The golden age of open source, predictions for 2016, and more news

Image by:

Opensource.com

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at reasons to use open source software, betting on open source, cryptocurrencies, a look back at 2015, and—since it's that time of the year—some predictions for 2016.

Open source news roundup for December 12-18, 2015

William Hill betting on open source rather than traditional IT for digital transformation

The 80-year-old betting firm William Hill is betting on open source tools for the future of its operations. William Hill typically experiences 400 customer transactions per second with price changes taking place five million times per day. This results in as much as 160TB of network data per day.

Using open source tools enables the company to provide personalized experiences for each of their customers while providing them with real-time results and recommendations.

9 reasons for using open source software

There are as many reasons to use open source software as there are people using it. Here are nine more from Datamation. I particularly like this list because it's simple and straightforward. It covers cost, security, rapid bug fixes, and control. I especially like the #1 reason which, I think, represents a tipping point in perception.

The golden age of open source has arrived

With all the love for open source these days, here is yet another article extolling its virtues and why one needs it in order to "keep up with the Joneses" of computing.

Marius Moscovici is the founder and CEO of Metric Insights and he writes that there is no company, including those like Apple and Microsoft, that can afford to ignore open source software. Just the fact that Apple is open sourcing its Swift programming language indicates that the advantages of open source are no longer optional. He also states, "Open source tools are cheaper, faster, and more powerful, and they let companies apply data in unheard of ways."

The cryptocurrency open source API Marketplace for developers

An open source project called The API Network aims to ease the use of cryptocurrencies. It provides a common set of APIs to enable a free marketplace for the interchange of cryptocurrencies without charging processing fees or commissions.

David A. Johnston, Chairman of the Board at Factom Foundation, says, "Instead of the developer paying 30% of their revenue for the pleasure of being in the app store, we can actually reward developers with APIcoins for joining an API network. So, in the sense, we are paying developers directly for the APIs that they add in proportion to how popular and how used their API is. "It sort of flips the existing model on its head and rewards those that are actually creating the value in these systems," he said.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar to see what's happening next week in open source.