OStatic

InfoWorld's survey of IT professionals indicates that open-source usage will continue to grow in the coming years. Why, and what does this mean for open-source developers?

Last week Novell released version 1.9 of the Mono open source .NET framework as well as a new IDE called Monodevelop. The newest version of Mono now supports a number of the advanced features found in Microsoftﾒs .NET 3.0 framework.

While Mono and Novell, which sponsors the project, have been much maligned by various factions within the open source community, the overall impact Mono could have on Microsoft and the open source community could in fact be large.

Last week Amazon announced a new web service called FWS (Fulfillment Web Service). FWS is an add-on to Amazonﾒs existing fulfillment system which allows any developer to interface directly with Amazonﾒs inventory management system using open APIs. This service allows you to programmatically print shipping labels for your inventory which you then send to Amazon. They store it until your app issues a shipment request at which point your web service call causes some human (or perhaps a robot) to pick and pack your product and then ship it out to your customer.

As the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco winds down, it's worth looking in at the news out of the get-together. Lots of pundits were on hand, and the conference brought several new announcements.

Acquia representatives at OSBC said they are on track to deliver a value-added social publishing system named Carbon based on the Drupal open source content management system (OStatic is built on Drupal).

It's not every day that a Microsoft executive as highly placed as senior vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel Brad Smith shows up at an open source conference, but he made an appearance at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week. I enjoyed the title of InfoWorld's summary of his visit: Microsot's Brad Smith Tries to Make Nice with Open Source Community.

Making nice was probably part of his motivation, but there's more to it. Especially after a huge fine from the EU, Microsoft needs to take concrete steps to work more closely with open sourcers. Also, people keep missing how Microsoft's proposed Yahoo deal would force it to embrace open source.

MapReduce is Google's secret weapon: A way of breaking complicated problems apart, and spreading them across many computers. Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce that you can use on your own computers, in the same way.

How does Hadoop work, and how might you best use it? Especially if you were interested in the recent news involving Yahoo and Hadoop, or if you're interested in cloud computing, it's worth finding out.

Are negative U.S. socioeconomic factors working in favor of open source? Red Hat president/CEO Jim Whitehurst said at the Open Source Business Conference that overseas disdain for the U.S. is helping.....Likewise, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said on a panel this week that the weakening U.S. economy is benefitting open source.....CNet has an interesting report on how CBS Interactive is aggressively adopting open source.....A survey from OpenLogic says open source developers are motivated by both money and altruism.....