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First big business, now big data


By Alex Handy
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December 23, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
To properly assess the state of open-source software in 2009, one would have to gather millions of code commits and project releases. Open source isn't a buzzword or even a type of software; it has become a new way of doing business in software.

In September, the Linux Foundation released the findings of its “Who Writes Linux” survey. The results found that Linux is seeing contributions from hundreds of thousands of different users, and that pool of contributors is still growing at an encouraging rate, building on over 10 years of consistent evolution and expansion.

The Apache Foundation celebrated 10 years, and the Linux kernel got a new scheduler. The OpenJDK continued to push toward a truly GPL Java, and the Apache Harmony project was used in commercial products from IBM.

Even Microsoft contributed to open-source projects this year, both by joining the Apache Foundation and by contributing actual code to the Linux kernel. While that code was only to enable Microsoft's virtualization products when running on and with Linux, it was still a monumental contribution despite lingering questions over the GPL's jurisdiction over said contributions.

Speaking of virtualization, the two titans of that market, Citrix and VMware, both found themselves out in the cold as the Linux Foundation endorsed the open-source Kernel Virtualization Module as the new standard way to virtualize machines with Linux. It was a blow mostly to Citrix, which had been trying to win back XenSource fans who had been alienated when Xen went commercial. To make amends, Citrix began giving away XenSource for free.

Big data
It's almost impossible to talk about software development in 2009 without talking about clouds. As analysts and developers alike look further into cloud computing, it has become clear that a new stack of software is needed. Built on virtualization and scalable data structures, this new stack is relatively nebulous at present. But there is one major open-source project that could become an indispensable part of the cloud stack.

The Apache Hadoop project is already the most popular current project at Apache, according to president of the Apache Foundation, Justin Erenkrantz, due in part to its broad underbelly of sub-projects.


Related Search Term(s): open source

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