rays's blog

Over the last couple of years open source software has gradually shifted from developer’s desktop to corporate infrastructure. Born out of university labs, this is quite a commendable journey. While this trend is captured in quite a few studies around that capture the mood and sentiment of CIOs, Architects; this particular post from silicon.com caught our attention sometime back. Sure, most of us were convinced about the economic impact of open source besides the freedom part, but we perhaps weren’t thinking about the magnitude of that impact. As the post and the quoted study suggest the economic impact – in this case lost sales opportunity of proprietary software to open source is estimated to be $ 1 trillion per year. How does that compare with the revenues of some of the largest software companies in the world, say Microsoft at $ 60 billion? There you go.  read more »

This was my Aha! moment with virtualization. Having played around with Vmware, Xen and Virtualbox, missed this subtle feature that really makes the guest and the host OS share the desktop seamlessly. Check out the interesting post by Jack Wallen  read more »

Its raining open source mobile platforms. We already had a share of Android, Symbian, Moblin, the original gnome mobile and then Limo, OpenMoko and now OFONO jointly launch by Intel and Nokia. Announced earlier this week, perhaps this is an attempted answer to rising Android + ARM combine that is going beyond phones to netbooks as well.  read more »

The difference between a school and a conventional enterprise is what happens to that expertise. In most businesses it sticks around. In school it graduates.  read more »

Recently came across an interesting post by Steve Maryka on Asynchronous Web at theserverside.com. Sure we have been experiencing asynchronous Ajaxified web pages for a while, but Steve presents a nice overview of different approaches to achieve asynchronous calls given the limitations of HTTP protocol.  read more »

Open source skills have been in vogue for some time now. Developers with FLOSS skills are said to be making upto 40% more in compensation compared to other fellow developers on proprietary technologies. Matt Asay, VP Business Development at Alfresco also makes an interesting point about not just money but more on the satisfaction scale as well. But then how are companies talking to this really?  read more »

The 2009 report on 'Future of Open source' by North Bridge Venture Partners shared at the InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), re-confirms the trend towards increasing adoption of open source, particular in the enterprise. Following are the key findings collected from 435 respondents  read more »

Being an open source enthusiast I generally follow the open source blog at Infoworld as a good source of open source news. Today I was clearing up my backlog of new posts and came across this one on PhoneGap. Was amazed at the simplicity and usefulness of the whole idea. Here is some more about PhoneGap.  read more »

A large alumni circle, who take pride in their alma mater is the best thing that can happen to an institute. As brand ambassadors, their personal success often influences their institutes rankings. Higher rankings or reputation in turn attracts better talent and soon enough you have a party going - think Ivy League, the IITs. And what can sustain this party?  read more »

Open source is increasingly leaning towards structured training content to encourage more and more developers. Some time back I had shared about Mozilla foundations plans and now Linux foundation has announced a new program. Linux foundation is particularly interesting as a central organization influencing many projects and platforms under the Linux umbrella. Involvement of community members as mentors further underlines the seriousness behind the program.  read more »