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Today Triggermesh announced the TriggerMesh Knative Lambda Runtime (TriggerMesh KLR) open source project. The project aims to provide complete portability of Amazon Lambda functions to Knative native enabled clusters, and Knative enabled serverless cloud infrastructure without the need to rewrite these serverless functions. Knative, the Google Cloud-led Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads, was announced last year.

Not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled road trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 500 figuring out intellectual property in technology is a wild ride. I thought about this for a while and since I am not a lawyer (IANAL) especially not one of the caliber of Dr. Gonzo’s sidekick lawyer Raoul Duke so I’ll have to speculate.

One of the most transformative platforms for innovation is open source. The solution to helping solve problems in the world not just technology problems but social and political problems can and should benefit from open source.

We often have our heads down looking at the projects we regularly work on (Apache CloudStack and Xen Project) and don't always pay attention to the other cool things going on in the open source world. So once and a while it's good to poke your head up olut of the clouds and take a look at some of the awesome projects being developed in the open source community. These projects are very promising and especially usefully for cloud comptuing.

If you are a network (or systems) administrator, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools for the job. One of the toughest tools to really nail down is a network monitoring tool. Although there are plenty of such tools out there, they range from the over-priced to the under-featured. Where do you look for any sort of middle ground where features don’t lose out to price? Zenoss is an outstanding, enterprise-ready network monitoring tool that includes all of the features you are accustomed to finding in a much costlier solution. Many a network administrator would do well to deploy such a tool.

Two of the most notable trends in systems management are DevOps and the related and partially redundant Agile Operations movement. These initiatives are popular in many Web 2.0 and cloud computing oriented companies like Twitter, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook where the companies’ products are highly dependent on IT. Though in reality the same practices are just as well-suited to the IT administrator in the traditional organization with massive infrastructure, unrealistic workloads and businesses that needs to improve efficiency to meet their business goals.

There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be? I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management. In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of maintaining server configurations started to really come to light for me.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold. Despite a widespread interest in cloud computing there may be some pitfalls including cloud lock-in.

I have decided, should any of my kids ever develop an interest in Computer Science, that I'm going to send them to a Scandinavian university. Clearly, these institutions of higher learning have got it going on.I recently came to that conclusion after meeting Mark Burgess, who put together an entire configuration management system in 1993 while doing a post-doctorate fellowship at the University of Oslo, just because he was tired of managing his systems manually with scripts and wanted to do it better. Which is right up there with some other Scandinavian student named Linus who ended up putting together the kernel for some operating system you might have heard of here and there.

The CodePlex Foundation is a non-profit designed to encourage and educate commercial software developers to start or improve their own open source projects. And, even though Microsoft is the first sponsor of the Foundation, all of the projects are "platform and technology agnostic," Hunter emphasized in a recent interview. That's likely a response to many critics of the CodePlex Foundation (CF), who think this is all an attempt by Microsoft to deal with open source solely on its own terms. The evidence is certainly strong. Besides being the founding sponsor, Microsoft currently holds two positions on the current five-person board.

They may sound like manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss but these eleven open source projects are growing fast and are likely to be your best bet for deploying and managing cloud computing

Starting in 2009 popular, autonomic configuration management tool, Cfengine will be commercially supported by a company formed by Cfengine author, Mark Burgess. Cfengine has a laundry list of brand names that are using their software –AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Nokia, and many more. I suspect that many of them would pay for commercial suppor

A few weeks ago I felt a little like a proud pappa, well maybe more like an uncle since I can't claim to have been present for the conception. NetDirector, an open source configuration management tool that I helped get off the ground NetDirectorhas finally been released under the GNU Public License making it a bona fide open source application (it was previously licensed under the NetDirector Public license, the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause). NetDirector is a web-based Unix system administration tool that provides the ability to centrally manage services. The thing that's makes NetDirector unique is it's ability to simultaneously manage multiple servers at once from a graphical interface. In comparison to the very popular Webmin which can configure many different services and server attributes but maintains a one-to-one ratio.

Today Linux desktop manufacturer Xandros acquired Linspire for an undisclosed amount. Xandros will also be keeping existing engineering, support, and key sales employees and long-time Linspire employee and CEO Larry Kettler will be joining the Xandros executive team as the VP of Business Development. While Xandros didn't mention their total employee numbers Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos claims Xandros to be the third largest Linux company in the world after the acquisition. Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has some harsh criticism of the deal on his blog.

Most open source luminaries are known for their code, their successful startup successes or even their outspokenness. Andre Boisvert comes to open source from a different angle. Having worked for two billionaire programmers, Larry Ellison and Jim Goodnight, Andre’s transition from proprietary software to open source software has been an interesting journey. Andre started out his career at IBM where he spent 3 years. At Big Blue he was fast tracked through various positions in sales, marketing and R&D as part of their executive program. He then left for a turn around at Cognos (now owned by IBM). He’s been the President and COO of the world’s largest private software company, SAS Institute Inc. and has been the SVP of Marketing at Oracle. After working for some of the largest proprietary software companies, Andre now works primarily advising open source startups using his experience in order to help them better compete with some of his former employers. Though he keeps a relatively low profile in the open source community though he’s definitely a mover and a shaker.

There is a funny thing about commercial open source software companies as much as they like talking about their community-driven open source heritage they end up doing a lot of things their proprietary counterparts do. Spout off about being enterprise-ready, boast, offer TCO studies, and all manner of other things that make them look like a typical proprietary software company. A lot of them neglect the transparent open source traits that makes them truly disruptive and interesting (see yesterday's post on SourceFire).

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun's billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer "SourceWho?" If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a bit lately as Barracuda Networks has made a bid for their open source competitor.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

I remember when the big open source debate was whether a piece of software was really open source, meaning it was released under an Open Source License ProliferationOSI-approved license. The tides are shifting, debates now center around which open source license to use. Adding to the complexity of the debate is proliferation of OSI-approved licenses. Now discussions are rising over the open source licenses that are in the best interest of all stakeholders of an open source project. In the case of collective software works there is also the added intricacies of license compatibility.