Search

PredictionIO is building the MySQL of prediction. The young company recently released version 0.7.3 of its open source machine-learning server. Unlike typical prediction algorithms and open source libraries, PredictionIO is based on making machine learning available to software developers. Cofounder...

Enterprise IT is a very serious matter, but you might not know it judging by the software tools that are often integral to its operations. The list of odd names in today's data centers and enterprise IT shops also highlights the ongoing trend of polyglot programming. Today's applications and service...

Software developers routinely use open source components to boost productivity and improve the quality of their code. The problem for enterprises is that companies using open source must properly manage it and comply with its licensing, as with any third-party code. That becomes difficult to do when...

After launching its Atom text editor into beta back in February, GitHub on Tuesday announced that the software is now fully open source under the MIT License. "Much of Atom's functionality is provided by packages, and every Atom package has been open source since the day we launched the beta," expla...

GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner has resigned following an investigation into harassment charges made by developer Julie Ann Horvath, who departed the company last month. "The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or re...

Open source software continues to gain momentum -- but what is not growing is an open desire among individual software developers to port their commercial Windows wares to Linux. Open source support is not a mere in or out decision. Some software makers shape their business models to take advantage ...

Using Hadoop running YARN to manage large clusters for Big Data analysis may soon become easier with a renamed open source project accepted by the Apache Foundation. The Apache Foundation accepted the open source project Twill, named "Weave" while hosted on Github, after foundation members began vot...

Ubuntu's latest desktop OS release, Ubuntu 13.10, is more of a plain-Jane release than its "Saucy Salamander" nickname might otherwise suggest. This release comes six months after the Raring Ringtail version, which was also a bit of a yawner in terms of offering any must-have-the-upgrade enthusiasm....

The trick to designing an all-purpose music player is to make it work the way you want. The Tomahawk Music Player performs that trick very well. It could well be a better listening choice than any other cross-platform music player application. It runs on a variety of Linux distros, Microsoft Windows...

Open source software may hold considerable appeal for software developers around the world, but that doesn't mean it's without its aggravations. While no one aspect qualifies as the ultimate reason to oppose writing or using open source code, a significant number of programmers report that poor docu...

Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but there's no comparison to the match-ups that occur in the business world. Consider this: Mozilla, which has been flexing its muscles of late and pushing into the smartphone business and foreign markets, announced on Wednesday that it has teamed up with th...

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the ...

Twitter on Tuesday joined the Linux Foundation. However, the move comes just days after Twitter removed its find-friends feature from blogging service Tumblr. Twitter had earlier done the same to Instagram, and has imposed new restrictions on developers. "These moves are contrary to what Linux stand...

Netflix on Monday released the source code for its Chaos Monkey tool into the open source jungle. Chaos Monkey is a tool the company built in the Amazon Web Services system. Its job is to randomly kill virtual machines and services within Netflix's architecture. The idea is to test systems in real-w...

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention. That lesson proved true with this youngster of an app. Development...

Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer for the GNOME desktop. Its lightweight structure includes just enough editing power to make it an ideal choice for everyday use. Image viewers come in all sizes and shapes. They can be packed full of editing features and can come with little or no photo ...

There may be life yet for the seemingly defunct HP TouchPad. The company has discontinued its development of all webOS devices, leading retailers to drastically mark down prices on the TouchPads they have in stock. Some buyers have been able to score one for as little as $100 -- that's $400 off the ...

For years, a staple tool I have relied on is a clipboard manager to keep tabs on reusable text snippets. The Linux desktop has several noteworthy clipboard managers. Some are much handier than others for working with parcels of text that I can easily swap from a clipping queue to a document or Web p...

When the Internet and World Wide Web finally went mainstream in the mid-1990s, new Unix-like operating systems running on PCs went mainstream too. Developers working on these systems had access to a wide range of development tools, but these platforms didn't initially offer anything like the mature,...

The file manager utility more than any other system app on any computing platform is the workhorse of daily computing tasks. Linux users have numerous file managers as choices. Depending on the distro, usually one or two default apps are preinstalled -- but these might not be the best options. Thuna...