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One of the hottest open source startups is Cloudera, which is based on the clustering/cloud computing software Hadoop. Here's an interview with one of its founders, Mike Olson, formerly of Sleepycat, about Hadoop, his new company, and why cloud computing is neither a threat nor an opportunity for open source.

With the pressure of the recession bearing down on companies, several industry experts expect adoption of open source software to grow, as a result. Michael Barnes, VP of software and Asia-Pacific research, Springboard Research, told ZDNet Asia in an interview, there has been increased interest over the past three to four months in open source.

Enjoy the slogans. T's not published under the GPL ;)

Novell's SUSE Linux appears to be one of the more popular versions of the open-source OS for netbooks, but it does not work on ARM-based devices and Novell said it did not have plans to support the chips.

Recently we’ve seen some surprising comments about Red Hat’s stand on software patents and, in particular, about one of its patent applications related to the AMQP specification. It looks like clarification is called for. Our views and our position, as expressed in our work for patent reform, our Patent Promise, and our work with the AMQP project, have not changed.

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost. The XenSource developers often showed little interest in getting their code into the mainline, and attempts by others to get that job done ran into no end of obstacles. So Xen stayed out of the mainline for years; the first public Xen release happened in 2003, but the core Xen code was only merged for 2.6.23 in October, 2007.

The H went to Qcon and sat down with Patrick Curran, chair of the Java Community Process for a chat about how the JCP is changing and looking for more transparency in all aspects of its work.

In Tux Radar's second podcast we pondered whether the dodgy economic outlook could actually bring more users to Linux and free software. With everyone afraid to open their wallets, surely software that has an initial zero cost is much more attractive for businesses looking to move on from legacy software, right? And home desktop users -- how many of those will really want to splash out on the much-hyped Windows 7 when it comes out, if things get worse?

Fresh off the Sugar Labs press release is a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform for children. Sugar v0.84 represents the expansion of Sugar beyond the XO-1 - it is packaged in GNU/Linux distributions, it runs under virtualization on Macs, and most of all, its a big step in getting closer to Sugar on a Stick which will boot those older classroom Windows PCs and newer netbooks.

The Wine development release 1.1.17 is now available and includes several new features and bug fixes. Wine, which stands for "Wine is not an emulator", allows Linux, BSD and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications by providing its own versions of Windows libraries, compiled for the platform in use.

Are you tired of frequent seeking or all these mega-piles of CDs constantly growing on your desktop? Is there any place left out there? Do you really need to wait another six months to update your software or get the feature you expect? Well, what I want to tell you is that there is a solution! Let me introduce to you, Arch Linux. In this article I would like to encourage you to give it a try, especially if you’re a beginner since the advantages of using the distro are really worth your effort. I also realize that it might be somewhat problematic to some of you, but you’re not alone – there are tonnes of resources out there on the net, so you can safely accomplish the installation and eventually enjoy one of the best desktop distros available (in my opinion).

This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community's annual summit, GUADEC.

Next month at Phoronix Media we will be introducing version 1.8 of the Phoronix Test Suite. Among a horde of new features, new test profiles, bug-fixes, and much more, there is a Phoronix Test Suite GUI (updated screenshots). The GTK2 GUI is nearly completed already, while additional fine-tuning and new features will come to the interface with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 later this year.

When I was working on the Annvix project, I was fascinated with how the system booted and services were started. This led to an eventual rewrite of initialization scripts and the use of runit instead of the traditional SysV init. The results were fantastic: a fast booting system with services starting in parallel and a series of scripts to start and stop the system with a small footprint and amazing speed.

There has been a lot of discussion about the ext4 data loss issue, and I see a lot of misconceptions, both about why rename() is used and what guarantees POSIX gives. I’ll try to give the background, and then my opinion on the situation. There are two basic ways to update a file. You can either truncate the old file and write the new contents, or you can write the new contents to a temporary file and rename it over the old file when finished. The rename method have several advantages, partly based on the fact that rename is atomic.

From the Linux (and Linux Journal) perspective, there's an issue with clouds—those back-end Web services that compose Utility Computing. They're proprietary. Amazon owns AWS (Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2 and a growing number of others). Google, Microsoft and other companies own theirs as well. These are open in the sense that most services are substitutable, which makes them utilities. If you don't like storing your data at Amazon's S3, you can park it elsewhere. The documents you create and keep at Google Docs can be put elsewhere as well. Elastic computing is more tricky, but it should be substitutable as well.

We started to study shell programming in school and we use VI to code some scripts. I noticed that all my colleagues using vi on ubuntu are very irritated and seem to envy their friends who use VI on Fedora 10 because it's very easy to use and colorful, it helps to detect syntax errors. Some of my friends started to regret installing Ubuntu instead of Fedora and even blamed me for recommending it. As an Ubuntu fan I looked for a solution for this tiny problem.

A long time ago I used to actually use a separate computer to install and test Linux distributions. I even built some of the boxes that I used to do the testing with but these days I mostly do my work on Macs. I know, I know...I've become a lame Apple whore. Along the way I finally ended up dispensing with testing Linux distributions on separate computers. These days I use VMWare and Parallels to run Linux on my Macs. Why? Well you can constantly be downloading and installing different distributions with a minimum of fuss and hassle. You don't need to tie up an entire machine just to check the latest cool distributions.

Red Hat's application for a patent for an approach to routing messages over a middleware bus has disturbed some who are wondering why Red Hat didn't simply publish. If, as Red Hat claim, this is simply a defensive patent they could instead have published the proposal to establish prior art.

About two-thirds of "IT executives" responding to a Novell-sponsored survey report either "actively evaluating" or "accelerating adoption" of Linux on the desktop, Novell says. About 72 percent responded likewise for servers, although presumably the desktop category includes more evaluators, while servers have more adoption accelerators.