Mozilla has announced an update to Firefox 38, and despite the company’s dislike for Digital Rights Management (DRM), support will be included for it in the update. “We don’t believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it’s currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, senior VP of … continue reading
This week’s featured GitHub project, Vorlon.js, is an extensible, platform-agnostic tool for remote JavaScript debugging and testing. Developed by the Microsoft DirectX team, Vorlon.js is powered by Node.js and the Socket.io real-time event-based communication engine. John Shewchuk, a Microsoft technical fellow and CTO of the Microsoft Developer Platform, introduced Vorlon last week at Build and … continue reading
Google has launched Cloud Bigtable, a scalable, fully managed NoSQL database service available through the open-source Apache HBase API. Google Cloud Bigtable is an enterprise-focused NoSQL service for high-volume data ingestion, analytics and data-heavy serving workloads. The service includes a natively integrated open-source interface for Hadoop imported to existing HBase clusters along with replicated storage … continue reading
GitHub wants to bring its Web development technology to the desktop. We’re self-aggrandizing this week’s GitHub Project of the Week with Electron, a framework of GitHub’s own making. Formerly known as Atom Shell, it is a cross-platform framework for creating desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS, based on the io.js and Chromium runtimes and … continue reading
The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache Parquet as a Top-Level Project. Apache Parquet, a columnar Hadoop storage format, is used across Big Data processing frameworks, data models and query engines from MapReduce and Apache Spark to Apache Hive, Impala and others. Parquet’s ascension to a Top-Level Project signifies the health and maturity of the … continue reading
Cloud-based virtual machines are proliferating like mad, so it’s about time there was an operating system for them. Created by Cloudius Systems, OSv is a new open-source operating system for virtual machines, designed to execute a single application atop a hypervisor. Written in C/C++, the cloud OS runs Linux applications on hypervisors such as VMware … continue reading
Red Hat is updating its open-source development tools with a focus on developer productivity and production stability. The company has announced the availability of Red Hat Developer Toolset 3.1, a selection of stable C and C++ compilers and development tools. (Related: Other Red Hat news, this time about Linux containers) “Across the open hybrid cloud, … continue reading
I recently attended Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco, where I had a revelation on why it is going to be impossible to succeed as a technology vendor in the long run without deeply embracing open source. Of the many great presentations I listened to, I was most captivated by the ones that explained … continue reading
C# 6.0 is on track for release along with the upcoming Visual Studio 2015, but developers won’t see C# 7 for quite a while. That doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t already planning it out, though. C# and Roslyn compiler program manager Mads Torgersen has posted a working list of C# 7 features on GitHub detailing the … continue reading
VMware has announced two new open-source projects to help enterprise developers create, deploy and manage cloud-native applications. The projects include Project Lightwave and Project Photon. Project Lightwave is an identity- and access-management project that will add a new layer of container security to cloud-native apps. Project Photon is a lightweight Linux operating system designed for … continue reading
Google is making it easier for people to find applications with App Indexing. App Indexing already provides users with a way to interact with an installed Android app, but starting this week, people searching on Google can discover other apps even if they haven’t installed them. In addition, Google will be using App Indexing as … continue reading
Normally at this time on a Friday you’d be reading about whichever interesting open-source project we decided to highlight for our GitHub Project of the Week. But this week it seemed more pertinent to take a closer look at the recently released GitHub 2014 Transparency Report. The report details every disclosure and takedown request, search … continue reading
