Weekly wrap-up: "Tessel" may become a household geek-word, open source calls shotgun, and more

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Open source news this week:

October 7 - October 11, 2013


What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.


  • Connect all the things. The "Internet of things" movement is gaining momentum, with more and more everyday devices becoming connected (just this week Nest announced a new smart fire alarm). A new company founded by young engineers is trying to make it even easier for makers and developers to connect their hardware to the Internet with a new custom-designed circuit board called "Tessel." Wired.com has the story of Technical Machine, the company that recently open sourced Tessel to make it easier for developers to bring to the web to objects. Tessel is an Internet-connected microcontroller programmable in JavaScript. If the Technical Machine team gets its way, Tessel will soon become as commonplace as Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on it.
  • MongoDB scores more money. This week MongoDB announced that it received $150 million in financing. The open source database services company plans to use the money to help grow the 320-person company over the next few years, reports the Washington Post. The investment will also help MongoDB "add new features to its current offering such as management capabilities, more advanced security, and integration with third party software," the Post reports. LinuxInsider has an interview with MongoDB CTO and co-founder Eliot Horowitz if you want to learn more.
  • Open source calls shotgun. It may not be long before you are driving a car with an open source in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system (the audio and entertainment area that takes up screen space in your dash). Computerworld has a cool story explaining why a Linux-based operating system is headed for your car’s IVI. By ditching their proprietary IVI operating systems for an open source one, automakers could spend less time developing the overall system and share upgrades. That would allow automakers to focus their efforts on making their systems special through user interfaces, something that anyone who has driven a car with a crappy in-dash interface will appreciate. Learn more about the car manufacturers that are already deploying open source software in this Computerworld article.
  • I completely agree with this post (insert link to random, unrelated site). Most bloggers have been the target of spam comments. For the most part, it’s not hard to identify them and delete them. But when your site has a massive audience, those spam comments can be a massive problem. SoundCloud, the online audio distribution platform, wanted to squash the problem, so it it built a tool called "Sketchy" to detect spam comments and send them to the SoundCloud content team for review. This week SoundCloud open sourced Sketchy, reports GigaOM. You can find Sketchy on GitHub. Gigaom reports that SoundCloud has posted more than 100 projects on GitHub.

 

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Ginny Hamilton was a community manager for EnterprisersProject.com, an online publication and community focused on how CIOs and IT leaders create business value through information technology. A former journalist, Ginny is passionate about local politics, journalism, technology, and social media.

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