Hadoop is coming out of the shadows and into production in IT shops that are drawn to its ability to store, process and analyze extremely large volumes of data. But the relative newness of the open-source platform and a shortage of experienced Hadoop talent [link to sidebar TK] pose technical challenges that enterprise IT teams need to address.

In its new role as steward of the OpenOffice.org open source office suite, the Apache Software Foundation expects to offer an Apache-branded version of the package for developers in 2012. Apache also is carefully guarding its trademarks.

Yahoo is discontinuing its distribution of the Hadoop platform and will instead focus on Apache Hadoop, the Hadoop Team at Yahoo said this week.

The volunteer developers behind Apache Tomcat have released version 7.0.6 of the open-source Java servlet container.

The Apache Foundation has completed a major upgrade of its Maven software build system, making it speedier and more extensible.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.