cloud

Open Source 2010: New Year's predictions.

New Year predictions are of course a licence to speculate. What's more the normal boundaries of sanity are loosened sufficiently to make the predictions fun rather than libellous.

Linux not the Cloud will Save Schools?

PM Gordon Brown has finally used the word 'cuts' last week with regard to public sector spending. He is determined, in his words, to cut unnecessary spending. M'thinks this must include school ICT unless of course enough money is saved by sacking senior teachers.

Open Source, P2P and the Pirate Party

The Swedish champion of civil liberties and scourge of outdated monopolist Copyright and Patent Laws has made it to the UK. The Pirate Party, famous for losing a recent P2P file-sharing trial, is bloodied unbowed and recruiting.

...good timing too. Riding roughshod over the Minister for Transformation Tom Watson, the First Secretary of State, Lord Peter Mandelson recently announced that whole families will have their broadband access cut if any one of them is caught illegally sharing files.

What?

The People's Cloud

Ok, so now we know,

John Suffolk's (the Cabinet Office CIO) generously replied to my questions posed in last week's blog. G-Cloud is 'go' and it will be a Private Cloud, based on Open Standards and will use a mix of proprietary and (free?) open source software. All I reckon is left it to see whether it's stitched together by Microsoft's technology or Red Hat's.

UK Government ditches Microsoft's Cloud in favour of Open Source?

In a world of spin, smoke and mirrors working out what is 'going down' is not easy and requires the full use of the "Spencer-scale".

At one end of this sale is 'paranoia', just feelings nothing more, moving through 'guessing' to 'speculation' and then on to 'putting two and two together'. At the other end is 'analysis' (of the facts) and ultimately a simple if rare report of the 'knowns'.

G-Cloud and our privacy

There are fine lines between realism and cynicism, wariness and paranoia and never more so when trying to piece together what a particularly slippery government is doing. One could just read what they say they are doing on the public record and believe what they say but that surely would, in the light of experience, just be plain silly.

Cloud Computing: Time is Money

Why the demise of proprietary software is creating a vacuum which is about to be filled... and we may not like it.

The PC Arrives on the Desktop

When I was at college the PC or personal computer had not arrived. We bought computing time (at great expense) on the 'mainframe', and a friend of mine made a good living selling computing-time to companies in need of computation.

Eucalyptus: the unsung hero of Open Source?

Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastructure for the implementation of cloud computing on computer clusters. Its name is an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". The current interface is compatible with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing interface. Tom Callway speaks to Rich Wolski, the project's director, about how Eucalyptus can be leveraged by enterprises and where it sits along side proprietary alternatives like Windows Azure.

What vendors really mean by 'open source'

When you say 'open source', you may be clear about what you mean. However, others are twisting the term for their own ends, says open-source expert Mark Taylor.

Like me, you've probably read articles on how free software, or open source, is going to thrive in 2009, and how businesses everywhere are going to survive the recession by migrating to it.