to improve their malicious software, according to McAfee.