Stories about: Reilly

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame.

It's over, finito, kaput. The fat lady hasn't merely stopped singing, she's taken off her girdle and waddled home. There are now so many forks stuck into the Microsoft Yahoo deal that it looks like a cutlery display.

Following the open source model for collaborative software development can cut costs while providing a basis to create other innovative networks to develop technology specific to your company. While few have tried to develop industry-specific or vertically oriented open-source solutions up to now, it could become the future of software development.

The release of an esoteric plug-in for a twenty-year-old piece of software normally doesn't merit much attention... except when the software is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word, and the add-on could have a major positive effect on the 1.5 million blind or visually impaired Americans who use computers, millions more like them around the globe, and, potentially, tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide with developmental disabilities or reading problems.

Mashup tools have so far been used mostly for simple applications like adding geographical information to corporate data by pulling Google Maps into common processes.

For many IT shops, nothing strikes fear as deep in its heart as the notion that a new technology will be as alluring to users as Excel, which in many organizations has withstood every attempt at being controlled at all by IT.

Google officials fielded questions from developers at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco who pressed the company about its Google App Engine, asking about everything from its language support, privacy assurances, pricing and backward compatibility.

It's not your kid's video game.

Microsoft is aiming to use the Internet as a hub to "mesh" data, devices and applications that are always updated and available from anywhere. Microsoft's new Live Mesh, which it announced as a limited technology preview Tuesday and planned to detail further here at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, combines hosted services for storage, sharing files and peer-to-peer connections to allow multiple different devices to work together and users to access updated applications from anywhere, the company said.

The Open Source Census, an effort to pin down hard statistics regarding the implementation of open-source software around the world, got underway on Wednesday.

Jeff Jonas knows the Las Vegas gambling industry inside and out. As the founder and chief scientist of Systems Research & Development (SRD), Jonas helped build numerous casino systems before 2005 when his company was purchased by IBM.