WebProNews

Tag: Open Source

  • Linux Distro Reviews: Intro

    Linux Distro Reviews: Intro

    This series of articles will review some of the most popular Linux distributions (distros) with an eye to everyday desktop use.

    Linux has been growing in popularity as an alternative to Windows and macOS, especially for users that want privacy, security, and control over how their data is used. Linux is also unencumbered by Microsoft’s TPM requirements, making it a good option for hardware left behind by Windows 10 or Windows 11. The fact that Linux, and most of the software running on it, is entirely free is yet another bonus.

    In my case, I’ve been transitioning to Linux after more than 20 years on macOS. During those two decades, I used macOS exclusively and even developed commercial software for it. My main drivers for the switch were:

    • Wanting to have more control over my data rather than being at the mercy of Apple’s decisions.
    • The ability to upgrade my hardware and extend its usable lifespan for a fraction of the cost of new Apple gear.
    • A desire to use more open-source software rather than relying on closed-source options.

    For the uninitiated, Linux differs from Windows and macOS in the sheer volume of choices it offers. Companies, organizations, and groups take the Linux kernel – or core of the OS – bundle it with a user interface and various applications, and release it as a distro. While it’s hard to say how many distros there are, with the number somewhere in the hundreds, popular website DistroWatch.com lists 100 of the most popular.

    While it can (and sometimes is) confusing having so many different distros available, it’s important to remember that at their core, these various distros share similar functionality. The differences often come down to the package manager they use to install software, the user interface (desktop environments), their release cycle, and the suite of tools and packages installed that gives a distro a specific focus (think daily use, gaming, servers, security testing, etc.)

    I began my migration to Linux at the beginning of 2022 and have distro-hopped across some of the most popular options on the market in an effort to find the one that provides ease of use, stability, reliability, and the software I need to do my job.

    This series will explore my findings, dispel some popular myths (such as Linux being too hard for the average user), and may shed some light on what distro is right for you.

  • Linux Foundation: Open Source Hiring a Top Priority

    Linux Foundation: Open Source Hiring a Top Priority

    The Linux Foundation has released its 9th annual Open Source Jobs Report, and the outlook is positive for the open source job market.

    Open source software and platforms offer a number of advantages over commercial options, not the least of which is cost. In addition to cost, open source software provides organizations more control, as well as the potential for improved security and privacy.

    According to the Linux Foundation, in partnerships with edX, 97% of hiring managers cite hiring open source talent as a top priority. In addition, 50% of those managers plan on hiring more open source talent this year. Some 44% of hiring managers said they wanted to hire individuals who had actively contributed to an open source project.

    Open source professionals are noticing the uptick in demand.

    Interestingly, open source professionals report being headhunted more in 2021 than during the past several years, with 55% of professionals receiving more outreach in the past six months than the prior six months. During the pandemic in 2020, only 29% reported receiving more outreach, while 21% heard from recruiters less often. Only 10% of respondents this year stated the volume of recruiter outreach has decreased for them.

    The Linux Foundation’s report is good news for open source professionals and the community at large.

  • Canonical and Blender Partner to Provide Support Options

    Canonical and Blender Partner to Provide Support Options

    Blender has partnered with Canonical to provide enterprise-grade support to Blender users.

    Blender is an open source 3D animation tool that has been used in the film, TV, tech and science community for years. As an open source platform, however, Blender hasn’t always had the support options its commercial competitors can boast.

    That has changed, with Canonical providing enterprise-grade support. Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions. The company also provides support for other open source applications.

    “It’s a privilege to support Blender and the fantastic work of this remarkable community, its founders and leaders. Today’s announcement strengthens Blender with full-service Canonical support and long term security maintenance, and delivers the level of assurance that professional Blender content creators need, in partnership with the Blender Foundation” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical.

    “The way Canonical structured this service with us is exemplary for the open-source movement,” said Blender Foundation’s Chairman Ton Roosendaal. “I believe it will set a new standard for how independent, free groups of makers who truly care for their product and users participate in the market and shape the future of the industry.”

  • Google Open Sources Lyra Audio Codec

    Google Open Sources Lyra Audio Codec

    Google has announced it is open sourcing its Lyra audio codec, a codec that uses machine learning to compress the audio and preserve quality.

    As voice and videoconferencing has become more ubiquitous, audio codecs haven’t done a very good job of keeping up. As Google points out in blog post, many modern video codecs have better compression than audio ones.

    To solve this problem, we have created Lyra, a high-quality, very low-bitrate speech codec that makes voice communication available even on the slowest networks. To do this, we’ve applied traditional codec techniques while leveraging advances in machine learning (ML) with models trained on thousands of hours of data to create a novel method for compressing and transmitting voice signals.

    Google is now open sourcing Lyra in an effort to help it gain widespread acceptance.

    As part of our efforts to make the best codecs universally available, we are open sourcing Lyra, allowing other developers to power their communications apps and take Lyra in powerful new directions. This release provides the tools needed for developers to encode and decode audio with Lyra, optimized for the 64-bit ARM android platform, with development on Linux. We hope to expand this codebase and develop improvements and support for additional platforms in tandem with the community.

    Lyra is currently in beta, with Google wanting feedback from developers as soon as possible.

    We are releasing Lyra as a beta version today because we wanted to enable developers and get feedback as soon as possible. As a result, we expect the API and bitstream to change as it is developed. All of the code for running Lyra is open sourced under the Apache license, except for a math kernel, for which a shared library is provided until we can implement a fully open solution over more platforms. We look forward to seeing what people do with Lyra now that it is open sourced. Check out the code and demo on GitHub, let us know what you think, and how you plan to use it!

  • Microsoft Building Team of Rust Developers

    Microsoft Building Team of Rust Developers

    Microsoft is building a team of Rust developers, both for internal work and collaboration with the community.

    Rust is a relatively new programming language. Syntactically, it’s similar to C++, but is designed to offer better safety, especially in how it handles memory management and concurrency. The language was originally created by a developer at Mozilla, with the organization taking a leading role in its development. Much of Mozilla’s Rust team was laid off in 2020, amid the 250 employees let go.

    Since then, some of the biggest names in tech have been snapping up the Rust developers that were laid off. Microsoft is the latest, posting a job listing for a Rust Principle Software Engineer.

    The job listing makes it clear the engineer will work on internal systems, as well as collaborating with the Rust open source community. The engineer will be part of a newly formed team within the company.

    In this role you’ll work closely with product groups around Microsoft to gather requirements and develop tooling improvements for Rust. You’ll join a newly formed team with a vision to support Rust at Microsoft while also collaborating and sharing those improvements with the broader Rust OSS community.

    You’ll be working along with some of the most talented engineers in Microsoft on important internal systems programming workloads.

    Microsoft and other big companies’ support is good news, both for the Rust language, as well as for the developers laid off by Mozilla.

  • Microsoft All-In On Open Source: ‘The Accepted Model For Cross-Company Collaboration’

    Microsoft All-In On Open Source: ‘The Accepted Model For Cross-Company Collaboration’

    Microsoft has fully embraced open source software, calling it the “industry-accepted model for cross-company collaboration.”

    Microsoft was once considered by many as the number one enemy of open source. The company’s approach to software was diametrically opposed to the open source movement, since Microsoft’s business was based entirely on charging for its operating systems (OS) and software.

    In recent years, however, especially under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has embraced open source and shifted its entire business model. Rather than vigorously protecting its OS business, and working to keep everyone using Windows, Microsoft has adopted a more open approach. The company’s new focus is providing the best software and services, regardless of the platform the user is on.

    This new approach lends itself well to working with open source, especially when it comes to collaborating with other companies. Sarah Novotny, Open Source Lead, Azure Office of the CTO, outlined how much things have changed in a blog post:

    A few years ago if you wanted to get several large tech companies together to align on a software initiative, establish open standards, or agree on a policy, it would often require several months of negotiation, meetings, debate, back and forth with lawyers… and did we mention the lawyers? Open source has completely changed this: it has become an industry-accepted model for cross-company collaboration. When we see a new trend or issue emerging that we know would be better to work on together to solve, we come together in a matter of weeks, with established models we can use to guide our efforts.

    Novotny highlights several benefits of being part of the open source community, including gaining different perspectives, balancing corporate policy with employee empowerment and autonomy, securing every stage of the software supply chain and over communicating.

    These lessons have had a profound impact on how Microsoft does business.

    As a result, companies are working together more frequently, and the amount of cross-industry work we’re able to accomplish is accelerating. In 2020 alone, Microsoft participated in dozens of industry groups, associations, and initiatives—from long-standing established organizations, like the Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation, to new emerging communities like Rust and WebAssembly. This work across companies and industries will continue in the year ahead and we look forward to learning, growing, and earning our place in open source.

    Microsoft’s example can serve as a lesson to all companies on the importance of open source in today’s industry, and especially in the context of the digital transformation currently in effect.

  • Google Asking For Help With Its Fuchsia OS

    Google Asking For Help With Its Fuchsia OS

    Google is opening the door to greater collaboration with the open source community on its latest operating system (OS) endeavorer, Fuchsia.

    Google has been working on Fuchsia since at least 2016, when its existence was first publicly known. Much of Fuchsia’s development has been shrouded in mystery, and Google has been light on details. It appears to primarily be aimed at phone and tablets, although Google has hinted that it could be used on a wider array of devices.

    The obvious point of reference is Android, with many believing Fuchsia represents a possible Android replacement. One big difference is the kernel, or core, of the OS. While Android is based on a Linux kernel, Fuchsia has a completely new kernel called Zircon. This may be in an effort to address the shortcomings Android has experienced.

    For those interested in seeing what Fuchsia looks like, Ars Technica built a copy of the project and posted a gallery of screenshots.

    In the meantime, however, Google is making it easier for the open source community to contribute to the project.

    Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia’s open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.

    In addition, we are also publishing a technical roadmap for Fuchsia to provide better insights for project direction and priorities. Some of the highlights of the roadmap are working on a driver framework for updating the kernel independently of the drivers, improving file systems for performance, and expanding the input pipeline for accessibility.

    The fact that Google is opening the door to more collaboration may indicate an acceleration of this plans. It will be interesting to see where Fuchsia goes, and what devices Google uses it on.

    Image Credit: Ars Technica

  • Google Reneges On Promise, Angers Open Source Community

    Google Reneges On Promise, Angers Open Source Community

    Google has found itself in hot water with the open source community by reneging on a promise it made regarding Istio.

    Istio is a “mesh service,” a critical piece of cloud architecture that ensures all the various microservices that comprise a cloud platform work together. Google developed Istio, and it quickly became one of the most popular mesh services available, supported by a wide array of companies. Part of this popularity came from the boost IBM gave Istio, when they merged their own Amalgam8 mesh service into Google’s project and joined forces with search giant to promote Istio.

    The controversy is surrounding Google’s 2017 promise to turn Istio over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Instead, the company has decided to turn over control to the Open Usage Commons (OUC), a brand-new, open source organization Google created, and then announced on July 8. Needless to say, this bait-and-switch has not sat well with the open source community.

    “Today’s announcement by Google of the creation of the Open Usage Commons (OUC) is disappointing because it doesn’t live up to the community’s expectation for open governance,” writes IBM’s Jason McGee. “An open governance process is the underpinning of many successful projects. Without this vendor-neutral approach to project governance, there will be friction within the community of Kubernetes-related projects.

    “At the project’s inception, there was an agreement that the project would be contributed to the CNCF when it was mature. IBM continues to believe that the best way to manage key open source projects such as Istio is with true open governance, under the auspices of a reputable organization with a level playing field for all contributors, transparency for users, and vendor-neutral management of the license and trademarks. Google should reconsider their original commitment and bring Istio to the CNCF.”

    These are strong words from Google’s Istio partner and should cause the company to reconsider its position. Google has spent years earning the goodwill of the open source community, something this debacle is quickly undoing.

  • Microsoft Responsible For Latest Google Chrome Feature

    Microsoft Responsible For Latest Google Chrome Feature

    Once bitter rivals in the browser wars, Microsoft and Google are now cooperating like never before, with a major Chrome feature originating with Microsoft, according to The Verge.

    Microsoft recently moved its Edge browser over to Chromium, the open-source rendering engine that serves as the basis for Chrome. Since the move, Microsoft has been responsible for some 1,900 changes and improvements to Chromium, according to CNET.

    While many of these changes are under-the-hood, the latest is a very visible one. CNET says “the tab management feature in Edge lets you right-click on a single tab or a group of tabs you’ve selected then send them to a new or different Edge browser window. It’s useful if you like to group related tabs into a single window.”

    The feature caught the eye of Google software engineer Leonard Grey and, as The Verge points out, “now Microsoft is helping bring it directly to Chromium and Chrome.” This is an excellent example of the overall benefit that comes from tech companies working together around open standards and open-source software.

  • IBM CEO: We Will Be Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    IBM CEO: We Will Be Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    IBM is in the midst of being reinvented and the acquisition of Red Hat is a big part of that. A primary business for IBM is helping companies integrate their mission-critical work into a multi-cloud world in a secure way. “All of us know the big job is how to manage it, access controls, security, know what data is where, and how much data you want flowing,” says IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.  “We will be number one in what the world calls hybrid cloud.”

    Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, recently discussed on Fox Business at Davos 2019 how the acquisition of Red Hat is part of the reinvention of IBM and how this is part of their strategy to be number one in hybrid cloud:

    We Have Been Reinventing IBM

    We have been reinventing IBM. We just had our earnings and 50 percent of the company has moved into these new products and services which are always redoing the portfolio. One of the things with the Red Hat acquisition is really what I see in front of us, which I call chapter two of the cloud. For most enterprises, chapter one was the easy things that they moved. Pretty low hanging fruit. If you sized it, 20 percent is what’s moved to the cloud. The other 80 percent is not just more complex, it’s got a different complexion.

    Most companies weren’t born yesterday. It’s like if you have a house already. You’ve got your house. You say these rooms I’m not going to touch, I’m going to leave them as they are. These rooms are going to get remodeled, moved to the public cloud. These are so sensitive, I’m going to keep them right here and put them in a private cloud.

    Greatest Proponent of Open and Open Source

    That’s really what Red Hat and us together says to all of our clients out there. With this journey now, you are going to have multiple clouds. They are difficult to manage with security and moving of data. Don’t get locked into any single cloud. We now become the greatest proponent of open and open source.

    Part of Red Hat is how you build things so they can move from private to multiple clouds. This allows clients to move to a multi-cloud era, open so they are not locked in, in a very secure way, so they make their cloud journey from where they start. It really allows us to own the starting point and the ending point of a cloud journey. That’s part of the portfolio.

    Number One in Hybrid Cloud

    When you think of IBM, think of your mission-critical work. We believe it will be a multi-cloud world, but we believe we will have the most secure public cloud for mission-critical work. We will also help you manage and integrate all of these other clouds together. We are the cloud for business. That’s how I would differentiate us. For big business as well as small. You will see a different mix between what percentage runs on a public cloud versus a private cloud.

    Most clients may have their CRM system with Salesforce, their HR system with SAP or Workday, etc. They already have all of this different real estate. All of us know the big job is how to manage it, access controls, security, know what data is where, and how much data you want flowing. We will be number one in what the world calls hybrid cloud.

    IBM is the Greatest Supporter of Open Source

    Our familiarity and investment in Linux goes back 20 years. Linux is the open operating system and what people mostly think about when they think of open. We are one of the top contributors to all the projects out there. So I think counter to what may be the perception out there, IBM is the greatest supporter of open source. Take blockchain, for instance, that’s all open source. We open sourced that on purpose to make it fly.

    Red Hat Linux is the number one operating system in on-premise as well as number one in the cloud. This year it took over number one over the others. We view this a part of our DNA to be open. I don’t see it cultural. It’s really important for what they do that it not just run on IBM. It’s going to run on all of our competitors. This is friendly competition as well since these are our clients that use all these. It will be on all the other clouds.

    We want to preserve that and make sure that they have equal opportunity with what they do. Then what we do is we take the same products from Red Hat and we add to it and then we also compete in that world. We have a strategic imperative around cloud, around analytics, and around mobility. That’s the part of the business that is now close 50 percent of the company.


  • Microsoft is Reportedly on the Verge of Acquiring Github

    Microsoft is Reportedly on the Verge of Acquiring Github

    Microsoft is reportedly in acquisition talks with GitHub, according to sources privy to the matter. Based on the Bloomberg report, the deal to purchase one of the biggest code repository companies will be announced as early as Monday.

    Founded in 2008, GitHub was a popular hosting site of codes, projects, and documentation for several developers and companies. It is the commonly used platform for open-source software projects, boasting of more than 20 million developers working across 67 million repositories in 2017. GitHub has come a long way from having just 2,000 users when it first started 10 years ago.

    Back then, Microsoft disparaged open-source programs built on GitHub because of its proprietary software in the market. Open-source software allows developers to play around, improve, and share codes, making it a threat to Microsoft applications. Over time, the software giant became more receptive to the idea, launching its own open-source community over a decade ago and shifting its bigger projects on GitHub in 2015.

    These days, Microsoft is the top contributor to the site, while other big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple also use GitHub. Microsoft’s seismic move to open-source technology, as well as cloud computing, began when CEO Satya Nadella took over the top post in 2014. Since then, the company has been pushing for ways to support Linux as it veers away from depending on the Windows operating system.

    It’s likely that Nadella’s vision has impressed GitHub, opting to sell instead of going public. Although the terms of the deal remain under wraps, GitHub was reportedly valued at $2 billion in 2015. This was lower than its $5 billion asking price when acquisition talks were discussed previously, say sources familiar with the deal.  

     GitHub is viewed by many as the de-facto source code platform where developers can connect and collaborate. However,  it suffers from a few operational problems such as monetizing its products and turnover in its executive ranks. One of the company’s co-founders, Chris Wanstrath, stepped down as its CEO in August 2017. Since then, there has been no replacement while Chief Business Officer Julio Avalos handles daily leadership in the interim.          

    GitHub posted losses of about $66 million for three quarters in 2016 but reported revenue of $98 million during the same year, according to Bloomberg. However, its annual revenue doubled to $200 million in 2017, driven mainly by its paying corporate accounts. The company began offering GitHub Enterprise, a paid option for corporations with additional features and services, such as 24/7 support, dynamic hosting alternatives, and private workspaces, among others.

    With GitHub’s push for more corporate clients, investors anticipate an initial public offering in the future. The company seems to benefit significantly from selling out instead of going public, particularly since Microsoft appears eager to snap up the platform based on their intermittent talks over the years.

  • Yahoo Reveals Its Search Secrets, Vespa Tool is Now Available as Open Source

    Yahoo Reveals Its Search Secrets, Vespa Tool is Now Available as Open Source

    Yahoo is now giving away the crucial technology powering its internal searches. Vespa, the search engine used by the tech company for internal queries, is now open-source and available to everyone.

    Oath Inc., the Verizon company that acquired Yahoo in June, announced that Vespa is now available as open source on GitHub. According to a company blog post, making the Big Data processing and serving engine open source is a step further in Oath’s commitment to opening up its infrastructure to developers.

    “By releasing Vespa, we are making it easy for anyone to build applications that can compute responses to user requests, over large datasets, at real time and at internet scale – capabilities that up until now, have been within reach of only a few large companies,” Jon Bratseth, a systems architect at Yahoo, explained via the blog post.

    Vespa powers Yahoo network’s internal search feature and is used to determine what recommendations to display as well as the company’s ad targeting system. Currently, Vespa is used in around 150 apps such as Yahoo’s main search engine, Yahoo Mail, and Flicker, CNBC reported. The search tool is also responsible for serving around 3 billion native ads daily.

    Vespa traces its roots back to AllTheWeb, a Norwegian search engine which was acquired by Yahoo in 2003, according to Wired. Since then, the tool has been modified as a general purpose engine that Yahoo could use internally in a host of different applications.

    This is not the first time Yahoo released some of its technology as open source. In 2009, the company released Hadoop as open source which became a hit when it was adopted by big tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay. Apparently, the plan is to replicate the benefits of making Hadoop publicly available which allowed Yahoo to easily recruit programmers as it became widely used.

    But Vespa’s reach has the potential to overshadow that of Hadoop. As Bratseth puts it, “Vespa is larger in scope and lines of code than any open source project we’ve ever released,” adding that it has already been battle-proven in Yahoo’s largest and most critical systems. It is attractive both for its scalability and versatility while it is touted to be better than Hadoop in serving results to end users.

    However, there are doubts that Vespa could be successful outside of Oath. According to Wired, Hadoop became a success because it was born open source and arrived at a time when businesses needed it most. This time, however, most large companies have already addressed web search issues that Vespa is designed for. In addition, there are already other open source engines available.

    [Featured Image via Yahoo]

  • Microsoft Announces Open Sourced SONiC for Running Network Devices

    This week at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Microsoft announced an open sourced “Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC)” for running network devices like switches. Mellanox, Dell, Arista, and Broadcom collaborated the company on the project.

    You can see the keynote remarks from Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich here:

    He discusses SONiC more here.

    “Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) is not hardware, but a collection of software networking components required to build network devices like switches with rich functionality,” says Azure Networking Principal Architect Kamala Subramaniam. “It can run on various switching platforms via the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which we announced during last year’s OCP Summit and which was officially accepted by the OCP in July. It is based on a modular architecture with a lean stack built for data center networking needs. SONiC will enable cloud operators to take advantage of hardware innovation while giving them a framework to build upon an open source code for apps on the network switch and the ability to integrate with multiple platforms. SONiC is not just prototyped software but deployed today and planned to run at scale in the future.”

    “Most importantly, all the components of Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) are available as open source, enabling community driven innovation in open networking,” she adds.

    She gets much more into the whys and hows here. Arista, Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cavium, Centec Networks, Dell, Mellanox, and Facebook all offer comments on the news as well.

    Image via YouTube

  • Facebook Launches Parse Server Dashboard

    Facebook Launches Parse Server Dashboard

    As you know, Facebook announced in January that it’s shutting down Parse, its cloud-based platform for cross-platform apps, which lets developers create rich social apps integrated with Facebook across platforms like iOS, Android, HTML5, etc.

    Parse is to be fully retired by January 28, 2017. The company and others have been giving developers tools to help the migration process, and the latest comes today with the announcement of the open source Parse Server Dashboard.

    “The dashboard is one of the top requested features by developers, and is a tool to use during all phases of the migration of apps: whether they are already on the Parse server, still on Parse.com, or planning to migrate soon, they will be able to manage them all from the same dashboard,” a spokesperson told us in an email.

    “The Parse Dashboard is adapted from the same dashboard we launched in December, and running it will feel very familiar to any Node.js or web developers,” writes software engineer Drew Gross on the Parse blog. “If you already have Node.js, all it takes to get started is four simple commands to clone the source code, and a little bit of info in a config file.”

    Gross talks about getting started, staying up to date, and contributing on the Parse blog here.

    Image via Parse

  • LinkedIn Open Sources Data Discovery Portal WhereHows

    LinkedIn announced that it is open sourcing its WhereHows data discovery and lineage portal.

    WhereHows is made up of a data repository to store metadata content, a web server that surfaces the data through a UI and an API, and a backend server that periodically fetches metadata from other systems.

    As far as the metadata it collects, this includes the catalog info of datasets (like schema structure, dtasets physical location, timestamp of create/modify, ownership, etc.), operational metadata (like jobs, flows, and execution info), and lineage info metadata (the connection between jobs and datasets).

    “At LinkedIn, WhereHows integrates with all our data processing environments and extracts coarse and fine grain metadata from them,” explains LinkedIn’s Eric Sun. “Then, it surfaces this information through two interfaces: (1) a web application that enables navigation, search, lineage visualization, annotation, discussion, and community participation and (2) an API endpoint that empowers automation of other data processes and applications.”

    “This enables us to solve problems around data and process lineage, data and process ownership, schema discovery and evolution history, User Defined Function (UDF) and script discovery, operational metadata mashup, and data profiling and cross-cluster comparison,” Sun continues. “In addition to machine-based pattern detection and association between business glossary and dataset, the community participation and collaboration aspect enables us to create a self-maintaining repository of documentation on the entities by encouraging conversations and pride in ownership.”

    Read LinkedIn’s full post on the news here for more on how to use the metadata and much more.

    There is detailed documentation for each of WhereHows’s components available on Github.

    Images via LinkedIn

  • Apple Open Sources Swift Programming Language

    Apple Open Sources Swift Programming Language

    Apple announced programming language Swift last year as a replacement for Objective C as the language for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS apps. The company announced this week that it is releasing it as open source.

    Apple says the broad community of developers ranging from app developers to educational institutions and enterprises can now contribute to new Swift features and optimizations as well as bring the language to new computing platforms.

    The company also launched Swift.org as a place to obtain detailed info about the language, including documentation and community resources. You can also download the source code from there.

    The code is available via GitHub. Components include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL.

    “By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Swift’s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with today’s announcement they’ll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud.”

    “Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language that gives developers the freedom and capabilities they need to create the next generation of cutting-edge software,” the company says. “Swift is easy to learn and use, even if you’ve never coded before, and it’s the first systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. Designed for safety, Swift also eliminates entire categories of common programming errors.”

    According to Apple, Swift is the fastest growing programming language of all time.

  • Google And Twitter Reportedly Working On Open Source Answer To Facebook Instant Articles

    Back in May, Facebook announced Instant Articles, which sees the social network host content from participating publishers in order to show users that content more quickly on mobile devices, saving them from having to wait for content to load.

    The result was what some considered a “buttery smooth” content consumption experience.

    Earlier this year, Google and Twitter partnered to start showing a new tweet integration in search results, and now the two companies are teaming up on an answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles, according to a new report from Re/code, citing anonymous sources. They’re doing things a little bit differently, however.

    According to the report, Google and Twitter are creating publishing tools as an open source project with the hopes that other platforms will adopt it. They’re also not actually hosting the content like Facebook is, but rather showing cached “snapshots” of content from publishers’ sites. Peter Kafka and Mark Bergen at Re/code report:

    The idea, according to multiple sources, is that Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately, instead of having to wait several seconds.

    Neither company is commenting on these alleged plans, but you can at least read what Google has to say about cached links here.

    It remains to be seen how well this will work with content that gets updated after its initial publishing, and how quickly Google and Twitter will be able to show the freshest version.

    Another thing that remains unclear is how business terms and ad-related matters will work out for publishers. The first content resulting from the partnership is expected to surface this fall.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Google Open Sources Cloud Dataflow SDK For Java

    Google announced the open sourcing of its Cloud Dataflow SDK for Java in a move it says will make it easier for developers to integrate its managed service while forming the basis for porting Cloud Dataflow to other languages and execution environments.

    Google first unveiled Cloud Dataflow back in June.

    “We created Cloud Dataflow, which is now currently an alpha release, as a platform to democratize large scale data processing by enabling easier and more scalable access to data for data scientists, data analysts and data-centric developers,” says Google software engineer Sam McVeety. “Regardless of role or goal – users can discover meaningful results from their data via simple and intuitive programing concepts, without the extra noise from managing distributed systems.”

    “We’ve learned a lot about how to turn data into intelligence as the original FlumeJava programming models (basis for Cloud Dataflow) have continued to evolve internally at Google,” McVeety says.

    Google says it’s open sourcing it so developers can “spur innovation in combining stream and batch based processing models,” adapt the Dataflow programming model to other languages, and execute Dataflow on other service environments.

    Those who wish to get involved with Clodu Dataflow can apply for access to its managed service here, take a look at the documentation, and converse at StackOverflow.

    Image via Google

  • Microsoft Open Sources, Expands .NET To Linux, Mac

    Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack, and expanding .NET to run on Linux and Mac OS. The company also released Visual Studio Community 2013, which is a free edition of Visual Studio that provides access to the core toolset.

    “With billions of devices in the market today, developers need tools that target many different form factors and platforms,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. “Through Visual Studio and .NET we are committed to delivering a comprehensive end-to-end solution for developers to build and manage applications across multiple devices and platforms.”

    Included in the .NET server stack open sourcing are: ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries.

    The company says it will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET, and will work through the .NET Foundation.

    Non-enterprise application developers who wish to get started with VIsual Studio Community can do so here. Microsoft is also previewing Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015.

    Finally, the company announced the preview of ASP.NET 5.0, which it describes as a “streamlined framework and runtime optimized for cloud and server workloads.”

    Image via .NET Foundation

  • Twitter Acquires Mitro Labs, As EFF Helps Turn Mitro Into Open Source Project

    Twitter is apparently on something of an acquisition spree. This week, we already learned that Twitter acquired Madbits, which specializes in deep/machine learning. Earlier this week, it announced the acquisition of CardSpring.

    On its earnings call this week, Twitter also announced that it closed the previously announced acquisition of Tap Commerce. Now, it has acquired Mitro Labs, apparently for its talent (via TechCrunch).

    The Mitro team will join Twitter in New York, and work on “a variety of geo-related projects,” while Mitro, its multiple user password product, will live on as an open source project with code on Github. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been helping them in turning it into “a sustainable, community-run project”.

    According to Mitro Labs, it will continue to operate as is for the foreseeable future. They had this to say in a blog post:

    We want to thank our users, institutional investors (especially Stan Reiss at Matrix and Rich Miner at Google Ventures), and angel investors for helping us build a product that is both secure and usable. We’d also like to thank Twitter for their support as we make this transition.

    The EFF discusses its role in the project here.

    Image via Mitro Labs

  • Facebook Open Sources Engine Behind Paper App (Pop)

    Facebook announced that it is open sourcing Pop, the animation engine behind its recently launched Paper app.

    Facebook released Paper in January. It’s a social news reader app for iOS. If you’re unfamiliar with it, watch this:

    Pop is responsible for the smooth animations and transitions that take place within the app, including scrolling, bouncing, and unfolding effects.

    “Since the original iPhone, iOS has excelled at supporting static animations. The Apple-provided Core Animation framework makes linear, ease-in, ease-out, and ease-in-ease-out animations simple to leverage,” says Kimon Tsinteris, an engineer at Facebook. “The innovation of touch interfaces has ushered in a new wave of software design. Direct manipulation of on-screen elements has removed one level of indirection, which in turn has raised our expectations for the screen as a medium. If objects respond to our touches, they should also respond to the velocity of our flick.”

    “When I co-founded Push Pop Press in 2010, our goal was to create a realistic, physics-everywhere experience,” he adds. “We wanted a solution that would allow us to evoke the same delightful experience of UIScrollView throughout the whole application. Pop is the latest manifestation of that vision, allowing us to keep the familiar and powerful programming model of Core Animation while also capturing a gesture’s velocity and better reflecting user intent. Paper has given us the opportunity to further refine both the vision and the animation engine behind it.”

    Facebook acquired Push Pop Press back in 2011. Here’s what it looked like at the time:

    Tsinteris says they want to make commonly needed animations convenient, and make it easier to create unique effects in apps. They also want to create a developer-friendly, but powerful programming model.

    Pop joins other open source iOS releases from Facebook including KVOController, Shimmer, and Tweaks.

    You can find Pop on GitHub here.

    Image via Facebook