Business

  • Four years after it’s founding, Confluent, a company that provides enterprise services based on Apache Kafka, has reached a valuation of $2.5B with annual bookings in excess of $100M. This makes it possible the 2nd open source company after Red Hat to reach a $1B valuation. Confluent specializes in providing data processing for companies with […]

  • At a recent press conference, Sarah Novotny, head of open source strategy at Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Melody Meckfessel, VP of engineering for GCP shared some interesting insight into how Google decides when to release software under an open source license. Key points: Google has released more than 2,400 open source projects, however the major […]

  • Quote from Tech Crunch: The Linux Foundation is adding yet another foundation to its stable: the LF Deep Learning Foundation. The idea behind the LF Deep Learning  Foundation is to “support and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning while striving to make these critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere.” The founding […]

  • ExpressVPN has released leak testing tools under an open source license. They were developed by the company’s Privacy Research Lab and have been released under an MIT license. The tools were build for two reasons: To provide robust, automated regression testing of ExpressVPN applications To facilitate leak testing investigations to further strengthen those applications The […]

  • Cockroach Labs recently released much of their interview process under an open source license on GitHub. This process does away with resumes and instead focuses on interactive exercises that test a person on the things they would be doing as a part of the job. The process has been released under a CC0 license and […]

  • In another example of the company’s ongoing embrace of open source software, Microsoft has become a premium sponsor of the Open Source Initiative. From the announcement: Microsoft’s history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License, then again in August of 2007 with the submission of the Microsoft […]

  • OSVehicle is the group behind the open source car hardware platform named the Tabby Evo. The company has now released EDIT: an open source platform for customizing the Tabby Evo for specific purposes. The company looks to solve a number of problems associated with the traditional car manufacturing industry: For most the time to market […]

  • Black Duck Software is a company that provides automated solutions for securing open source software and monitoring compliance. The company has announced the launch of the Center for Open Source Research and Innovation (COSRI) that will fund research to improve innovation, information, and education related to open source software. From the press release: “Through COSRI, […]

  • The Linux Foundation and Dice have partnered to released the 2016 open source jobs report which surveyed more than 400 hiring managers and 4,500 open source professionals to understand the current state of the open source job market. This year’s report illustrates and increased demand for open source talent, and that talent is increasingly hard […]

  • With 4th quarter 2015 revenue hitting $544 million, Red Hat has become the first open source based company to produce $2 billion in revenue in a single year. Only four years ago, Red Hat became the first company to hit $1 billion in revenue, so this demonstrates remarkable growth for the company. Subscription revenue for […]

  • 10 years after the Company’s launch Twitter has been valued at $32 billion but has yet to produce a profit. The company has struggled throughout its entire existence to monetize it’s large user base. This editorial explores how it might be possible for Twitter to pursue greater democratization through open source to grow its userbase, […]

  • Senator Daniel Squadron, a senator from New York Stat, has co-sponsored a bill along with Senator Ruth Russel-Thompson to provide a tax credit to open source software developers for writing free software. The senators hope to encourage greater technology development in an effort to create jobs and add to the state’s technology sector.  Senate bill […]

  • Toonz is a popular animation software application that has been used to make some popular animated shows and movies including the popular TV series Futurama. It is often preferred because it makes it easy to combine hand-drawn animations with software-created animations. Japan-based Dwango has acquired Digital Video, the company that made the software, and has […]

  • The Open Compute Project is an effort to make an open source data center. Facebook started the project to reduce the effort and money required to build a data center and to demystify the process of doing so. A number of major tech companies have gotten involved in this project over the last year, but […]

  • Microsoft’s perception of open source has changed drastically in the last few years as the company has adopted more and more open source practices in an effort to keep up with its competitors. Two new developments have occurred as a part of this effort. The first development is Microsoft joining the Eclipse Foundation as a […]

  • SXSW is a giant event in Austin, TX that attracts hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to see the latest in music, movies, technology, and art. Most people are aware of the bigger events that require badges to get in, but there are also a ton of smaller events that are free […]

  • Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system that was launched by Google. Apprenda is a startup based out of Troy, NY that deploys computer applications in industries like finance and pharmaceuticals, and they have announced they will be merging Kubernetes into their platform and joining the Kubernetes community. They chose Kubernetes for three primary […]

  • Building on the success of the Open Compute Project, facebook has launched a new open source project to design wireless broadband technologies. The program is called the Telcom Infra Project (TIP), and includes more than 2 dozen companies including Intel, Nokia, and many more. The focus of this project will first be on separating the […]

  • Random Articles from the OST Archives

    • India is now the fastest growing market for the open source operating system Ubuntu with it achieving a growth of 50% year-over-year. Canonical has benefited greatly from a partnership with Dell and HP to include Ubuntu on laptops sold in the country, and the low-cost alternative to proprietary operating systems has made Ubuntu a popular […]

    • Docker has achieved incredible success in the short two years it has been in existence, but some of the tech companies that have been involved since the early days are beginning to question whether or not the project still lives up to its original goal of making packaging software simpler. CoreOS is one of the […]

    • Building on the success of the Open Compute Project, facebook has launched a new open source project to design wireless broadband technologies. The program is called the Telcom Infra Project (TIP), and includes more than 2 dozen companies including Intel, Nokia, and many more. The focus of this project will first be on separating the […]