Articles by Jay Lyman

Docker -- the open-source application container technology that has drawn broad interest from the enterprise IT industry -- recently marked its second birthday since its creation and launch in March 2013 by developer Solomon Hykes and his company, dotCloud, which was renamed Docker, Inc., for the technology in October 2013 Judging by its growth and...

We're hearing more from vendors about how new features, functionality, rewrites, and releases are being driven by customers -- by their direct experience using the software and competing in their various industries We're also hearing from customers and users, including the enterprise market, that they are increasingly involved and thus empowered in...

Enterprise IT is a very serious matter, but you might not know it judging by the software tools that are often integral to enterprise application development and IT operations The list of odd names in today's data centers and enterprise IT shops also highlights the ongoing trend of polyglot programming. Today's applications and services are based o...

The OpenStack project continues to be something of a lightning rod and also something of a dichotomy in the industry On one hand, it has drawn the involvement of hundreds of supporting vendors and more than 17,000 individual members. It ranks highly among priorities, particularly for private clouds, among 451 Research survey respondents....

Microsoft recently established a .Net foundation and open-sourced substantial parts of the popular programming language, continuing to spread its newfound love for open-source software. However, another movement — DevOps — may be more of a driving factor in Microsoft's .Net move In establishing the independent .Net Foundation and making more ke...

There was a somewhat quiet, cost-free acquisition of sorts in the Linux world earlier this year when Red Hat announced it was joining forces with Red Hat Enterprise Linux community clone CentOS. The move, which effectively brings organization, governance, backing and technology of CentOS under Red Hat's brim, is interesting for a few reasons First,...

We may not see or hear much about open source in the latest cloud or Big Data offerings, but it's playing a significant role in the most disruptive trends in enterprise IT Just as we've seen with open source in cloud computing, it is an integral part of trends that currently are disrupting consumer and enterprise IT markets, including hybrid cloud ...

Server provisioning, configuration management, and automation are the latest examples of where the tech industry is being driven, largely by open-source software. The leading open-source server and IT infrastructure automation frameworks, Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs' Puppet, sit on the leading edge of significant trends underway in enterprise IT -- particularly disruption from cloud computing and DevOps, where application development and IT operations come together for faster, smoother delivery of software and services...

The recently released Who Writes Linux kernel contributor list reveals that some of the usual supporters of Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE, IBM, Intel, Oracle -- remain firmly behind the open source OS There has also been a lot of attention on the other contributors, which now include Microsoft. What I find most fascinating about the Linux contributor list...

We've seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today's technology world -- where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount -- exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs Open source software continues to be ...

Amid continued traction for Android, there have been a number of other developments for mobile operating systems based on Linux. Given my support for and belief in Linux and open source software, you might expect me to be bullish on the prospects for all of this mobile and device Linux. However, based on what I've seen in the past in terms of mergers, reshuffles and strategic restarts, I believe the introduction of the Tizen Linux-based OS is reminiscent of a time when mobile Linux wasn't really moving ahead...

There have been many changes in the market and technology since Citrix acquired XenSource and a major stewardship stake in the Xen open-source hypervisor four years ago Red Hat's 2008 Qumranet acquisition and subsequent push behind the Linux-integrated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor has added to the disruption. One thing, though, rem...

Jeremy Allison, a prominent open source software developer and Sambaproject cofounder, announced last week that he would be leaving Suse Linux vendorNovell over the company's patent pact with Microsoft The November interoperability and patent agreement between Novell andMicrosoft has upset a number of free and open source software (FOSS)community m...

With version 9.1, the latest iteration of its free Web browser,Opera joins competitorsMicrosoft andMozilla by prominently featuring anti-phishing and anti-fraud measures In order to bring the newsecurity functionality to its browser, Norway-based Opera partnered with digital certificate providerGeoTrust andPhishTank, the OpenDNS anti-phishing proje...

Semiconductor makerHynix announced Monday that it has developed a smaller dynamic random access memory chip using a 60-nanometer process that -- at 800 MHz -- is the world's fastest. The improved DRAM reportedly delivers 1 GB capacity along with the blazing speed, which tops the performance of existing 667 Mhz DRAM chips The feat shows that Hynix, ...

Heavy open source software user and Internet search giant Google this week unveiled a fully open source version of its Google Web Toolkit, GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, available for free under the Apache 2.0 open source license The toolkit, built around Google's code for Asynchronous Javascript and XML (Ajax) development, comes as both GWT and Ajax a...

Microsoft andNovell this week touted results of a recent survey -- sponsored by both companies -- indicating that nearly all IT customers at large organizations overwhelmingly approved of their Windows-Linux interoperability and patent protection deal ...

Web site operators and bloggers will get free Web hosting, including all advertising revenue from their sites, with a new service called "OpenServing" from the for-profit Wikipedia companyWikia The company said OpenServing will "extend the essence of theopen source model," delivering not only free software and content to users but also free bandwid...

Fortify Software and theFindBugs Java error detection project this week unveileda collaborative effort aimed at zapping the bugs of open source softwarecode written in Java The Java Open Review (JOR) Project is designed to help open sourcesoftware projects identify and fix security and other software errorsbefore they affect application performance...

Microsoft's Open XML office software format, pushed by the tech giant to compete with the Open Document Format (ODF), cleared a standards hurdle this week, winning approval from the Ecma international standards body The vote was not unanimous, however, as ODF supporter and Ecma member IBM gave Microsoft's standard a no vote, and there was some spec...