Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed Facebook Open Platform or fbOpen, this move is viewed as being in direct competition to Google’s OpenSocial which is also an open source development platform for creating social apps.
“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to More»

Labels: Facebook, google, open social, Open Source, social media

In the first day of our Open Source CEO shoot-out, Esther Schindler asked how companies should go about finding open source projects:
Let’s say that a company is philosophically willing to use open source. How does it learn about the best software for the company’s purposes?
Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB notes that open source awareness is promoted by hiring open-source savvy IT people:
Businesses are gaining key knowledge about open source software by employing the next More»

Labels: Open Source

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, was egged by a student during a speech at the Hungarian University in Budapest. The student threw eggs at Mr. Ballmer and accused Microsoft of stealing 45 Billion in Hungarian taxpayer money.
Many African countries have said that the aid Microsoft provides them in the form of free software, benefits Microsoft many times more in the end. Microsoft donates free software to governments and universities and hence gets them hooked on it. Shortly after the donation, the software requires More»

Labels: africa, india, linux, Microsoft, Open Source, web applications

Yahoo has just announced an expansion of what it calls the Yahoo Search “Open Ecosystem”.
Yahoo has been a leader for some time in the Web 2.0 space with several applications and innovations such as photo site Flickr and adoption of OpenID. Recently Yahoo opened up their search application for more customization by developers.
Today’s announcement marks a stronger level of committment to new standards that will support the growth and development of the semantic web through the adoption of microformats - basically formats that help standardize the way applications can interact with data. More»

Labels: developers, microformats, Open Source, openid, opensocial, Yahoo

Reposted from the KeeneView blog. Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness.
Savio Rodrigues has a good posting entitled Microsoft will prevail in the face of Freetards. His point is that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with “free” that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer’s perspective.
Let’s be clear More»

Labels: Microsoft, Open Source

With the success of companies like MySQL, JBoss, Cygnus and SleepyCat, open source software has introduced major changes to the way corporate IT adopts new technology. Yet open source business practices have a long way to go before the industry as a whole is fully embraced by CIOs.
In particular, I believe that the patchwork quilt of licenses and business practices among open-source vendors is a major barrier to enterprise adoption of open source. Vendor standardization on a simple and commercially More»

Labels: affero, apl, gplv3, keeneview, Open Source

Today was a big day for OpenID, a single identity framework, given its anouncement that Yahoo is joining OpenID. OpenID is an admirable effort which aims to provide a centralized Identity system for authentication which can be used by any web site. You can read about the details if you are new to OpenID. Now that Yahoo has decided to join it, it means that the almost 250 million user accounts which are present in the Yahoo database are now part of OpenID, which consequently, means that the almost More»

Labels: dataportability, Facebook, Open Source, openid

Have you ever felt the frustration of installing some open source software and thought what prevents the incredibly geeky developers of these software to make a simple installer for us mere mortals? Well all your open source installation woes may finally end with BitNami. BitNami stacks make it incredibly easy to install your favorite open source software. Application stacks include an open source application and all the dependencies necessary to run it, such as Apache, MySQL and PHP or Ruby. More»

Labels: Open Source