As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos about the commoditization of hypervisors, what’s driving his company’s growth and its plans to release Eucalyptus 3.1 soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model. The interview is presented in two parts. Yesterday’s post covered the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed.

Linux.com: What’s driving private cloud (Eucalyptus’s specialty)?

Marten Mickos: The driving force now is agility. Companies need the elasticity of cloud to assign infrastructure resources on the fly to different applications and shift the workloads around. That’s why our customers do it. Cloud is a new piece of software on your servers so there must be a benefit to installing it. Agility is that benefit. Longer-term, cloud also gives better manageability and higher utilization.

Linux.com: How much overlap is there between the surge in interest in big data and the open cloud movement? Is one influencing the other?

Mickos: I think both are driven by the large increase in the number of connected devices. The underlying trend is connected devices. How many new devices with an IP address are there? They produce a lot of data and have compute needs. They need clouds to run on and big data to be analyzed. You can run big data solutions on cloud platforms. That’s just a practical reality.

Linux.com:  Is virtualization in the cloud going away? More companies are offering cloud services without the hypervisor. What does that mean for VMware and others?

Mickos: Virtualization is needed and useful but ultimately it will be compressed into the hardware, into the CPU. Sure you can do deployments that don’t use hypervisors and get some improvements in use case. But how do you maintain flexibility of your own virtual machine? I don’t think they’re going away but I can see them being commoditized.

But we shouldn’t think companies like VWMare are losing their business anytime soon. Although the technological change could happen fast, customer deployments happen slowly. They virtualization vendors will be able to monetize that for many years to come. And now they’re moving up the chain into PaaS and IaaS that they didn’t have before.

But with a hypervisor background you might not have the needed frame of thinking for building a cloud. A hypervisor is a single piece of software; it runs in one machine. A cloud platform like Eucalyptus is essentially a multi-machine piece of software.  It takes a different mindset to develop distributed systems.

Here’s an analogy: The world had hierarchical databases, and then someone developed a relational database. It wasn’t the hierarchical designers who came up with it, it took new guys.

Linux.com: Where is Eucalyptus now?

Mickos: We are unique in the space in that we’ve had production use of Eucalyptus for over two years. We have taken a step into mission-critical uses and now have high availability (HA) in the product.

Linux.com: What’s new for you this year and where are you headed?

Mickos: We are growing very rapidly. We shipped Eucalyptus 3.0 which is revolutionary in that it has features no other cloud service has. We signed a deal with AWS and have raised $30 million in capital a few weeks ago.

We have lots of customers going and that’s just the U.S. We’re equally active in China , India and Europe. We’re pushing hard on all those fronts and shipping software faster than before. And we have the financial funds to keep expanding. But it’s always hard to build a company.

The 3.1 release is coming out in two months from now. It will mark the transition we agreed on internally in terms of a new development model. We’re working now under an agile model and we’ll use Git and GitHub for our source code repository.  This marks a much more open model for how we develop our product.

Linux.com: Does that mean Eucalyptus will be completely open source, or will you still reserve some aspects of your code for customers under an “open core” model?

Mickos: The platform is totally open, we will have plugins we give to paying customers. The good news is anybody can develop plugins so we’re a much more pluggable architecture and we’ll welcome that sort of development.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) has a lot to like. It's cheap, can be used for storing a little bit of data or as much as you want, and it can be used for distributing files publicly or just storing your private data. Let's look at how you can take advantage of Amazon S3 on Linux.

So much has happened recently in the Linux community to be inspired by. This is my second month as the Digital Content Editor for Linux.com and as a newbie member I’ve already met so many amazing people and seen so many significant milestones pass just since I started.

- With the Linux Foundation’s Annual Development Report we learned that more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005.

Their contributions make Linux the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing. That’s pretty amazing, and inspiring.

- Linux Creator and Linux Foundation Fellow Linus Torvalds in April was named a Millennium Technology Prize laureate -- an honor considered to be the Nobel prize of technology.

Wow, am I proud to work in the same community as him.

- New advances are happening all the time, whether it’s Ubuntu’s recent 12.04, the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.4, OpenStack and the open cloud movement, Android seizing market share or the myriad other technologies and trends that form the Linux juggernaut.

You had me at Ubuntu.

Bottom line: This community is continually innovating and inspiring the next generation of Linux products and developers. The list of accomplishments is as diverse as the community that contributes to the success of Linux. I can’t help but be in awe, and I’ll bet you can’t help it either. That’s why we’ve chosen the theme of this year’s T-shirt design contest to be “Inspired by Linux.” Tell us:

How does Linux inspire you?

We invite you to take that kernel of an idea and turn it into an inspiring T-shirt design for the Linux community to wear proudly in our 3rd Annual Linux Foundation T-shirt Design Contest. The design can depict literally or figuratively the events or ideas that get you pumped up for Linux. It can have words, graphics, or both in whatever font and colors you like. Let Linux be your muse.

Submissions are due on June 8. (Submit your design and see the official rules and submission guidelines.)

This year we’re pleased to announce that two winners will be selected by the communty. The first place winner will be reimbursed $2,000 to be applied toward airfare, hotel and admissions to their choice of LinuxCon North America in San Diego, CA on Aug. 26 - 29, 2012, or LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, Spain Nov. 5-7, 2012. Second place will be reimbursed $1,000 toward LinuxCon North America or LinuxCon Europe in 2012.

We’ve also taken steps this year to ensure a fair voting process. The Linux Foundation staff will choose the top 5-7 submissions from designs received by the deadline. The community will then vote on the finalists to choose two winners. Voters must be registered members of Linux.com and must be logged in to vote. Only one vote per registered member is allowed.

First place will be awarded to the design that receives the most community votes and second place will go to the runner up. Winners will be announced on or around July 17, 2012.

Good luck! I can’t wait to see all of your designs. And if you're looking for more inspiration, check out our contest video:

Open source cloud computing software startup Eucalyptus has had an eventful past few months:

-       In March the Infrastructure-as-a-Service company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to improve its compatibility with the Amazon API and address customers jointly. This makes Eucalyptus the only cloud vendor to land a formal agreement with the market-leading platform, though it’s not the only one using the API.

-       In April the company raised $30 million in Series C funding, setting it on solid financial footing to fuel its rapid expansion says CEO Marten Mickos.

-       And Eucalyptus 3.1 is coming soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model and placing it firmly at the center of the open source cloud computing movement.

As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Mickos about Linux and the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed. The interview is presented in two parts. In part two we discuss Eucalyptus’s business in more detail.

Linux.com: Open cloud has been gaining momentum in the past few months with the announcement of CloudOpen and activity around OpenStack. What’s driving that attention?

Marten Mickos: I think generally speaking people are realizing how important cloud is. And when you look at what’s out there, there’s VMWare and then there’s nothing. And then you have four open source projects: OpenNebula; OpenStack; CloudStack; and Eucalyptus. When you want an alternative you are immediately in open source space.

Linux.com: What has changed in open source cloud computing since you spoke about it a year ago at LinuxCon?

Mickos: Products have matured. It’s following a typical technology adoption lifecycle, described in Crossing the Chasm. We’re still early but we’re less early than a year ago.

Linux.com: In that talk last year you said GPL was vital to Linux, do you see a similar legal framework developing for the cloud yet?

Mickos: It’s an important question but it’s a little philosophical. We have GPL which defines software as free and open. When you go into the cloud it’s not only about source code - it is also about data and API. Today, openness in data and API is up to each vendor - there isn't yet a common rulebook for it like the GPL is the rulebook for free software.

But I do think we’re seeing de facto standards emerging in cloud. To take Eucalyptus as a specific example, we do the same cloud API as Amazon. We see EC2 as a de facto standard.

Linux.com: The Linux Foundation has announced a new conference this year, Cloud Open, intended to encourage collaboration among open source players in cloud computing. What do you see as the Linux Foundation’s role in the open cloud movement?

Mickos: The Linux Foundation is one of the most central bodies in software in the whole world. We don’t hear much from The Linux Foundation because it’s so well managed. There haven’t been any big conflicts. Linus Torvalds keeps working on the kernel and after 20 years it keeps feeding a huge ecosystem downstream. Just doing that is already amazing.

I don’t think The Linux Foundation feels that it has to take on some mandate. It is important and relevant that KVM and Xen are now part of the Linux kernel. That’s an indication of the importance of cloud. It’s so important to keep Linux in active development in managing all the work from different parties, which is the key mandate for The Linux Foundation.

Linux.com: What about the role of Linux in open cloud?

Mickos: As we get more datacenters running in the cloud the underlying architecture will be Linux. Cloud will mean an increase in the Linux install base. Linux is so well suited for it. It powers already the largest datacenters and as we move to cloud architectures it’s good to have it there. I think cloud will increase the share of Linux on servers. 

Linux.com: What’s your outlook on the open source cloud movement in general?

Mickos: Openness is winning in cloud. I was just at a Goldman Sachs cloud conference. Out of 15 companies presenting, ten were open source companies. That’s significant. There’s much more coming and promising startups are scaling in size. Companies like Cloudera, Acquia, Opscode and Puppet Labs.

They have a large install base, they have great customers, and they’re competitive against closed source. It bodes well for the world of open source. It’s important in my mind that open source isn’t just a technology, but that there are businesses who thrive on and around open source. Take Red Hat as an example. People forget how critical it is that they’re successful showing that open source makes business sense. We need such role models and it’s very healthy for the open source community.

Linux.com: You’ve said that we’re in a transitional period in which programming freedom isn’t about source code anymore, it’s about API’s. What do you mean by that? And how does that apply to the open cloud?

Mickos: It is also about source code, but it’s not only about source code. I’m a huge supporter of open source, but the attention is pointing more to the APIs. Ten years ago you’d say that your application runs on Linux. The question now is does your application run on AWS? And of course AWS runs some Linux. But we have reached a new abstraction layer. We are higher up. And we talk about apps running on a specific cloud, not on a specific operating system. It’s difficult to find a public cloud today that doesn’t run on Linux.

Linux.com: Your talk about making API’s open was prescient considering the precedent now being set by Google and Oracle. What is the danger here?

Mickos: I’m not a legal expert so don’t want to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. But generally speaking there are many products that claim Amazon API compatibility or are developing it.

Power consumption is a major concern for Linux users. If you're using Linux in the server room, reduced power consumption can save a lot of money. If you're using Linux on a laptop, better power management means longer battery life. Likewise, when using Linux in devices, power consumption is all-important. The release of PowerTOP 2.0, then, is of interest to almost all Linux users.

In which we debunk the silly canard that Linux does not innovate, but merely imitates. And as a free bonus, suggest meaningful ways to contribute other than cranking out yet more Ubuntu respins.

This week's open source cloud headlines featured doomsday predictions about the consequences of the Oracle and Google dispute; why Rackspace's first quarter earnings have some analysts scaling down cloud computing predictions; and a crop of interesting trends including moves to abandon hypervisors and go bare metal in the cloud. 
Could Oracle Blow Up the Cloud?, Wired
An analysis of how the recent decision in the Oracle v Google case would potentially affect the cloud. If APIs are protected under copyright, open source cloud projects including OpenStack and CloudStack could wind up paying fees to Amazon Web Services.   Rackspace Earnings: Cloud Computing, Services Reality Check, Talkin Cloud Blog
The margins on Rackspace’s cloud computing earnings are fluctuating more than investors would like, signalling that the market isn’t going as gangbusters as predicted. Growth was still very strong, however, and the company reassured investors by pumping up its plans for OpenStack.
Citrix CloudStack: 85% of VARs See Private Cloud Opportunities, Talkin Cloud Blog
No real suprising news out of the Citrix Partner Summit in San Francisco this week. The market is young and Citrix is going after the group of VARs and cloud service providers that already partner with Citrix.   Open-source cloud frameworks: A work in progress, ComputerWorld
This overview of open source cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings includes a few case studies from businesses using open source frameworks.
6fusion Goes Vendor-Agnostic with Xen, Citrix Support, Talkin Cloud Blog
This IaaS provider is branching out from VMWare to include Citrix Xen and open source Xen support. The market is chafing against vendor lockin and this company is looking to make the hypervisor less relevant to cloud services.

Going native: The move to bare-metal cloud services, InfoWorld
This article seems to back up 6Fusion’s assertion that hypervisors aren’t necessary for cloud services and that there’s a trend away from them in the market.

The battle to stop Amazon Web Services starts here, InfoWorld
Expect to see more IaaS/ PaaS partnerships and acquisitions as companies align against AWS.

With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.

“We hope to build a vibrant business community around this,” Moorman said in a 2010 OSCON presentation. “If companies can build around OpenStack it’s going to pay for developers to continue to give back.”

Piston Cloud Computing was one of the first to jump into the fray as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service startup built on the OpenStack framework. The one-year-old company is both contributing to and seizing the momentum behind OpenStack as the project’s only distribution (so far).

We talked recently with Christopher MacGown, a Piston Cloud co-founder and CTO, about the kind of open source ecosystem he sees developing around OpenStack and his company’s claim as the Red Hat of OpenStack.

Linux.com: There are now several IT companies built around OpenStack, mostly offering services, how are you different?

Christopher MacGown: We’re primarily a product company. We’ve built the first of many distributions of OpenStack. We’re also private cloud focused versus those focused on OpenStack-based public clouds.

We’re one of the few companies for whom OpenStack is the big bet for our company. We succeed when OpenStack succeeds. Whereas some of these other companies have services divisions or other open source projects they can fall back on.

Linux.com: How are you integrated with OpenStack?

MacGown: At Piston Cloud we’re amongst the founders of OpenStack. My fellow cofounders were both at NASA and worked on the Nebula project, one of the key technologies behind OpenStack. I was at Rackspace at the time and trying to figure out how to make it open source.

We’re still really involved with the project. I’m on the Nova Core team for OpenStack compute. And several engineers are on core teams and the new Cinder project as well.

Linux.com: Why is it worthwhile to gamble your whole company on OpenStack?

MacGown: In open source software it’s not the actual software that wins, it’s the ecosystem that builds services or applications around it that wins. Linux won because the ecosystem was so much larger than the BSD/s. There’s a huge ecosystem around OpenStack. That makes it a good bet.

Linux.com: To quote Wired in a recent article: Who will be the Red Hat of OpenStack?

MacGown: We’ve always described ourselves as the Red Hat of OpenStack, though that’s become a bit funnier since Red Hat has joined OpenStack. They’re not as focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service as we are. So we think we can still make that claim.

Our competitive advantage is we’re the only people who have built large scalable clouds. Joshua (McKenty) helped build the first certified regulated cloud for NASA, which was used by the White House. We understand regulation and we built the first implementation of Cloud Audit API, and open sourced that framework. We understand the space and believe that other people won’t actually be able to compete with us on the advantage.

Linux.com: Is open source cloud heating up? Why now?

MacGown: It really is. Open source cloud is heating up now because so many people see the Amazon model and realize it’s going to lock them in long term and don’t want to turn Amazon into next IBM. They’re realizing they can actually drive the development to meet their needs better than if using other proprietary solutions such as KWS or VMWare.

Linux.com: What are some of the trends we should be paying attention to in the open cloud space right now?

MacGown: The licensing model is moving away from general public license (GPL) and transitioning to a freer, more open licensing. That enables companies to do more around open core proprietary extensions without feeling like they’re going to violate their own source code with the GPL. There’s a trend toward Apache licensing. On the tech side there’s a lot of research and development in software-defined networking.

Linux.com: How does software-defined networking fit in with open source cloud?

MacGown: When it becomes something people understand and view the benefit for, they’ll be able to build out federate cloud environments similar to how we build out web properties now. Everybody uses Apache, some use IIS, but when you use a web browser everything is the same with your experience. Back ends might not be identical but you have the same experience as an end user of the software or virtualization pieces directly and use that across cloud providers and platforms.

Linux.com: Has this been a focus of the OpenStack project?

MacGown: It’s definitely a focus. Companies like Cisco and Dell have contributed heavily. And with federation in general there’s a lot of expectation and work being done from the humanitarian and scientific computing communities.

Linux.com: Talk about some of the challenges of the open cloud and OpenStack project and your niche in the market.

MacGown: One of the main challenges is nobody’s quite sure what cloud means. With the OpenStack project in particular that’s very similar. You have a lot of excitement and driving that in a single direction that’s 80-90 percent for everyone has been historically difficult.

The work that’s been done around the foundation to put the control directly in the hands of the community will help that. There are efforts to formalize the relationship and the decision making structure.

Linux.com: Your startup is less than two years old now, how far have you come? Where are you headed?

MacGown: We raised series A funding in July of last year, announced a preview of our product, Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS) in September 2011 and pentOS went general availability in January of this year.

Our goal for the year is we’re going to have a great release of OpanStack Essex around the middle to the end of the third quarter. We were the first to release a distro of Diablo, but we don’t want to be the first for Essex. (Canonical plans to have Essex first.) We want to be the stately gravitas distro where we support it and know all about it and can guarantee the security of it.

To learn more about how open source is impacting the future of cloud computing, check out The Linux Foundation’s latest event CloudOpen.

Once upon a time there was KOffice, all full of unrealized potential. And then it was forked as Calligra Suite. The first release of Calligra was on April 11, 2012. Is this a contender, or another niche productivity suite?

The third generation iPad, featuring a 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina display and four processor cores, has once again raised the bar for Android competitors. According to a May 3 IDC report on first-quarter global tablet sales, Apple's latest iPad won back much of Android's recent tablet gains, which had swollen with the help of Amazon's Kindle Fire. Apple's iOS rebounded from a 4Q low of 55 percent market share back up to 68 percent, estimates IDC.

Yet Apple's recovery, boosted by the new iPad and a discounted iPad 2, may well be temporary, suggests IDC. "Although total Android shipments were down sharply in 1Q12, companies such as Samsung and Lenovo are beginning to gain traction in the market with their latest generation of Android products," states the research firm. "IDC expects the segment to rebound quickly as other vendors introduce new products in the second quarter and beyond."

Quad-core Android 4.0 tablets have just begun to ship, and Android OEMs like Acer and Samsung, which also manufactures the iPad's Retina display, are developing screens with comparable resolutions. By the time the next iPad arrives, several Android tablets should best the current model on features -- and with Android 4.0, they could arguably surpass it on user experience.

That said, no single high-end model will come close to outselling the iPad. Instead, low-end tablets will drive Android to overtake Apple's iOS within a few years, according to IDC. Promising contenders include a rumored Google-branded tablet from Asus intended to compete with the $199 Fire, as well as a larger version of the Fire, both of which will force tablet pricing lower, says IDC. In short, Android will win the tablet market the same way it won the smartphone market: with a flood of products with low prices and plenty of options on size and features.

IDC: Android tablets to overtake iPad by 2015

Last year, Android phones eclipsed the global market share of Apple's iPhone, and have now grown to a cumulative 51 percent of U.S. subscribers, compared to the iPhone's 30.7 percent, according to ComScore. The tablet market, however, has proven more challenging, in part due to flaws with Android 3.0. The vastly improved Android 4.0 should not only go far in helping Android compete on the high end, but will appear on many affordable tablets as well.

Despite Android's first-quarter downturn, IDC declined to modify its March projections on the global tablet market, in which it predicted that Android will overtake iOS by 2015, and advance to a roughly 50 percent share in 2016.

In an April report, Gartner projected a similar, but less spectacular trajectory. Gartner sees Android tablets growing from about half of iOS' share in 2012 -- 31.9 percent of total -- to 37 percent of total in 2016, compared to iOS' 45 percent. In 2016, the next closest competitor -- Windows 8 -- will trail at 12 percent, predicts Gartner. (IDC and others are much less bullish on Microsoft's prospects.)

Low-end options key to surge

By all accounts, the $199 Kindle Fire drove the fourth quarter Android surge, and continues to dominate. An April 26 report from ComScore estimates the Fire advanced to 54.4 percent of the Android market by the end of February. Yet, the Fire, which runs a highly modified version of Android 2.3, isn't alone in finding success on the low end. According to IDC, Pandigital and Barnes & Noble' Nook tablets have also succeeded with affordable Android slates.

Since Apple has yet to hint at an "iPad Jr." -- and Microsoft's OEMs will focus on the enterprise market -- Android vendors have the growing low- and mid-range markets to themselves. In March, ABI Research projected that sub-$400 tablets will rise to 60 percent of the market by 2016, driven by increasing sales to China and India.

Even if a scaled-down iPad arrives, the sheer volume and variety of Android options will be formidable. In the end, the more open platform will win, just as it has in smartphones and other embedded devices.

Chart: Worldwide Media Tablet Shipments Split by OS Historical and Forecast* 2010 - 2016 (Units in Millions)Description: Source: Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet & e-Reader Tracker, March 12, 2012 Note: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet & e-Reader Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for both the Media Tablet and eReader markets in 46 countries. Detailed historical segmentation is provided by CPU type, operating system, connectivity type, screen size and resolution, storage capacity, distribution channel, and customer segment. Measurement for this tracker is in units, value, and end-user price. For more information, or to subscribe to the research, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 1-650-350-6423 or knagamine@idc.com. Further detail about this tracker can be found at: http://www.idc.com/tracker/showproductinfo.jsp?prod_id=81 Tags: IDC, Tracker, Worldwide, Media Tablets, Media Tablet, OS, Android, iOS ...Author: IDCcharts powered by iCharts

As a global community, we are creating and sharing more information than ever before. And, most of that activity is happening "in the cloud," which is hosted on millions of servers in datacenters located anywhere from the Columbia River Gorge, to the Nevada desert, to the most remote areas of China.

As the reality of managing that level of data sets in, the demand for employees with a unique combination of analytics and IT management expertise is on the rise. With our newest event, CloudOpen, taking place this coming summer, we wanted to learn more about this demand and the areas we should address at this event and as part of our ongoing Linux training program. So, we got in touch with Dice.com's Managing Director Alice Hill. Her responses were very useful and we thought we'd share them with you, the community.

Linux.com: We've been reading a lot about an increasing demand for professionals with big data expertise. What's your take on the primary drivers behind this trend?

Hill: Every company wants more intelligence – more insights into customer behavior, emerging trends, cost structures, etc.  Many firms have the data, but it’s unused, unstructured and isn’t easily digestible by managers to make decisions.  If companies can develop this asset, it will give them an edge in the market and potentially influence customer behaviors.  

Linux.com: What kinds of expertise are employers looking for related to big data?

Hill: Data architects, analytics professionals and data scientists are high on the list right now. Employers are requesting experience with machine learning, statistics, and natural language processing.  Big data takes that foundation and marries that know-how to newer technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL and other open-source tools/technologies.  

Linux.com: You recently reported that demand for Linux talent hit an all-time high on the Dice.com boards. Do you see any parallels with the demand for big data talent?

Hill: About one-third of the “big data” jobs on Dice also request Linux expertise. The employment demand for Linux expertise is much more widespread and it’s really a core skill for technology professionals today.

Linux.com: We've heard that a big data expert is likely someone with a hybrid of expertise, including business and technical acumen. How are employers dealing with this challenge?

Hill: That’s true and we see more and more job postings on Dice.com that note an MBA is a plus. However, it’s not just the technology departments’ responsibility to gain business acumen. The line of business leaders need to have a willingness to dig into the technologies and ask questions when they don’t fully comprehend the back-end of getting the insights everyone wants.  

For newer technologists, whether focused on big data or other areas, you should be able to “story board” what the business needs, contribute to the story, understand the financial analysis and deliver it in a way that is easily understood by any audience. This is where we should spend time teaching our less experienced colleagues.  

Linux.com: What advice do you have for professionals seeking a career in the area of big data?

Hill: Focus on working with internet companies with consumer audiences – ecommerce, gaming, etc.  Those firms have enormous data streams matched by a serious craving to use the data.  Ultimately, though don’t fit your career into a trend – you should do what you are best at for real satisfaction.  

###

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In this interview, Dr. Jam Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Valdosta State University and creator of JavaWIDE, explains how the Java Wiki Integrated Development Environment provides a web-based Java programming environment for the classroom.

Anthony Favre used Linux for the first time as a student in 1997 and has since started two companies that specialize in Linux and open source technologies. 

In 2002 he founded Linalis, an IT company in Geneva that provided LPI (LInux Professional Institute) certifications. There he wrote one of the first LPI-certified study guides. Then in 2009, he founded the Swiss branch of French IT company Smile, also active in open source, where he is now managing director. 

"My job is to promote open source solutions in general and Linux in particular," Favre said. "My company is a Red Hat advanced partner and we provide solutions based only on open source." 

He recently joined the Linux Foudation as an individual member after learning that membership is an option for anyone.

"I didn't know it was possible to join The Linux Foundation. Since I saw that, I was pleased to grant a little bit to the foundation," he said. "Unfortunately, I'm not technically strong enough to develop or help on projects."

He's still very active in the community through the events he organizes to promote Linux such as the 2009 conference LinuxDays and this year's Open Source Now event in Geneva. He's hoping to take advantage of his membership to attend Linux Foundation events such as LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona Nov. 5-7. Members receive 20 percent off the registration fee for LinuxCon events.

His favorite Linux innovation?

"All of them, but specifically Android," he said, because it's an easy-to-use Linux for end users.

Welcome, Anthony!

Want to share your story with The LInux Foundation and have your profile featured on Linux.com? Email Digital Content Editor Libby Clark, lclark (at) linuxfoundation.org.   

The GNU MediaGoblin project was announced just a year ago. The project, to build a decentralized, free software media sharing tool, has been going great guns ever since. To get an idea where the project stands today, we talked with lead developer Chris Webber. Here we share Webber's comments on the history and future of MediaGoblin, new features, and the switch away from MongoDB to SQL.

Open cloud news this week brought with it some new competition, some reflection on existing competitors and some unexpected cooperation.  I've also thrown in a short counter perspective on the issue of portability -- is it a myth?    What did you think was this week's top open cloud story? Please tell me in the comments, below. I'd love to hear from you. Your feedback will help me refine this list and and make it more useful to the community. Thanks!  
First the competition:   Open source cloud toolkit funded by EU Optimis project to arrive in June, ComputerWorld UK
Funded by the European Union to make Europe more “cloud friendly,” the Optmis project is gaining steam. The European OpenStack equivalent is also getting some pressure to partner with OpenStack.

Red Hat debuts OpenShift Origin project, takes swipe at VMware's Cloud Foundry, ZDNet
The Origin project will serve as the upstream for code and improvements to OpenShift, Red Hat’s PaaS, which today runs on Amazon Web Services cloud and competes against VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry.

Marten Mickos: For Eucalyptus open cloud is more than open code, TechWorld Mickos compares cloud storage to depositing money in the bank. All depositors should have free and open access to their stored data. He also comments on Eucalyptus’ partnership with Amazon to support Amazon Web Services’ API, saying it gives his company a competitive advantage over OpenStack, which doesn’t have a similar deal with Amazon.   Cooperation (or just less competition):   Thanks to Piston, OpenStack gets an unlikely ally in VMware, GigaOM
Piston Cloud wants to bring together the Cloud Foundry PaaS with the OpenStack IaaS. Wasn’t OpenStack in part a play against VMWare, as well as Amazon Web Services?   Open Compute one year later. Bigger, badder and less disruptive than we thought, GigaOm
With the growth of Facebook’s Open Compute open hardware project and OpenStack it’s possible to build an entirely open hardware infrastructure layer and companies are demanding more flexibility. The big data ecosystem has adjusted, with companies like Dell and HP offering new server and storage designs compatible with Open Rack.   A different perspective:
Two Cloud Myths Busted: Lock-In and Locked Up, PCWorld
Portability is a favorite mantra of open cloud supporters. But is portability a myth? This commentary says profitability and intellectual property values will always trump portability.

It is the mystery of mysteries, the one that ranks up there with the Gordian Knot, crop circles, and how many licks does it take to get the center of Tootsie Pop: what is the greatest Linux distro of all?

It can be tough to get started with an embedded project, even for experienced developers, and the large number of choices out there can make things worse. Sometimes you need tools from one project, a board support package (BSP) from a different project or from a hardware provider, and applications from somewhere else - and no clues about how to make them all work together.
 
Many developers are driven to proprietary solutions, or to taking a large desktop or server-oriented Linux distribution and carving away unneeded pieces until the distro fits into a resource-constrained environment. Surely there has to be a better way.

The Yocto Project is one answer. Created as a Linux Foundation workgroup, now a lab, the project is an umbrella of sorts that covers many different aspects of embedded Linux development with the goals of stability, usability, and interoperability. The Yocto Project provides a comprehensive build system with an Eclipse-based IDE, several related tools, EGLIBC, and an Application Development Toolkit that enables developers to provide SDKs based on the distros they create with the Yocto Project.

Several of the projects in the Yocto Project are well known to experienced Linux developers - including EGLIBC and Poky - and several pieces are shared with other organizations, particularly the BitBake build engine and the OpenEmbedded Core metadata layer, both of which have shared maintainership with the OpenEmbedded project.

The Yocto Project uses and contributes to many upstream projects as well, including GCC and the Linux kernel itself. The result is a cohesive set of tools that are tested, highly extensible, and come with an active community of developers from many different organizations. As the tagline says, the Yocto Project is not a distribution in itself. Instead, it helps you create your own distribution from the ground up.

One of the more interesting aspects of the project is its governance structure. Rather than being run as either a corporate consortium or a rag-tag fugitive fleet, the Yocto Project is governed as a meritocracy, with the project's chief architect as the ringleader directing a group of technical leaders and community participants. Many resources come from the project's member organizations who form an Advisory Board. This board is made up of organizations who normally compete with each other - operating systems vendors, hardware manufacturers, and consumer electronics companies - but who all see the value in working collaboratively on these tools. It is a striking example of cooperation among competitors.

You can get started with the Yocto Project even if you don't have an embedded board to work with - the project's tools can build a distribution for any of four QEMU-based virtual environments: ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86. Check out the Getting Started page for more information, particularly the Quick Start Guide.

As further enticement, yesterday we released Yocto Project version 1.2, so you can be the first on your cubicle block to try it out.

And for those still wondering - the name Yocto comes from the smallest international unit, indicating 10^-24.

About the author: Jeff "Jefro" Osier-Mixon has been wandering the halls of Linux conferences and embedded and open source software companies for... well, a long time. He works for Intel Corporation and serves as community manager for the Yocto Project. This is the first article in a new monthly series from the Yocto Project on Linux.com.

For the past two days, we've held our annual Enterprise End User Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. Besides the fun of ringing the bell during our evening reception, it's been an incredibly valuable event, fueling collaboration between kernel maintainers and enterprise end users who are pushing Linux to its edge.   Here are highlights: “We’re not going to use our APIs to lock people out. Trust and security are at the heart of everything we do.” Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies “if there is one community who has embraced collaboration and openness,...

The Linux Foundation's Enterprise End User Summit kicked off yesterday in New York. The event this year is hosted at the NYSE Technologies' offices. It brings together Linux kernel developers and the world's largest users of Linux to collaborate face-to-face. The evening party was held on the trading floor of the NYSE, and we have some pictures available now that take you inside the event. {lfnews}

I've been holding my breath for two years since the last Long-Term Support Ubuntu release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Precise Pangolin, was just released so at long last I can breathe again.