Twitter Joins Linux

Twitter uses and builds a fair amount of open-source software, so it wasn’t too shocking when we read in our inboxes this morning that the social media startup has joined the Linux Foundation.

“Not only is Twitter built on Linux, but open source software is core to its technology strategy,” said a Linux Foundation rep to VentureBeat via email.
“It’s investing even more in the platform now as the company evolves and positions itself for the future. Linux has become even more dominant among web-based companies as the ‘hacker way’ has become pervasive among the newest generation of startups.”
Ah, yes, the Hacker Way. Or should we say, the “Hacker Way.”
Espousing open-source ideals, at least in spirit, has become increasingly common among web startups, especially in the Bay Area. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously wrote a “hacker way” mini-treatise into his company’s SEC IPO filing.
But in fact, while companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on open-source technologies and programming languages to get their various jobs done, their businesses are conceptually based on proprietary software, not open-source software.
As famous hacker Eric “esr” Raymond pointed out in a recent interview with VentureBeat, the true hacker way means “to give control to the individual, to respect his or her privacy, to create tools for autonomy and liberty, and to encourage creative re-use of software” — only parts of which are built into Twitter’s products.
While Twitter has open-sourced some of its software — a load-balancer called Iago and a design framework called Bootstrap, for example — vast expanses of Twitter code remain under lock and key, and the company’s recent and coming API changes means it’s getting farther away from anyone’s definition of free and open-source software.
This is a problem. Specifically, it’s a recruitment problem.
Twitter needs to continue to pull in the best, brightest, neckbeardiest developers the world can offer, and it can’t do so without some commitment to open-source communities. The company actually recently hosted an open-source event with thinly veiled recruitment mechanisms built in just for this reason: great developers and open-source software go together like peanut butter and jelly, and the more you can convince a great developer that your company believes in open-source, the more likely you are to recruit great developers in a highly competitive hiring environment.
All that being said, Twitter does have a vested interest in helping to advance the cause of Linux in particular, and some participation in open-source communities is better than none at all.
As a web-based business, Twitter, like every other web service, is supported by tens of thousands of Linux servers. In a statement on today’s news, the company said it intends to partner with the Linux Foundation to promote and protect Linux, the open-source operating system.
“Linux and its capability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Twitter open-source manager Chris Aniszczyk in the statement.
“By joining the Linux Foundation, we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

OpenCL SDK early released by Adapteva

Adapteva, a privately-held semiconductor technology start up, today announced that it is providing an early access release of an OpenCL SDK for the Epiphany multicore architecture. The OpenCL implementation was completed together with Brown Deer Technology, leading innovator in open-source heterogeneous computing.

OpenCLTM is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming that is now reaching widespread adoption in servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) provides a portable API for accessing the compute capabilities of a platform, accelerating performance in a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. With the OpenCL SDK, Epiphany programmers will be able to easily accelerate compute intensive tasks across an arbitrary number of cores on Epiphany based accelerator solutions.

“Adapteva’s Epiphany multicore architecture scales to 1000’s of cores on a single chip. Such massive parallelism requires a battle tested programming model that scales well. We chose OpenCL because it is an open standard with broad industry support and because it fits perfectly with our approach to heterogeneous computing”, said Andreas Olofsson, CEO at Adapteva. “We were very fortunate to be able to leverage the COPRTHR OpenCL implementation developed by Brown Deer Technology for ARM and x86 processors. The speed by which BDT ported its COPRTHR implementation to the Epiphany architecture and the quality of the results were simply outstanding and speaks volumes about the level of innovation and expertise at BDT and the maturity and flexibility of the Epiphany architecture.”

“Adapteva has delivered an architecture that supports massive on-chip parallelism with impressive power efficiency. OpenCL provides the perfect foundation for such a processor," said Dr. David Richie, President at Brown Deer Technology. "We leveraged this API in an SDK that provides programmers with a clear path for code development. Programmers will find their parallel algorithms mapping naturally to the Epiphany architecture. The chip is designed for massively parallel algorithms. Extracting performance from the architecture becomes relatively easy as a result of this design.”

Target Markets and Availability

The Epiphany OpenCL SDK is currently in Beta release and available to early access partners.
Coding examples and white papers will be published on Adapteva’s corporate site in the coming month.

Typing.io Lets You Practise Typing In Programming Environments

Programming languages are difficult to wrap your head around at first; you need to train your muscle memory to insert different characters after typing lines. Typing.io is a tool to help budding programmers practise and become more efficient at coding.

Typing.io is not meant as a tool to teach you programming. It’s meant solely as a way to practise typing in different open-source coding environments. This includes Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Perl, C, among others. When you load one of the lessons, you simply need to type over the text on the screen. When you make an error, the text will turn red. If you’re new to programming and need help practising your skills, Typing.io is a great place to start.

Hadoop gets a Real-Time Processing by Open Source vets

Nodeable solves real time Big Data issues

Big Data is certainly on a lot of people's lips these days. There is no doubt that we are certainly generating lots of data. Analyzing that data and making it useful is fueling literally millions of dollars of investment in companies around Hadoop, NoSQL, etc. One area where Big Data has some challenges is real-time analysis. With all of that data, analyzing in real time to get actionable intelligence into the hands of users is a big challenge. That is the the challenge that Nodeable is seeking to tackle.

Nodeable is led by a couple of open source veterans. Dave Rosenberg, formerly of Mule Source among a few other open source projects, is the CEO of Nodeable. With him are several folks who have worked with him in his previous open source companies. Additionally, Matt Assay, another veteran open source company builder, is on board at Nodeable as well.

I had a chance to sit down with Dave and talk about what he and his team are doing with Nodeable. You can listen in on our 15 or so minute conversation below. Let me warn you, the audio is a bit uneven at some points, but it isn't too bad and I think the quality of the conversation is well worth the problem with the quality of the audio.

The Nodeable team is using an open source program called Storm, which was originally developed by some folks at Twitter. Nodeable is seeking to commercialize this and build on top of it. This is a model that Dave has followed in the past and has lots of experience with.

Nodeable has been kicking around for a while now, but only recently really went public with this model. It is not competitive with Hadoop or other Big Data solutions, rather it brings another needed facet of Big Data to analytics.

So have a listen to Dave and check out a new and different Big Data solution coming to market.

Open Source DAM Software's 1.5 version releases by Razuna

The newest version of the open source digital asset management (DAM) platform Razuna is now available.

Razuna ApS announced late last week the availability of version 1.5 of the platform, which can be downloaded, used via a hosted service or run on a dedicated cloud server.

Customization, Rendering Farm
Enhancements in the new release include an option to fully customize Razuna, an option to log in using social media username and password via the integrated Janrain plugin, a new Rendering Farm functionality, and major updates to search and the overall look and feel.

The Rendering Farm distributes the job of encoding many files to other servers, whether a dedicated one in-house or one in the cloud. Customization options include the ability to modify tabs, dialogs or look and feel, and the company said that the new caching system “dramatically improves” overall performance and supports such caching engines as Memcached and MongoDB.

Razuna now supports scheduled backups of assets and data within the platform, as well as the ability to export metadata to a spreadsheet.

There’s also additional support for cloud storage, such as Amazon S3, Nirvanix or Eucalyptus, and there’s a new version of the application programming interface (API), which facilitates integration into an organizational environment.

Partner Program Overhaul
CTO and Razuna founder Nitai Aventagiato told news media that, with the latest additions Razuna is “truly an enterprise level digital asset management software” that is available to companies of any size, via the hosted offering.

Later this month, a new partner and OEM program will be launched, which the company said was due to an increasing demand for OEM solutions. CEO Jens Strandbygaard said in a statement that the partner program is undergoing a complete overhaul, adding that the API has allowed software vendors “to embed Razuna deep into their existing technologies” to leverage enterprise-level DAM features.

Strandbygaard also said that resellers and systems integrators will benefit from the new program, “since they will be awarded a higher commission as well as being able to offer our enterprise package to large scale clients.”

The Denmark-based Razuna, founded in 2005, said that its platform is used by more than 5000 businesses worldwide every day.

GitHub provides companies the tech talent

Because engineers and designers can post their work for all to see, more and more companies are realizing they can see what people can actually do, not just say they can do.

LinkedIn is so 2011.

In the red-hot market for skilled software engineers, companies looking to make great hires are discovering that relying on traditional services that showcase candidates' work histories -- but not their actual work -- is a great way to miss out on the best available talent.

These days, there's a new game in town -- GitHub, a place where hiring managers and recruiters alike are increasingly turning to find not just the potential employees who look best on paper, but the ones that actively (and publicly) demonstrate their capabilities.

Last month, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, put $100 million -- its largest-ever investment -- into GitHub, a company built to facilitate the organization of open-source projects, and that makes money by selling licenses to commercial and corporate users.

Asked why his VC firm ponied up the nine figures, partner Ben Horowitz cited GitHub's dominance these days in being a central repository for open-source code. But he also touted the company's growing role as a place to find top-tier tech talent -- and, more to the point, a preferable alternative to LinkedIn.
"I was talking to my friend [who] runs a tech screening process for looking at engineers," Horowitz told CNET. "I said, 'What do you use for recruiting?' He said GitHub. I said why not LinkedIn? He said, 'why would I look at their resume when I can look at a body of work?' And since he said that to me, I ask everybody [what they use] for engineer recruiting, and everybody uses GitHub. That's a big deal. It means if you're an engineer and you don't use GitHub, you don't exist."

Every engineer and all the code

In Horowitz's view, GitHub has become a place where the hottest engineers are coming together to share their code, and as a result, the service is home to the most important project and collaboration tolls, as well as application life cycle management systems in the business. "They've got the ultimate advantage," Horowitz said, "because they have every engineer and all the code."

This assessment is shared widely throughout the tech industry. From small startups to established, household name powerhouses, GitHub is now seen as the go-to place to spot quality talent. To be sure, there are still engineers who will get Silicon Valley jobs without putting up a GitHub profile, and for whom LinkedIn is still an employment lifeline, and every company's mileage may vary, but a common view is that a developer who has a profile there has an advantage over those who don't.

At many companies, the feeling is that engineers who take the time to develop a GitHub profile and put in the energy to participate actively in the community can be better evaluated in advance than others.
"It's an excellent opportunity to see what they are passionate about, their coding style -- good or bad -- and fun side projects," said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs. "We love when developers see a need and just go ahead and code a solution to share with the community. We are looking for some amazing problem solvers on our team. This is hard to get from an interview or resume. But sometimes, we see someone's GitHub library and think, 'Wow, that is really cool and handy.'"

GitHub itself has been looking to its own service's community for talent, sometimes hiring people that may not present the most stellar picture on paper, but who show off stellar programming skills in real life. "Previously, where you went to college was the be all and end all," said Zach Holman, who evangelizes for GitHub. "The fact that that's not true anymore is fascinating."

Holman also said that internally, GitHub is seeing more and more signs that outside companies are using the service as an initial indicator of whether a potential hire is good or not. "Whether or not somebody has contributed to open source is a good indicator of whether they're a good engineer," he said.
Distinguish themselves

What's particularly attractive to the people who work at GitHub, Holman added, is that the service has become such a great way for developers to distinguish themselves, even as it got its start more as a place where people were sharing their work for no reason other than to do so.
But that sense of selflessly participating in open-source projects is something that is increasingly attractive to hiring companies. "I've heard some of our portfolio companies mention the number of [GitHub] contributions people make and how active they area, and connecting that with their credibility in the community," said Craig Driscoll, recruiting partner at Highland Capital Partners. "There's just the signaling that someone using those types of communities is a general type of qualifier...[especially the] frequency and quality of the contributions."

Indeed, some tech companies are turning to GitHub to identify potential new hires who aren't even actively looking for a new job, and who may not have a resume online. Of course, almost anyone getting hired is still going to have their resume checked out and their education scrutinized, and recruiters are still combing LinkedIn's millions of active users, but their GitHub presence may be the single-most important factor. "We're always looking for people who have forked a lot of [open-source] projects and contributed back into those projects," said Tim Milliron, director of engineering at Twilio, a developer of cloud-based communications apps. "We like people contributing into open source...That carries a lot of [weight with] us."
Milliron said that Twilio has been looking at GitHub as a recruiting platform for more than a year, but that the pace of doing so has accelerated significantly in the last six months. "If we look at 20 people and five have GitHub profiles," he said, "and one has [contributed a lot], then that person tends to bounce to the top of the list."

To be sure, GitHub is hardly the only open-source community that is being looked at by companies searching for technical talent. But in talking to people throughout the technology industry, it appears that GitHub is getting the lion's share of the attention. As Barney Pell, CEO of QuickPay, and the founder of Powerset, whose technology became the basis of Microsoft's Bing, put it, "Online open-source communities like GitHub bring large numbers of...developers together and are thus a natural place for recruiting."

OpenStack which is of Red Hat's distribution raises concerns

There is a growing group of OpenStack distribution providers and some industry watchers who believe fragmentation of the cloud standard could negatively impact cloud software providers and customers.

Red Hat Inc. launched its own distribution of OpenStack this week. Rackspace launched public cloud services based on the open source cloud software stack earlier this month, and other companies with OpenStack offerings on the market include Hewlett-Packard Co., Canonical's Ubuntu, Dell Inc., Piston Cloud Computing and Nebula.

OpenStack isn't just a package like other open source tools, said Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn. It's an entire framework, which means it will be more difficult to keep the different components in lockstep with one another. Also, any given OpenStack product could theoretically contain whatever combination of those components its creator feels like including, along with proprietary extensions.

Red Hat said any changes it makes to the OpenStack standard will be fed back into the community, but according to Leong, "If your distro doesn't have a lot of changes, then it doesn't have a whole lot of differentiation. But if it does have changes, then you have fragmentation."

Fragmentation makes supporting OpenStack difficult for users and for the management tools ecosystem, Leong said.

For other experts, the growing number of distributions is not a sign of fragmentation, but of growing maturity in the OpenStack market -- especially now that there is a Red Hat version.

"Generally speaking, all these multivendor foundations need one or more distros because there are a class of customers who won't take the product without support," said Mike Norman, analyst with The Virtualization Practice LLC, a virtualization and cloud consultancy based in Wrentham, Mass. "It's a sign of maturity that Red Hat is picking up OpenStack, producing a distro and committing to proper enterprise support and product lifetime."

"The important part is that everyone's sticking to the same [application programming interfaces]," said Chris Perry, cloud architect for DreamHost, a hosting provider based in Brea, Calif. "Even if people implement it in a slightly different way on the back end, the APIs are the same pretty much across the board."

Norman is also encouraged by the changes he's seen in the governance of OpenStack over the last year. Previously, OpenStack was too much under Rackspace's thumb for Norman's liking, but with the establishment of the OpenStack Foundation in April, it has become more of an independent organization, he said.

The Foundation will hold its first election next week as part of "the final critical steps toward giving [OpenStack] a final independent home," said Jonathan Bryce, president of the OpenStack Project Policy Board.

The release, dubbed Folsom, will be released in October.

Right now the open source community is on OpenStack's side, but it's important for the Foundation's participants to start seeing revenue soon, said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research.

"If OpenStack fails by the fall of this year or the first quarter next year to really start driving revenue, there are a lot of companies that are participating in the OpenStack community in an oftentimes passive way who really need revenue from this, [who] could jump ship," he said. "They have a ticking clock [and] they've really got to move fast."