apache

The Sharing services in OS X allow for a number of connectivity options, including screen sharing, file sharing, printer sharing, and the capability to use your computer as an Internet router. In past versions of OS X, Apple has also included a full Web sharing service using the open-source Apache server that allows you to host Web pages on your computer, but this option has been removed from the system preferences in Mountain Lion.

Despite its relative lack of popularity, the presence of the full Apache Web server in OS X has been useful for testing Web development projects, or … Read more

Interest in big data continues to grow in terms of both downloads of connectors to software packages and in software infrastructure to power big data, primarily in the form of NoSQL databases and Hadoop-related extensions, according to a report.

The report, released today to coincide with the Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., comes via open-source business intelligence provider Jaspersoft. The second-quarter report measures demand for popular data sources for storing, analyzing, and visualizing big data and uses stats from the JasperForge community site.

Key findings:

VMware today announced a new open-source project called Serengeti, which enables enterprises to quickly deploy, manage, and scale Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments.

VMware says it is working with the Apache Hadoop community to contribute extensions that will make Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Hadoop MapReduce projects "virtualization-aware" to support elastic scaling and further improve Hadoop performance in virtual environments.

In case you've been living outside the big data vacuum, open source Hadoop has emerged as the de facto standard for big data processing and is packaged up in a few different distributions by … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Chief Financial Officer and President Safra Catz made an appearance on the stand at the U.S. District Court this morning, testifying for Oracle's rebuttal case in its intellectual-property trial against Google.

After Judge William Alsup asked at one point during the plaintiff's questioning why Catz was called, Oracle counsel Marc David Peters said that it was to prove that Oracle wasn't suing Google because it couldn't compete in the mobile market.

Despite an objection from Google counsel Christa Anderson, Judge Alsup overruled the motion, instructing the jury that the motives here … Read more

Nginx, a Russian startup that has succeeded where others have failed at challenging the dominant Apache software for housing Web sites, has begun trying to convert its popularity into actual money.

Nginx (pronounced "engine X") yesterday unveiled corporate support offerings for the product, a traditional business model for open-source software. It offers three grades--Essential, Advanced, and Premium--with three- and twelve-month contracts for services including installation, configuration, performance tuning, and maintenance.

"Subscribers to the Advanced and Premium options receive design, implementation and optimization assistance, as well as prioritized development. Premium subscribers will have access to an additional set … Read more

There's no such thing as "the" open-source license. There are lots of them. Sixty-nine to be precise if one accepts the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as the definitive arbiter of what is open source and what is not.

Some are essentially legacy licenses; in general, the continued proliferation of licenses has abated in recent years but it's often more trouble than it's worth to fully retire licenses that are still in use by active software. Others won't be relevant to a specific type of copyrighted material, such as software programs. (Material under an open-source … Read more

Oracle has ceded control of the OpenOffice.org code base to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator project, it announced on Wednesday.

OpenOffice.org is the most popular free productivity suite, and a major rival to Microsoft Office. The software giant said it was "donating" the open-source code so as to "demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open-source communities."

Read more of "Oracle 'donates' OpenOffice.org to Apache foundation" at ZDNet UK.

The Apache Software Foundation has resigned from the Java steering group, claiming that the widely used scripting platform is a proprietary technology under the full control of Oracle.

In a blog post yesterday, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) developer community said its resignation from the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee (EC) followed the committee's approval of the Java SE 7 specification, as proposed by Oracle. The ASF said the specification came bound up with license terms that continued to forbid the distribution of independent, open-source Java implementations.

"This vote was the only real power the Executive Committee … Read more

The Apache Software Foundation has threatened to pull out of the Java Community Process because Oracle, which controls the Java group, will not allow the certification of the Apache Harmony project.

The Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) complaint about Java certification goes back three years, to when the organization sent an open letter to Sun, then the technology's main sponsor. As the ASF said at the time, its membership of the Java Community Process Executive Committee (JCP EC) was supposed to allow the ASF to demonstrate the compatibility of Apache Harmony, its own open implementation of Java. However, Sun … Read more