News

• MIT to open source educational software

  By Joab Jackson | 20 December, 2011 04:48

  As part of an initiative to expand its online course offerings, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to release as open source the software it will use to manage student online learning, the institution announced Monday.

• The Grill: Doug Cutting

  By Jaikumar Vijayan | 20 December, 2011 02:25

  Doug Cutting, creator of the open-source Hadoop framework that allows enterprises to store and analyze petabytes of unstructured data, led the team that built one of the world's largest Hadoop clusters while he was at Yahoo. Formerly an engineer at Excite, Apple and Xerox PARC, Cutting also developed Lucene and Nutch, two open-source search engine technologies now being managed by the Apache Foundation. Cutting is now an architect at Cloudera, which sells and supports a commercial version of Hadoop. Here he talks about the reasons for the surging enterprise interest in Hadoop.

• Quest extends Unix Sudo tool

  By Joab Jackson | 16 December, 2011 00:08

  Reflecting the growing need for automation tools in the enterprise, Quest Software has released a software package that could help Unix administrators better manage policy files that determine which users can access privileged material and programs on Unix and Linux systems.

• 8 free Wi-Fi stumbling and surveying tools

  By Eric Geier | 12 December, 2011 22:26

  Even if you have an enterprise-level Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer, like Wi-Spy or AirMagnet, free Wi-Fi tools can also come in handy. You might use them during the planning or installation stages of your wireless LAN, while troubleshooting, or when performing maintenance. They could even serve as your primarily tools in smaller and less-complex environments.

• WebOS lives on! HP's mobile OS to go open source

  By Ginny Mies | 12 December, 2011 08:30

  The future of webOS has been hazy since HP announced in August that it will discontinue its webOS line of devices. The HP Veer 4G faded into oblivion, but the HP TouchPad has enjoyed numerous fire sales since the announcement. Today, HP announced that webOS will live on as an open source platform.

• Did HP just give webOS 'a death sentence'?

  By Nancy Gohring | 10 December, 2011 11:58

  As an open-source project with uncertain backing, webOS has a tough road ahead of it, analysts said on Friday.

• Usenix: Dartmouth expanding diff, grep Unix tools

  By Joab Jackson | 08 December, 2011 21:40

  With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more complex types of data.

• FAQ: CNET's "Trojan" installer

  By Tim Greene | 08 December, 2011 05:44

  CNET is under fire for downloading more than just open source software with the open source software that it makes available on its Web site.

• Red Hat RHEL 6.2 boosts storage capabilities

  By Joab Jackson | 07 December, 2011 05:53

  Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new technologies designed to cut the cost and improve performance of enterprise storage, the company announced Tuesday.

• Q&A: SUSE's Australasian sales director

  By Lisa Banks | 05 December, 2011 12:18

  Hamish Miles spoke to Computerworld Australia about his new role, the future of Linux in the enterprise, the Cloud and what role open source will play in the future.

• Protocol deal to bring compatible Microsoft apps to iOS, Android

  By Michael Kan | 29 November, 2011 21:57

  Microsoft said on Tuesday it will license the protocols for many of its enterprise systems to a company that will develop compatible applications for non-Microsoft mobile operating systems, including Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

• Small Taiwanese firms finally get some new Android code

  By Michael Kan | 18 November, 2011 17:28

  Some of Taiwan's smaller manufacturers said they were relieved to see Google release the source code for its Android 4.0 operating system, after being cut out of the picture with its previous Honeycomb version.

• Apache moves Geronimo to OSGi base

  By Joab Jackson | 18 November, 2011 07:48

  In an attempt to help developers create more modular enterprise Java programs, the Apache Software Foundation has reconfigured its Geronimo application server to a set of standards established by the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) Alliance.

• Adobe donates Flex to Apache

  By Joab Jackson | 17 November, 2011 10:25

  In a move that appears to be another step away from its Flash platform, Adobe has submitted the code for its Flash-based Flex framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to be managed as an independent project.

• Diaspora social network co-founder dies at age 22

  By Bob Brown | 16 November, 2011 04:23

  Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of privacy-focused social network Diaspora, has died in San Francisco.