HP plans for Open webOS 1.0 by September, Enyo framework out today

HP is moving forward with its plans to open source webOS, after failing to sell it off last year.

The company says it plans to complete the open sourcing process for webOS by September, which will be called Open webOS 1.0 when it’s released. Today, HP is getting the ball rolling by releasing the Enyo 1.0 Javascript framework, as well as the cross-platform Enyo 2.0 core, under open source licensing.

When HP announced its open … Continue Reading

5 cloud trends you won’t want to miss in 2012

Industry analysts like to refer to 2011 as “the year the cloud arrived.” But now that it’s here, what are we going to do with it?

We’ve got a few ideas.

Vendors are tripping over themselves to bolster their product lineups with cloud-hosted software and services, while customers in the public and private sectors alike are realizing the cost saving benefit of letting someone else worry about their servers and applications. And that’s not even … Continue Reading

Rackspace open-sources Dreadnot for failure-free software deployment with Node.js

The hard-working nerds at Rackspace have a gift for you: Dreadnot, their homebrewed software deployment solution.

It’s free and open-source; it’s built with Node.js; it purports to make continuous deployment a breeze (relatively speaking); and if all that doesn’t excite you, you’re probably not the kind of hacker that would find this post interesting, in which case we direct you to this video of a robot petting a kitten.

Our good buddy Paul Quera, who … Continue Reading

Twitter releases code for TextSecure to the open-source community

Android text-message-encrypting application TextSecure is now open-source, thanks to Twitter. On Tuesday, Twitter announced on its developer’s blog that it would be releasing the code from newly acquired Whisper Systems, starting with TextSecure.

In November, Twitter acquired Android-security startup Whisper Systems and added its co-founders, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, to the Twitter team. With the acquisition, Twitter also gained the code for Whisper System’s products including TextSecure, WhisperCore, WhisperMonitor and Flashback, all applications that … Continue Reading

WebOS will live on in HP tablets, according to CEO Meg Whitman

Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman says tablets are still in the cards for the newly open sourced WebOS, despite lackluster sales for the mobile operating system’s original product, the Touchpad.

Whitman and investor Marc Andreessen of venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz explained to The Verge that HP is not ready to give up on WebOS devices just yet. It believes the operating system is only going to get better with more hands contributing to its development under … Continue Reading

Facebook announces the HipHop Virtual Machine

Facebook has just announced the HipHop Virtual Machine. We’re not talking about Kanye — not this time, at least.

HipHop is Facebook’s open-source source-code transformer for PHP.

This means that Facebook found a way to make huge applications built in PHP — an easy-for-humans-to-read programming language — run a lot faster by translating the code into a language that’s easier for computers to understand. Facebook itself is built in PHP, so HipHop is part of … Continue Reading

HP open sources webOS, plans for tablets in 2013 (updated)

After shopping webOS around to major companies like Amazon and Qualcomm, HP has decided to make the platform available to the open source community, the company announced today.

The move allows third-party companies to use webOS, but HP will still be able to guide development of the platform. HP says it will be an “active participant and investor in the project.”

“webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected … Continue Reading

Ice Cream Sandwich is now open-sourced

Google has begun the release of Android 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich) source code into the wild.

What happens to it now is everybody’s business. You can download it right this second by following these instructions.

Googler Jean-Baptiste Queru notes in a Google Groups discussion, “Since this is a large push, please be aware that it will take some time to complete. If you sync before it’s done, you’ll get an incomplete copy that you … Continue Reading

Vint Cerf: The government is going overboard in Internet copyright control

“When Bob and I started writing the specs for the Internet in 1973…”

Only a handful of people can start a sentence anything like that.

Today, Vint Cerf, one of the godfathers of the Internet, stood on a stage at the Google campus and addressed attendees of Atmosphere, the company’s cloud computing event.

With his snow-white beard and three-piece suit, Cerf looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel, subtly different from the Brooks … Continue Reading

Want to hack on Facebook’s servers? Now you can

Today, Facebook announced it is opening up its fancy, redesigned data centers to help hardware hackers learn from and improve on their designs.

The Open Compute Foundation, announced today, will allow anyone to access the designs and specifications for Facebook’s homebrewed and highly efficient data center hardware and will provide structure for the project.

To join, hardware designers and hackers need to sign an agreement on the Foundation’s site, find an aspect to work on … Continue Reading

Hi5 confirms 28 job cuts as it dumps open source for Windows servers

Social network Hi5 has cut 28 jobs after completing a migration from open source servers to ones based on Microsoft’s .Net software. The move was part of a larger plan to shift the social network toward social gaming and commerce.

Alex St. John, president of San Francisco-based Hi5, confirmed a report that the company had cut the jobs after it moved its site off of what he called a “tremendously burdensome” Linux/Postgres base to a … Continue Reading

Google drops legal bomb in its own front yard as Oracle goes after Android

This week, three surprising scenarios emerged in initial depositions in the ongoing Google/Oracle lawsuit.

First, a Google engineer admitted he may have copied Sun’s code in his work on Android.

Also, Google documents show the company worked to give Motorola and Verizon early access to new versions of Android, known as “forks” — and a significant time-to-market advantage along with it.

And finally, we learned that Sun at one time wanted to walk away from … Continue Reading

MapR makes friends of Hadoop and the enterprise, raises $20M

Enterprise software provider MapR announced a $20 million second round of funding today, with the goal of making Hadoop easier for companies to use.

Hadoop is open source software that allows companies to store data on clusters of cheaper servers and run software very quickly on top of those clusters. It organizes and prioritizes data, so often-used data is pushed to the top of the stack for easy access. Along with the organization, Hadoop uses … Continue Reading

Exclusive: Facebook opens up about open-source software

This is the second of a two-part exclusive on Facebook’s involvement with and creation of open source technologies. The first installment focused on hardware. For these articles, we spoke with two of Facebook’s open source gurus, David Recordon and Amir Michael, about how the company is opening its infrastructure to other developers and organizations.

Sitting across from Facebook’s senior open programs manager David Recordon at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, we asked the young open-source … Continue Reading

Exclusive: How Facebook is open-sourcing its data centers and servers

This is the first of a two-part exclusive on Facebook’s involvement with and creation of open source technologies. For these articles, we spoke with two of Facebook’s open source gurus, David Recordon and Amir Michael, about how the company is opening its infrastructure to other developers and organizations.

It’s one thing to open-source the code for your app — that’s a simple matter of mashing a button on Github. But how do you really open-source … Continue Reading

Social incubator YouWeb raises $2M

Technology company incubator YouWeb has spawned incredibly successful social and mobile game companies. Now the Burlingame, Calif.-based incubator has raised $2 million in funding for itself.

YouWeb is raising the money from existing investors to help fuel its expansion. The company has also hired ex-Walmart executive and tech veteran Michelle Yee Sangster (right) as senior vice president of business development. Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb, said in an earlier interview that he was accelerating the … Continue Reading

Mozilla: Firefox 6 will be officially ready tomorrow

Though several reports have suggested users can download the new Mozilla Firefox 6 browser early from the company’s FTP server, Mozilla says that version is not final and the real build will be available tomorrow.

“As part of Mozilla’s open source development process, we post our builds publicly for testing and verification,” a Mozilla spokesperson told VentureBeat. “While we appreciate everyone’s excitement about the Firefox release, these builds are currently not final and are still … Continue Reading

Open source workspaces? Web Collaboration creates new way to learn

This article is part of a series of posts about DEMO alumni and news of their progress. Network Hippo launched at DEMO in Spring 2010. Check out more at DEMO.

The idea of an open-source website is not new, but how about open source workspaces? The founders of social-contact manager Network Hippo are using Web Collaboration, a virtual office, to find the definition.

Not everyone works from the office these days. Companies leverage external contractors … Continue Reading

Nebula aims to enable every company to implement cloud computing

Cloud-infrastructure startup Nebula envisions a day when every company will be able to implement cloud computing as easily as plugging into a an electrical utility.

By taking advantage of open source technologies, the company hopes to create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data center computers.

It fits with the revolution happening in big data, where the amount of data generated by applications such as Facebook … Continue Reading

Cloud-based app-development startup Cloud9 raises $5.5M

Cloud9, a cloud-based app-development startup, closed a $5.5 million first round of funding from Accel Partners and Atlassian Software, the company announced today.

Cloud9 is a web-based programming environment for developers to create and run both web and mobile applications written in JavaScript and HTML5. The service is hosted in the cloud and lets developers access, build, edit, test, debug and share projects.

Previously, Mozilla’s SkyWriter online development environment merged with the Cloud9 service, which … Continue Reading