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NEW YORK--There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.

Until now, that is.

Unlike open-source software, because there have been no formal definitions, many people may not even be aware of the growing industry. But already some of those practicing its general principles have become household names among the geek set: Arduino, the programmable single-board microcontroller and software suite; Chumby, a popular Wi-Fi device; MakerBot, a low-priced 3D printer; and Adafruit, a maker of do-it-yourself hardware kits for things like MP3 players and more.

Late Tuesday, a group … Read more

Charles Jolley, one of the primary creators of the SproutCore programming tools for building rich Web applications, has left Apple and struck off on his own to start a new company based on the technology.

Jolley announced the new start-up, Strobe Digital Publishing, in a blog post last week, saying the new company will continue to develop SproutCore, offer SproutCore training, and focus on publishing.

"Every so often a few technology trends converge that yield results much greater than their individual parts. I think we have reached one of those moments with mobile devices (like the iPad) and HTML5,&… Read more

Cloudera, a provider of support and services around the open-source cloud platform Apache Hadoop, on Tuesday announced Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of subscription-only add-ons to its free distribution.

The core platform, called Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop (or CDH for short), was first unveiled in March 2009 and is 100 percent open-source software. Now, the company is offering Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of additional tools for monitoring, managing, and administering a cluster in production to complement the core CDH platform--for a fee.

This business model fits into the open-core category, where companies charge for exclusive tools or functions on top … Read more

Puppet Labs announced on Thursday that Adobe Systems is publishing code for managing Hadoop on the Puppet Forge community development site. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

Puppet is an open-source data center automation and configuration management framework aiming to provide system administrators a platform for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management.

The necessity of data center automation and management tools (often grouped into the DevOps category) is becoming ever more apparent, as cloud principles and large-scale systems that process data in a parallel manner continue to emerge.

Case in point: Hadoop is an open-source platform powering hugely … Read more

The massive amounts of data being created on the Web and the rise of cloud computing together make an ideal environment for alternative database technologies to thrive. And the Web is often proving to be just an entry point for bleeding-edge technology to be tested out before it starts heading into the enterprise.

NoSQL databases and associated operational-data technologies based on nonrelational approaches to data management and manipulation continue to be top of mind for big Web shops and are slowly starting to make their way into enterprise IT infrastructure.

I've spoken with a number of vendors roaming the NoSQL space over the last few months and there seems to be one common thread that they push: traditional relational databases are expensive, bulky, and simply not ideal for this new era of Web technology.

On Wednesday, a new NoSQL database joins the fray: Membase. Launched as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license and co-sponsored by NorthScale, Zynga, and NHN (Korea's top online gaming portal), Membase is optimized for storing the data behind interactive Web applications.

Membase says it is 100 percent compatible with Memcached, the de facto standard for distributed object caching behind Web applications. Basically, Membase is as easy to use as Memcached but also stores data.

According to James Phillips, NorthScale co-founder and senior vice president of products, the thousands of organizations that use Memcached (18 of the top 20 most visited Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Google) have a demand for a solution that looks like Memcached but acts like a distributed, highly available, high-performance, elastic database technology. … Read more

Perhaps the best-known alternative media player for Windows and Mac, VLC's popularity has been driven by its open-source and cross-platform nature. The latest update, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, goes to great lengths to keep the player current.

VLC 1.1 adds in hardware acceleration on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Linux computers; supports encoding and decoding the HTML5 video and audio codec WebM; better MKV HD support and 40 percent faster HD decoding; introduces lua-based extensions; and has overall better performance because of the removal of "tens of thousands of lines" of code.

There's also … Read more

A new service called OpenVBX from cloud-communication provider Twilio hopes to change the way we think about and deploy phone services for businesses large and small.

Twilio provides a programmatic approach to phone calls much in the same way that we apply business logic through HTTP or XML for complex applications.

OpenVBX is a Web-based phone system that provides for virtual phone numbers as well as a wide range of other functions that are programmable through the OpenVBX plug-in API in PHP OpenVBX lets you take advantage of all of Twilio's integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, … Read more

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that "from a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October." It's a big embarrassment for a company that, over the past year or two, has managed to clean up its reputation for technical instability and that this spring one-upped critics by unveiling a business model that looks like it might actually work.

"Last Friday, we detailed on our engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability … Read more

TAIPEI--Intel has released more details and the deployment road map for the company's MeeGo operating system, highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open-source platform.

During his keynote here Wednesday at Computex 2010, Peter Biddle, director of Intel's AppUp products and services, noted that while he is "no longer worried" about attracting developers to create content for the MeeGo platform, it is consumer adoption that now preoccupies his thoughts. "We need more consumers," he declared.

MeeGo version 1.0 was unveiled last week and the chipmaker said Netbooks running the OS will … Read more