Patents! Patents! Patents! Canonical’s perfect 10. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Google responded to Oracle’s claims that its Android OS infringes copyrights and patents related to Java.

# Matt Asay evaluated the various patent claims against Android and its related devices.

# Microsoft licensed smartphone patents from ACCESS Co and a subsidiary of Acacia Research.

# Glyn Moody …

SMAQ report sections

→ MapReduce

→ Storage

→ Query

→ Conclusion

"Big data" is data that becomes large enough that it cannot be processed using conventional methods. Creators of web search engines were among the first to confront this problem. Today, social networks, mobile phones, sensors and science contribute to petabytes of data created daily.

To meet the challenge of processing such large data sets, Google created MapReduce. Google's work and Yahoo's creation of the Hadoop MapReduce implementation has spawned an ecosystem of big data processing tools.

As MapReduce has grown in popularity, a stack for big data systems …

Last week I was working on EC2 MySQL server where one of the slave is taking lot of time to catch-up; and only job that is running on that server[...]

VMware and Salesforce.com launch VMforce. Red Hat provides Cloud Access. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# VMware and Salesforce.com launched VMforce, a platform for developing and deploying Java cloud applications.

# Red Hat Cloud Access enables enterprises to use their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription on Amazon Web Services.

# Canonical announced Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition, Desktop Edition and ISV support.

EC approves Oracle-Sun. Google patents MapReduce. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

EC approves Oracle-Sun
The European Commission cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Larry Ellison is set to unveil Oracle’s Sun strategy on January 27th, Monty Widenius said he will go to the Court of First Instance to appeal the decision.

# Pro-open source political party formed in Hungary.

# Google …

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

Microsoft contributes to Linux. Acquia raises $8m. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Microsoft contributes to Linux
Microsoft announced that it is to contribute device driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Prompting us to publish a CAOS Theory Q&A. Answering one questioning we failed to ask, ZDnet reported that Microsoft’s Linux contributions should find their way into the 2.6.32 release.

Acquia raises $8m
Mass High Tech …

I’ve had a few VCs ask how we compare to Hadoop and companies using MapReduce. With Google blessing MapReduce, it seems to be the cool new thing. I figure I’m going to have to explain this to VCs, so I might as well blog about it.

MapReduce is a process of dividing a problem into small pieces and distributing (mapping) those pieces to a large number of computers. Then it collects the processed data and merges (reduces) it into a result set. Hadoop provides the plumbing, so users focus on writing the query and Hadoop handles the dirty work of mapping and reducing. Such a query, using a procedural language like Java, is more complex than a comparable SQL query, but more on that below.

So what is MapReduce good for? It really shines when you want to summarize, analyze or transform a very large data set. This is why it is well suited to web data. Map reduce doesn’t utilize an index, so the tradeoff you need to consider is whether …

I’ve had a few VCs ask how we compare to Hadoop and companies using MapReduce. With Google blessing MapReduce, it seems to be the cool new thing. I figure I’m going to have to explain this to VCs, so I might as well blog about it.

MapReduce is a process of dividing a problem into small pieces and distributing (mapping) those pieces to a large number of computers. Then it collects the processed data and merges (reduces) it into a result set. Hadoop provides the plumbing, so users focus on writing the query and Hadoop handles the dirty work of mapping and reducing. Such a query, using a procedural language like Java, is more complex than a comparable SQL query, but more on that below.

So what is MapReduce good for? It really shines when you want to summarize, analyze or transform a very large data set. This is why it is well suited to web data. Map reduce doesn’t utilize an index, so the tradeoff you need to consider is whether …

Dear Kettle fans,

As expected there was a lot of interest in cloud computing at the MySQL conference last week.  It felt really good to be able to pass the Bayon Technologies white paper around to friends, contacts and analysts.  It’s one thing to demonstrate a certain scalability on your blog, it’s another entirely to have a smart man like Nicholas Goodman do the math.

Sorting massive amounts of rows is hard problem to take on.  Making it scale on low-cost EC2 instances is interesting as it …