Open source news this week: August 12 - 16, 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.
- The Web in 20 years. Kevin Kelly has a sweet job title: Senior Maverick at Wired. It’s a title he's more than earned after co-founding Wired, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary as a publication. In this Linux.com interview, Kelly talks about his vision for the future of technology: The Technium, a global interconnected super organism. And just what does Kelly mean by that? His explanation is worth a read.
- There's nothing funny about LoL’s IT environment. The software infrastructure behind the wildly popular online game League of Legends was in serious trouble. Among the problems: It was taking nearly 24 hours to run the daily data extract update, reports David Strom on the SmartBear blog. So the game's studio, Riot Games, tapped a lot of open source communities and platforms for help. In his article, Strom outlines the open source tools Riot Games used and what its developers learned from the experience.
- Twitter buys an open source educator. Twitter says it wants to be the best place in the world for engineers to work, and to that end it announced this week that it was acquiring open source educator Marakana to provide its engineers with additional training. As a result of the acquisition, ZDNet reports that Marakana will no longer be offering its courses to the public. However, Twitter says it will "aim to release some of the Twitter University content online to anyone who’d like to learn."
- Open data galore in India. Accessing open data for India recently got a little easier thanks to a new open data portal that features more than 3,500 data sets from 49 different government offices, reports Tech President. The new website is being compared to the U.S. government’s data.gov website, which recently underwent a redesign. As part of the launch, the Indian government's Planning Commission is sponsoring an app contest encouraging use of the data. If you want to participate, you better hurry, the deadline to enter is August 20.
- How I spent my summer vacation. Finally, I'll leave you with a story that will warm even the coldest of geek hearts. VentureBeat has an article about a 12 year-old Las Vegas kid, Ethan Duggan, who spent a summer learning to code on Codeacademy. Ethan turned to code after he came up with an idea for an app and his developer dad encouraged him to learn to build it himself. A year later, Ethan has created three apps with PhoneGap, an open source framework that lets you create mobile apps. Now Ethan is preparing to roll out another app that will come in handy the next time you find yourself in an argument at a bar. This is a fun feature story about what happened when a parent encouraged his son to dive into development. Hat tip to reader Robin Muilwijk for making sure we didn't miss this article.
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