Docker acquires Orchard, SAP supports OpenStack, ODF and more

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Open source news for your reading pleasure.

July 19 - 25, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Docker acquiring Orchard, SAP who will support Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, the UK government who made ODF its official document standard, and more!

Docker acquires Orchard

On Infoworld, Serdar Yegulalp starts his article "Docker acquires Orchard in a sign of rising ambitions" with the line, "One sure sign a company has arrived: It starts acquiring other companies." Orchard Laboratories Ltd. created one of the six Docker services, and also provides Fig, an open source tool to create isolated development environments.

As Serdar writes, "it is clear why Orchard and Fig attract Docker's attention." They're useful tools, but more important, they represent the expertise Docker wants in its team. The acquisition is the first concrete step in a direction to make it easier to build, ship, and run applications on Docker containers, says Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker.

SAP to support Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

On ZDnet, it was reported that SAP announced at OSCON that it will support two major open source projects: Pivotal's Cloud Foundry (PaaS) cloud and the OpenStack Foundation (IaaS) cloud. SAP will not only support the projects with money, but with contributions to the code. As Thomas Grassl, SAP's head of developer relations, says, "There are ideas in the works where we want to actively contribute, shape it, and work with the community. It's a good thing for us to do this through the joint community."

Bjoern Goerke, SAP SE's executive vice president of Products and Innovation Technology, also states: "The developer and open source community are key to breakthrough technology innovation." SAP will also certify its core application on Microsoft Azure.

UK government makes ODF its document standard

Important news in the government sector this week is the decision of the UK government to make ODF its official documents formats standard (ZDNet). You can also read more about this on Opensource.com, in an article with Paul Brownell of Red Hat.

The selected standards are PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents, and ODF for sharing or collaborating on government documents. According to Francis Maude, UK Minister for the Cabinet Office, this decision was made because "open standards will reduce their costs and make it easier to work with government." Italo Vignoli, one of the founders of the Document Foundation, said in an interview at OSCON, "The UK decision will give users the freedom to use either Microsoft Office or open source programs such as LibreOffice." Will Google Docs follow, with adding support to ODF?

Microsoft bring more open source to Azure

As reported on TechCrunch, Microsoft announced at OSCON that they've formed partnerships with Packer.io and OpenNebula. These partnerships will bring developers more open source support on Microsoft's Azure.

Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images (operating systems) for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. OpenNebula provides management of virtualized data centers to enable on-premise IaaS clouds. Microsoft continues to expand into the open source ecosystem, with its Open Technologies subsidiary which has grown to over 200 engineers working on a variety of projects.

Geneva and Toulouse move to open source

At the Open source observatory, Gijs Hillenius covered in two articles how two cities moved to open source. The city of Geneva, Switzerland, switches to free software. All primary and secondary public schools in the Swiss canton of Geneva will be switching to Ubuntu Linux for PCs used by teachers and students. This switch involves a total of 190 schools. As the article states, it will make the PCs easier to use, and maintain.

The city of Toulouse, fourth largest city in France, will move to LibreOffice, saving one million euro. "Free software and open source in general is now an established part of the city’s comprehensive digital policy," reports the study. The city now has several websites, web application, and intranet portals that are supported by free software. This move is part of the city's IT strategy. You can read more about it in the study.

In other news...

OSCON, and your open source news break

Don't forget to check on our own Jason and Jen, who were at OSCON this week and live blogged the key notes for day 1, day 2 and day 3. You can also check out the Opensource.com photo stream on Facebook for OSCON photos.

Want to take our open source news on the go? Check out Bryan Behrenshausen's podcast, Weekly Open Source News Break, on Hacker Public Radio.

A big thanks, as always, to Opensource.com summer intern Bryan Behrenshausen and moderator Scott Nesbitt for their help this week.