Readwrite’s Matt Asay, Interviewed Paul Muller Adeven about why he thinks Mobile Analytics Toolkits like the one they have created are a better choice for companies. The article is full of opinions about why it’s better. He explains some of their problems and why they decided to develop their own toolkit and then open source it.
The folks over at Airbnb were frustrated with how good old cron was not really managing their scheduled jobs. To limit the frustration they built Chronos. This week they decided to open source it. It’s built on a Java project from the Apache Project Incubator called Mesos and Maven as the backend.
For those who haven’t used it cron is about the simplest scheduling you can do. Cron works great for kicking off things like backups and basic reporting. Where cron starts to fail is when you want to do complex jobs that know to start things on a previous jobs success or manage the number of jobs that are running. The logging and reporting of cron failures is generally pretty rough. So facing these issues the team decided to write their own replacement. They additionally needed it to be able to run on multiple machines.
They started building the system, simple and with functional GUI to make management and reporting easier. To be redundant a server is chosen to be the “Leader” which keeps track and hands out work to through their API. If you do connect to a machine that isn’t the “Leader” your request is redirected to the “Leader”. If the “Leader” goes down a new “Leader” is elected. The jobs can have defences and can be run in parallel. The jobs themselves are written in interrupted BASH Shell commands. It tries it’s best to be flexible and not overly complicated.
If you are looking for a package to manage distributed schedules this one is defiantly worth a look. Here you can find a good demo talk about how they got to where they are. There are closed source options but they tend to be very complex. So this is a really nice addition to the open source world.
There is an interesting and snarky account of a recent report over at marketware.com about how secure/insecure Open Source software is. The authors of the study for instance seem to think a lot of patches really fast is a bad thing. I don’t know about you but I want my stuff patched and working securely. The article is great and a fun read. For more from us on the topic check out our discussion on this weeks podcast.
Check out this article that tries to put some context to the discussion about what went wrong with between OpenStack and Microsoft. Assuming that the facts are correct the story explains a lot. According to this Microsoft let Citrix work on it’s contribution to OpenStack. When Citrix needed to re-task those developers the work on OpenStack stopped. Instead of Microsoft stepping back in and picking it up they just let it stall. Microsoft has committed to upping it’s efforts and get things back on track. We can only wait and see but this is pretty much par for the course where there interaction with open source is concerned.
Simmon Phipps wrote a nice piece for his blog over on computerworlduk.com pointing out some great points about why closed source leads to less innovation. One of the best ones is that closed source means that you always have to support it. This keeps a lot of people from making the effort because they don’t want to the commitment. Opening up the source code gives you the freedom to walk away or at least easily transfer management to another person. Passing off the baton of leadership for your project so it can live on beyond you. It’s a nice read with several nice points.
Linus T. took some time in a speech recently to point out some of the failings of Closed Source. In normal Linus style he points out things like this gem about Microsoft, “Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end. People want freedom and markets want freedom.” He went on to compare secure boot to Apple’s DRM and how ineffective it was. Check out this synopsis of the full speech over at ostatic.com.
For everyone in the US this past weekend has been a time of Thanksgiving, and shopping. With that has brought a slew of stories about what people are thankful for in the world of Open Source.(If you want to know our list listen to the podcast 🙂 ) Here is one we tended to agree with over at linuxinsider.com. Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think we should all be thankful for in the world of Linux and Open Source.
Ubuntu has been doing a lot of things lately focusing themselves on “the cloud”. They have switched from eucalyptus to openstack and now they are partnering with HP to be the os for their cloud option. Over at ZDNet they have a nice little arctile talking about it all. Check it out and let us know what you think about it.
Several countries still have laws on the books that actually prevent things like the GPL and CC licenses from being used. The laws in at least a few cases are such that no open licenses will be leagal until they get changed. The author does a great job of making it all make sense as best he can.
In other leagal news, the SCO Vs. Linux case may finally be done. Let’s hope that no one else tries this. It’s been years and lots of confusion with this case. Support the FSF and Linux Foundation so that we all can enjoy the use of the open source tools we have gone to depend on.
Richard Stallman himself owned up to the fact that in what we assume was an oversite forgot to include 8 files needed to make recent versions of EMACS compliant with the GPL. So should you stop using it now? Probably not unless you are running the most bleeding edge versions of EMACS. Which probably isn’t going to be in your favorite distributions repository for just this type of reason. They probably have already updated the files though we haven’t verified it.
linuxinstall.net 