open-source

Facebook has acquired Strobe, a startup focused on the open-source SproutCore software--but CNET has learned that a new startup called Tilde looks to be picking up where Strobe is leaving off.

SproutCore is a package of prebuilt JavaScript code designed to ease the creation of Web sites and Web apps, including those that work on mobile devices. Charles Jolley has worked on SproutCore for years, including for a period of time at Apple where SproutCore was used in MobileMe services, before striking off on his own to form Strobe.

Several programmers left Strobe in October to begin a new start-up … Read more

Still don't have a Halloween costume? Check out Superpunch's list of downloadable masks--just print and cut them out, add a string or a Popsicle stick if you're extra lazy, and off you go. Happy Halloween!

Vampire power, also known as standby power, is a reference to some electronics sucking up juice even when they're turned off, but it also works for our ongoing Halloween show title theme! Check out this article on the Learning Thermostat to see what Nest Labs is doing to kill vampire power.

The iPhone Dev-Team is already close to finishing a preliminary jailbreak on the iPhone 4S that will eventually work with the iPad 2 as well, but what happened to good old analog piracy? As it happens, Activision Blizzard is knee-deep in pirates already circulating bootleg copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.… Read more

Apple made its lossless audio format open source this week, allowing for others to view and change the code for use in their own software and tools.

As Daring Fireball notes, the format--which goes by the name, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC)--adopted the Apache license yesterday.

ALAC was first introduced to Apple's Mac OS X Core Audio framework in 2004, where most users saw it as part of iTunes 4.5. It let users rip a CD into smaller compressed files without reduction in quality. Still, the resulting files are considerably larger than the more ubiquitous MP3, … Read more

A recent Gartner survey found that business process management spending will increase significantly this year, with 54 percent of medium and large companies planning a 5 percent increase or more in their BPM spending this year and 20 percent of companies planning to up their BPM spending by at least 10 percent.

This week, venture-backed startup BonitaSoft announced a new $11 million round of financing to take advantage of the growth in the market.

Gartner explained the market growth by pointing to increased interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, which offer a cheaper entry point, and a shift toward funding BPM … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Ford wants developers to create a broad array of connectivity applications that can be used in conjunction with its cars, and it launched its OpenXC platform Monday to promote that effort.

In an announcement at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference here, Ford and its partner Bug Labs unveiled OpenXC, a platform designed to allow third-party developers to create any number of open-source hardware or software products that will interact with Ford's Sync system.

The idea, said K. Venkatesh Prasad, the senior technical leader of Infotronics at Ford Research and Innovation, is to make it possible for outside developers to … Read more

ClamWin Antivirus is a free antivirus solution for Windows PCs. This open-source freeware integrates with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook, schedules scans, and automatically updates virus definitions. It offers good, basic protection without the bells and whistles of premium antivirus packages.

ClamWin's installer let us choose to integrate the program with Explorer and install the Outlook module, both of which we selected. Right-clicking the program's system-tray icon let us configure and update ClamWin as well as schedule scans, display reports, manually check for updates, and attend to other matters. The program's main interface is utterly basic but … Read more

Blogger is rolling out a site-wide refresh today.

It's the first major overhaul of the Web-blogging service in several years. Details on the new look and feel, along with key feature updates, can be found on Blogger Buzz, the official voice of Blogger. Apparently, after taking into consideration a plethora of user feedback, "the entire editing and management experience" has been "rewritten from scratch" making the overall user experience "faster and more efficient."

Among the most significant changes: The post editor now gives users "a larger canvas for drafting and previewing" … Read more

As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.

Last week I sat down with Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler to understand how the company intends to differentiate from other vendors such as Cloudera, MapR, and the many as yet unlaunched companies that venture capitalists are still funding.

Hadoop itself was initially developed at Yahoo by … Read more

Android's unbranded browser is coming back into the WebKit fold.

The software--called simply "Browser" on Android phones and tablets--is based on the open-source browser engine called WebKit. It's long been disassociated from it, though, and now Google is trying to reunite the projects in a move that could portend the arrival of a branded Chrome on Android.

"We're looking forward to a much better collaboration with the WebKit community," Google's Andrei Popescu said yesterday in a mailing list message flagged by new Chrome developer Peter Beverloo and spotted by TechCrunch.

Convergence between … Read more