Business

  • Despite being the poster child for open source business, Red Hat has had little interaction with many of the biggest open source communities. Red Hat has done wonderfully to attract businesses to their enterprise services, but attracting developers to their open source platforms has been a major challenge for the corporation. One attempt at remedying […]

  • A very large part of the services offered on the web are free (as in beer) to users, but many of them come at the cost of freedom. Services like Twitter, Google, and facebook are being used to track users interactions on the web and to monetize as many of those interactions as possible. As […]

  • Walmart has been a major backer of Hapi.js , a framework for node.js that allows developers to focus on producing reusable application code rather than building infrastructure. Walmart uses this software extensively in production environments and they have benefited from the open source community through early adopters that test the code and make it more […]

  • Key insights: User generated improvements are better informed. Collective intelligence bears more leverage and needs less coordination Code velocity, committer reputation, user/vendor driven innovation, user activity, and corporate support are all metrics that can be used to evaluate the quality of an open source project. Foundations can help open source by being vendor neutral, enforcing […]

  • The Cloud FX is the first Firefox OS smartphone and is now available for purchase in India. It features a 2MP rear camera, a 1.0 GHz processor, 128 MB of memory and 256 MB of device storage (expandable up to 4GB).  Mozilla has focused on emerging markets for Firefox OS with the ability to run […]

  • It’s been four years since Rackspace helped launch OpenStack, and the company is beginning to struggle. Fortunately, the OpenStack ecosystem is as vibrant and healthy as it has ever been, with the largest category of contributors being “others,” meaning most contributions are coming from individuals in many different companies. More from Tesora

  • Following a slow start to the year 2014, Red Hat is now showing strong gains for the second half. This is fueled by the expansion of their middleware and cloud services which have netted multiple contracts worth over $5 million this year. This, coupled with their acquisition of InkTank, the makers of Ceph, earlier this […]

  • Community Engagement is one of the most important considerations when building an open source community that has long-term sustainability. A Group of 30 community managers came together in Portland, Oregon for the Community Leadership Summit and built a list of methods to keep a community involved. This list includes welcoming new members, conducting assessments to […]

  • Participating in open source can foster a sense of optimism and hope, open up new skills and abilities, and encourage deeper engagement in learning within the individuals involved. This article is chocked full of examples of open source expanding the potential of the human mind. More from OpenSource.com

  • Open Source Hardware companies generated $50 million in revenue in 2013, an number that appears to be headed towards $1 billion next year. This is driven by companies like Adafruit, Arduino, Maker Shed, and Parrallex. Bug Labs is demonstrating the ongoing growth of this industry by recently raising $16 million in venture capital. More from […]

  • A new study by researchers from Harvard and the University of Texas demonstrates how patent trolls have a significant negative effect on R&D spending of companies. The study showed companies who lost patent litigation against non-practicing entities spent $211 million less on R&D on average than those who won. The study also shows a negative […]

  • More companies are turning to open source solutions for their business needs, with quality being the number one consideration for companies who adopt open source technologies. Black Duck and North Ridge Venture Partners joined together to conduct a survey to find out why businesses are choosing open source. Additionally, security and technical features were highly […]

  • BitXBay is a P2P trading app that operates through the Bitmessage network to enable users to transfer money to anyone else securely and privately.Charly Clinton stated his motivation for starting this: “No trading rules, no registration, no need to enter into a contract or show their documents. Economics has nothing to do with politics or […]

  • Random Articles from the OST Archives

    • 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 […]

    • Mark Hinkle is at the forefront of open source cloud through his work at Citrix on Apache CloudStack, OpenDaylight, and the Xen Project. In this interview, he discusses ongoing trends in the open source cloud industry. Migrating to cloud solutions is a challenge for many businesses because it is widely different than the server-client model. […]

    • Elizabeth Joseph is an Automation and Tools Engineer at HP working on OpenStack, and she has 8 years experience working as a Linux systems administrator. In this interview she discuses how HP works with upstream projects, the struggle many companies are having adopting DevOps practices, and her upcoming talk about open source systems administration at […]

    • Walmart has already seen measurable benefits from investing money and developer time in the Node.js community. Now, the company is focusing on hapi, a framework for building applications and services. The company has found that investng time and money in open source communities like this has benefited them immensely by making it easier to find […]