Open source news for your reading pleasure.
February 3-7 2014
In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we have great news for Nvidia fans wanting better driver support in Linux, lots of exciting developments from inside the data center, and more.
White House to host a Maker Faire
President Obama has caught the maker fever! The White House announced on Monday future plans to host a Maker Faire of their very own later in the year, following the hosting of 16-year-old marshmellow cannon maker Joey Hudy as a special guest at last month's State of the Union address. "By democratizing the tools and skills necessary to design and make just about anything, Maker Faires and similar events can inspire more people to become entrepreneurs and to pursue careers in design, advanced manufacturing, and the related fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)."
New options for Android developers
Two new developments in the Android world emerged this week. First, recognizing the role of Android in the corporate ecosystem, Microsoft has begun developing better Active Directory support through new libraries and it released as open source under the Apache 2 license. Second, Facebook has open sourced code to make it easier for developers to include encryption support for Android apps. Even Steve Wozniak says that Apple should consider making an Android phone.
And for those Android developers using open source Eclipse as their Integrated Development Environment (IDE), let's take a moment to say Happy 10th Birthday to the Eclipse Foundation!
Nvidia takes first steps towards open source
Great news for Nvidia users on Linux who are longing to get away from being forced to use proprietary drivers: This week Nvidia pledged to offer more support and technical guidance for the open source Nouveau driver. Nvidia still calls their involvement "experimental," but many in the Linux community are thrilled to see the participation. Linux creator Linus Torvalds even gave Nvidia a virtual thumbs up on his Google Plus page.
Open source in the datacenter
Following last week's news about the Open Compute Summit, open source remains in the headlines this week for anyone interested in large-scale computing. Perhaps the biggest annoucement is the release of OpenDaylight's Hydrogen software, which is an open platform for SDN (software-defined networking). Unsuprisingly, many are now claiming that open source will rule the data center, although others would probably argue that it already does.
Hat tip to Opensource.com moderator Robin Muilwijk for sharing some of these news articles with me this week.
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