Brent Sordyl's blog » opensource

Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT

Brent Sordyl — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:29:57 +0000

One reason for this revolution is explained by Etsy in terms of Conway’s Law:

When a team makes a product the product ends up resembling the team that made it.

I’ll extend this notion to say the team and thus the product end up resembling the underlying technology used to make it. When you change the underlying development infrastructure, by moving to a cloud, you are bound to change teams and processes they create.

(Full Story: Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT)

osTicket – Open Source Support Ticket System

Brent Sordyl — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:02:27 +0000

a widely-used open source support ticket system. It seamlessly integrates inquiries created via email, phone and web-based forms into a simple easy-to-use multi-user web interface. Manage, organize and archive all your support requests and responses in one place while providing your customers with accountability and responsiveness they deserve.

(Full Story: osTicket – Open Source Support Ticket System)

WalmartLabs is building big data tools and will then open source them — Cloud Computing News

Brent Sordyl — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:37:13 +0000

Stephen O’Sullivan, senior director at of Global e-commerce, at WalmartLabs is prepping the retail giant to move from 10 different web sites to one and from a trial-sized 10-node Hadoop cluster to a 250-node Hadoop cluster. Along the way his team will build several tools to migrate data from the current Oracle, Neteeza, Oracle and Greenplum gear that he hopes to open source.

(Full Story: WalmartLabs is building big data tools and will then open source them — Cloud Computing News)

Adoption of Open Source Software

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:43:21 +0000

Tests indicated that users of any OSS system have significantly higher revenues and assets than users of proprietary systems (see Table 2). Furthermore, two logistic regression analyses showed a positive relationship between assets or revenues and open source adoption (see Table 3).

(Full Story: Adoption of Open Source Software)

Facebook shares some secrets on making MySQL scale

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:43:10 +0000

Facebook’s Mark Callaghan, who spent eight years as a “principal member of the technical staff” at Oracle, explained that using open-source software lets Facebook operate with “orders of magnitude” more machines than people, which means lots of money saved on software licenses and lots of time put into working on new features (many of which, including the rather-cool Online Schema Change, are discussed in the talk).

Additionally, he said, the patch and update cycles at companies like Oracle are far slower than what Facebook can get by working on issues internally and with an open-source community. The same holds true for general support issues, which Facebook can resolve itself in hours instead of waiting days for commercial support.

(Full Story: Facebook shares some secrets on making MySQL scale)

With Many Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow | open source

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:07:17 +0000

A new report from the Coverity Scan project today indicates that a great many people do know what to look for, and open source software is at least on par if not better than proprietary software with respect to software defects. The Coverity Scan project evaluated selected open source projects and a number of anonymous proprietary codebases to identify “hard-to-spot, yet potentially crash-causing defects.” The results reinforce Linus’ Law.

According to Coverity, within the software industry as a whole a defect density of 1.0 is the average. As you can see from Coverity’s findings, the Linux 2.6 kernel, PHP 5.3, and PostgreSQL 9.1 all have signficantly smaller defect densities.

(Full Story: With Many Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow | open source)

How Much Would Debian Cost to Develop? How About $19 Billion?

Brent Sordyl — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:39:16 +0000

The developer version of Debian GNU/Linux (“wheezy”) contains 17,141 packages of software, or 419,776,604 lines of code. With that figure, James Bromberger estimates that Debian would cost about $19.1 billion to produce. Bromberger also looks at the cost of individual projects like PHP, Apache and MySQL. Even at more than $19 billion, the figure is likely far short of what it would actually cost to produce.

(Full Story: How Much Would Debian Cost to Develop? How About $19 Billion?)

From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 02:50:05 +0000

The second most popular web server on the planet no longer comes from Microsoft. It comes from NGINX. And now, the tiny Russian outfit wants to actually make some money from its widely popular open source server software.

(Full Story: From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers)

Waffles – command-line tools for machine learning and data mining

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:06:31 +0000

Waffles seeks to be the world’s most comprehensive collection of command-line tools for machine learning and data mining. Our native tools have minimal dependencies (no interpreter, VM, or runtime environment is necessary), and build cross-platform. If you have a useful data mining tool that meets these criteria, we want it in Waffles.

(Full Story: Waffles – command-line tools for machine learning and data mining)

Black Duck – Open Source, Abundance and Open Innovation

Brent Sordyl — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:06:52 +0000

With open source comes abundance — more than 500,000+ projects are freely available today, and that number’s growing rapidly. Clearly the confluence between developers, communities and businesses turning to open source has provided a way for enterprises to grow and speed development, even with constrained resources.

(Full Story: Black Duck – Open Source, Abundance and Open Innovation)