News
What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems? An Update
Red Hat is well known as a supplier of server systems, so the latest developments with our desktop products and technologies sometimes find themselves in the shade. It’s time for an update on the current state of the desktop at Red Hat.
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The iPhone SDK and free software: not a match
Apple's recently released a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone, but if you were hoping to port or develop original open source software with it, the news isn't good. Code signing and nondisclosure conditions make free software a no-go.
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Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise
MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.
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Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2
One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder of the Grabb.it MP3 blog service, just released AppDrop — an elegant hack proving that's not true.
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Sun Tackles Video Codec
Looking to boost the Web, Sun is working on a royalty-free and open video codec and media system, company officials said Thursday afternoon.
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Harvard starts teaching open source
It's about time that United States elite academic institutions finally got around to not only using open-source software, but also teaching it. In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, Harvard gives its MBA students a taste of the decision facing every company that leverages technology as part of its business (namely, everyone):
Should I embrace or fight open source?
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Google shares its security secrets
Google is offering security professionals a look into its security systems..
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Microsoft gets a new open-source chief
Sam Ramji just got a promotion: Sam will now be running Microsoft's worldwide open-source and Linux team (roughly 120 people and counting).
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Google gives Web developers a leg up with App Engine
Looks to make it easier for more people to get started developing, and to scale their apps.
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Red Hat Asks Federal Court To Limit Patents On Software
Today, Red Hat took a public stand challenging the standards for patenting software
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Exclusive: Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2
One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder of the Grabb.it MP3 blog service, just released AppDrop — an elegant hack proving that's not true.
AppDrop is a container for applications developed with the Google App Engine SDK, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Just like Google's Appspot, anyone can use a modified SDK to deploy their App Engine apps directly to Amazon EC2 instead of Google, and they work without modification.
This proof-of-concept was built in only four days and can be deployed in virtually any Linux/Unix hosting environment, showing that moving applications off Google's servers isn't as hard as everyone thought.
How does it work? Behind the scenes, AppDrop is simply a remote installation of the App Engine SDK, with the user authentication and identification modified to use a local silo instead of Google Accounts. As a result, any application that works with the App Engine SDK should work flawlessly on AppDrop. For example, here's Anderson's Fug This application running on Google App Engine and the identical code running on EC2 at AppDrop.
Of course, this simple portability comes at the cost of scalability. The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.
I spoke to Chris this morning about his project and where he wants it to go. "AppDrop is open-source just like the Google SDK, so I'm hoping someone will come along and take it to the next level," he said. "It wouldn't be hard for a competent hacker to add real database support. It wouldn't be that hard to write a Python adapter to MySQL that would preserve the BigTable API. And while that wouldn't be quite as scalable as BigTable, we've all seen that MySQL can take you pretty far. On top of that, you could add multiple application machines connecting to the central database, and load-balancing, and all that rigamarole."
While this is only a hack, it demonstrates that App Engine developers don't need to live in fear of Google's reprisal. "The upshot is that if you put a lot of time into an App Engine app, and then run afoul of Google, you have alternatives, even if they are more work."