open source

LF Europe’s Project Sylva wants to create an open source telco cloud stack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Europe, linux foundation, open source, telco, telecommunicationsNo Comments

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) — the recently launched European offshoot of the open source Linux Foundation — today announced the launch of Project Sylva, which aims to create an open source telco cloud framework for European telcos and vendors. This is the first project hosted by LF Europe and is a good example of what the organization is trying to achieve. The project aims to create a production-grade open source telco cloud stack and a common framework and reference implementation to “reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services.” Currently, five carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) are working on the project. “There’s a whole bunch of Linux Foundation networking projects already that have taken telecommunications into the open source era,” Arpit Joshipura, the general manager for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, told me. “All those projects are under what is called the [LF] Networking foundation. […] So whatever that work is that is done by the telcos, Sylva is going to leverage and build on top of it with these European vendors to solve EU specific requirements. Those are security, energy, federated computing, edge and data trust.” At the core of Sylva is a framework for a compute platform that can be agnostic to whether a workload is running on the telco access network, edge or in the core. The project aims to build a reference implementation, leveraging all of the work already being done by LF Networking, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the home of Kubernetes and other cloud-native infrastructure projects), LF Energy and others. All of this, of course, is done with a focus on the EU’s goals around security, data privacy and energy management, but even though the project has this EU focus, the overall ambition is broader and goes well beyond the European Union. Many of these regulations, after all, will make it to other markets as well. “Linux Foundation, Europe allows us to focus more on specific regional requirements, but without those siloes and fragmentation that foster that techno-nationalism, if you want to call it that, by really being able to foster local collaboration and then, pushing that stuff upstream gives us this amazing conduit to go across borders,” explained Gabriele Columbro, the general manager of the Linux Foundation Europe. The vendors joining the project all argue that they are doing so in order to reduce fragmentation as the industry moves to a cloud-centric model and to enable interoperability between different platforms. “The Telco Cloud ecosystem today is fragmented and slowing down our operational model transformation. Despite a transition to cloud native technologies, a real interoperability between workloads and platforms remains a challenge,” said Laurent Leboucher, group CTO and SVP, Orange Innovation Networks. “Indeed, operators have to deal with a lot of vertical solutions that are different for each vendor, leading to operational complexity, lack of scalability and high costs. Sylva, by providing a homogenous telco cloud framework for the entire industry, should help all the ecosystem to use a common technology, which will be interoperable, flexible and easy to operate.”

Meet Budibase, a low-code open-source web app builder with automations • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in Apps, Budibase, Enterprise, low-code, open sourceNo Comments

While there are differing perspectives on the degree to which no-code and low-code development tools could eventually supplant human software developers, it’s clear that any software that takes care of the technical “heavylifting” is having a huge impact within businesses — in terms of opening app-building to more personnel, plugging the talent gap, and helping existing developers focus on more demanding tasks. A quick peek across the recent funding landscape shows little sign of the no-code / low-code movement slowing. In 2022 alone we’ve seen the likes of Webflow draw in $120 million for a no-code website builder; Softr raise a $13.5 million Series A to help companies build apps on top of Airtable databases; Appsmith secure a $41 million Series B to power customized internal business apps; Retool attract a $45 million cash injection for a similar proposition; and Thunkable lock down a $30 million investment for a no-code mobile app development platform. So despite the broader downturn, it seems that 2022 may have been relatively kind to startups operating in the no- and low-code sphere, something that fledgling Northern Irish startup Budibase is capitalizing on with the announcement of a fresh $7 million tranche of funding to further develop an open source web app builder. Founded out of Belfast in 2019, Budibase allows users to connect to an external data source — such as Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, Google Sheets, or Airtable — and develop internal tools or business apps in minutes. Such apps may include anything from customer helpdesk applications, application tracking systems, and inventory management systems, to admin panels, portals, and forms. Budibase: Example business application in action It’s also worth noting that Budibase also packs its own built-in database based on CouchDB, for those looking to build apps entirely from scratch. “Every enterprise we speak with says the same thing — ‘we have a long backlog of internal tool tickets that are holding us back’,” Budibase cofounder Joe Johnston told ZebethMedia. “With Budibase, enterprises are building internal tools and transforming workflows in days, not months, which is a huge cost-saving and catalyst for innovation.” Open sourced One of Budibase’s core selling points is that it’s open source, which gives companies more flexibility and extensibility, but also allows them to host everything themselves — this is particularly important for enterprises with sensitive data they may wish to protect from the SaaS-y clutches of third-party infrastructure. In addition to the free self-hosted version of Budibase, the company also offers a range of premium and enterprise plans with add-on features (such as SLAs and unlimited automation logs) and a fully-managed hosted incarnation. Budibase is somewhat similar to other players in the open source low-code development space, including the aforementioned Appsmith and Joget which, as it happens, announced its first institutional funding earlier this year via a $2.2 million pre-Series A investment. So this highlights the demand not only for no- and low-code app builders, but also the ability to retain full control over company data and gain full insights into what’s going on under the hood. “Enterprises like this because they have access to the codebase, and they can patch it if they need to [which is useful for] risk mitigation,” Johnston said. Automation for the people Budibase is looking to set itself apart in a number of ways, through more subjective elements such as usability, but also through specific differentiators such as built-in automations comparable to something like Zapier. Indeed, Budibase includes automations that are powered by webhooks and actions that are good to go out-the-box, but which can also be customized by the more technically-minded that want to throw their own scripts into the pot. Such automations can cover any number of use-cases, such as automatically approving (or denying) an employee’s leave request through an internal form, or issuing a new inbound lead notification to the sales team at the start of their shift. “We want to deliver a platform that helps developers and non-developers — but technical employees — innovate and accelerate their workplace,” Johnston said. Budibase automation in action A quick peek at Budibase’s homepage reveals a fairly impressive roster of company logos, from Google and Netflix, to Tesla and Disney. At first glance, it would appear that these are fully signed-up Budibase customers, but alas this is not the case — Budibase uses a tracking tool called Scarf to detect which domains are downloading the open source Budibase software. So this doesn’t really tell us all that much about how Budibase is being used at these companies, whether it’s being tested internally or whether it’s simply curious employees downloading it for their own interests. “Employees from some of the companies mentioned are active in our community,” Johnston said. “For example, Scarf told us Google has pulled down the Budibase Docker image over 150 times.” Budibase had raised $1.8 million in seed funding prior to now, and its latest $7 million “seed II” funding round included investments from SignalFire, Angular Ventures, Techstart, and a slew of angel backers.

FlowForge nabs $7.2M to help companies integrate IoT using Node-RED • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Enterprise, FlowForge, Hardware, Node-RED, open sourceNo Comments

A new company from one of the original creators of the open source Node-RED project is setting out to make it easier for companies to bridge the gap between incompatible IoT ecosystems at scale. Node-RED, for the uninitiated, is a low-code, visual programming tool developed inside IBM for connecting APIs, hardware, and related assets that constitute the broader Internet of Things (IoT) — it’s all about enabling IoT developers to build applications at speed, while addressing the sheer number of IoT devices, manufacturers, and protocols they have to contend with. IBM transitioned stewardship of the project to the JS Foundation (a Linux Foundation project) back in 2016, and today it is used by organizations including Siemens, Hitachi, and Bosch. While Node-RED has been gaining traction within industry, it has also faced challenges typical of many open source projects, vis-à-vis the time and resources required to deploy and manage Node-RED beyond small-scale or prototype projects — which is where FlowForge enters the fray with a commercial platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that helps IoT companies run Node-RED at scale in production environments. Via the FlowForge UI, users can spin up Node-RED instances in seconds and manage them all from a single pane, as well as monitor the health of their project. Moreover, companies can elect to use FlowForge’s hosting, centralized audit logging, security, role-based access control, and more — basically, letting FlowForge take care of all the heavylifting. FlowForge in action Cashflow Founded out of the U.K. in 2021 by IBM’s former Node-RED lead and project maintainer Nick O’Leary, alongside early GitLab employee Zeger-Jan van de Weg, FlowForge has largely flown under the radar up until now. O’Leary told ZebethMedia that the company has previously received some $2 million in funding from GitLab cofounder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij through Open Core Ventures to get the business off the ground. And to help take things to the next level, FlowForge today announced a fresh $7.2 million in financing from Cota Capital, Westwave Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Open Core Ventures. While there are a handful of similar commercial players out there already, such as Krysp.io, Sensetecnic’s FRED, and Prescient Devices, FlowForge is carving a path to market through adopting an open source ethos. And having Node-RED’s creator at the helm doesn’t hurt its outlook either. “Building FlowForge as an open source platform means we complement the open source nature of Node-RED,” O’Leary explained. “Many people have come to Node-RED as an open source alternative to the proprietary solutions that are out there today. For customers of FlowForge, it gives them much more direct access to what we’re building. They can provide feedback on items they care about from the very beginning of the development process.” With FlowForge version 1.0 fresh off the production line just last week, the company is now gearing up to develop bigger features, including collaboration tooling that will allow developers to work with each other in real time, a little like Google Docs. “So far we have been primarily focused on getting the core platform in place,” O’Leary said. “With our 1.0 release, we are now at a point to start working on the features that will really set us apart. Collaboration has always been a less-than-smooth user experience in Node-RED. That’s something we want to address and are looking at more real-time collaboration options.” With another $7.2 million in the bank, FlowForge is well-financed to ramp things up, targeting companies across all industries and sizes. “We see Node-RED being adopted by a wide range of companies, across many different industries and scales,” O’Leary continued. “We believe FlowForge will help solve problems faced by anyone wanting to take Node-RED into production in a well-managed environment.”

Meet Crowd.dev, an open source user-led growth platform for fostering developer communities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Community-led growth, crowd-dev, open source, Social, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Community-led growth (CLG) has emerged as a popular mechanism for driving business, as companies strive to foster an ecosystem of fervent users that draws in new customers organically, serves as a support network for millions, and bangs a company’s drum completely off its own volition. Businesses such as Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, and Figma have grown substantially off the back of their respective communities, which in turn has led to a slew of new technologies dedicated to helping such businesses harness their fanbase, unearth their biggest advocates, and keep that CLG flywheel spinning. Investors have taken note, too: in the past year alone we’ve seen companies such as Commsor raise a $50 million Series B; Common Room secure $52 million; Threado draw in a $3.1 million seed round; and, more recently, Talkbase raise $2 million to power user-led growth for any company. Now, another new company has entered the community-led growth fray with a slightly different approach to the existing players, one focused on developer communities and with open source at its core. Founded out of Berlin in 2021, Crowd.dev brings together data from myriad developer communities including GitHub, Discord, Slack, Twitter, DEV, and Hacker News, and serves up analytics and workflow automations on top of this aggregated data. For example, a developer tool company might want to understand its users better and build relationships both with them and their employers to hone their product and find a better product-market fit. This might involve gathering and viewing all direct and indirect feedback in a single interface, or using one of Crowd.dev’s premium tools such as Eagle Eye which leans on natural language processing (NLP) to identify community discussions ripe for engagement. Crowd.dev: Eagle Eye app Image Credits: Crowd.dev To help take things to the next level, Crowd.dev has just raised €2.2 million ($2.2 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Lightbird, with participation from Possible Ventures, Angel Invest, and a handful of angel backers. On top of that, the German startup has open-sourced its core platform, a move that goes some way toward differentiating itself in an increasingly crowded space. But first, it’s worth considering why developer-focused firms might need a dedicated platform to steer their community-led growth efforts, given that the incumbents can already be used for any community of users — including developers. Verticals Crowd.dev CEO and cofounder Jonathan Reimer argues that the word “community” has a broad gamut of connotations, and could mean anything from from social media influencers to online learning groups. Ultimately, a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work — a company laser-focused on attracting developers will probably need different tools to a company seeking to attract creators or crypto fans. “There has been hype around community, but also disappointment regarding new tools made to make community-building easier,” Reimer explained to ZebethMedia. “I have tried [existing] tools at previous jobs and was never satisfied as they didn’t match my use-case. Similar to CRMs (customer relationship management software), we believe there will be a verticalization in the community software space. We’re the first going in the developer space.” This “verticalization” is important in terms of building a platform that people actually want to use. In the case of Crowd.dev, which is aiming to create a product that suggests actions that a user can take based on developer community data, specializing in this way allows it to better tailor its product and “build more reliable model,” as Reimer puts it, for example in terms of detecting feedback or evaluating sentiment. “Achieving this for all kinds of communities at the same time would be incredibly hard,” Reimer said. “Developer communities have astonishing similarities, and especially for open source communities, we have access to a ton of historical training data.” Crowd.dev analytics Image Credits: Crowd.dev The open source factor Open source communities have long played a fundamental role in driving adoption of software, which is partly why a growing number of companies choose to make their products available under an open source license. If developers are able to tinker with software themselves with minimal friction, contribute some code, and even add new features, they are more inclined to use the software in their places of work — and thus, they are more inclined to convince their employers that it’s worth paying for premium features on top of the open source product. And this is the main driving force behind Crowd.dev’s focus on open source development communities, and its reasons for open-sourcing its own platform. “We believe that an essential tool for developer-focused, open source companies — as community management is — should be open source itself,” Reimer said. Transitioning to an open source platform may hold other benefits, too. For example, enterprises seeking greater transparency and control over their data can host Crowd.dev on their own infrastructure, and then pay Crowd.dev to unlock access to unlimited users and integrations. Or companies can elect to pay for the hosted incarnation of Crowd.dev, which includes a basic free tier in addition to more advanced enterprise plans. In its short lifespan so far, Crowd.dev claims a fairly impressive roster of customers such as The Linux Foundation and Microsoft, a company that has increasingly embraced open source over the past eight years after a somewhat frosty attitude toward community-driven software in years previous. Reimer said that Microsoft uses Crowd.dev to operate Flatcar Linux, a Linux distribution for container workloads it now operates after acquiring developer Kinvolk back in in 2021. “They use Crowd.dev mainly to analyze community members’ engagement, spot relevant stargazers on GitHub, and create reports,” Reimer said. In truth, Microsoft and its big tech ilk won’t be typical users, due to the fact that most of Crowd.dev’s target customers will be smaller companies seeking growth. But still, it’s an indication of the mindshare that Crowd.dev has managed to secure so far, with “several hundred organizations” joining the company’s beta product since March this year. “Eighty percent of our users are companies between Seed and Series B that see community

Mastodon’s microblogging app saw a record number of downloads after Musk’s Twitter takeover • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Apps, Elon Musk, mastodon, open source, Social, TwitterNo Comments

There are signs of a small but growing Twitter exodus underway following Elon Musk’s closure of the deal to buy the social media platform last Thursday. While many Twitter users are taking a wait-and-see approach and may not have fully deleted their accounts at this time, a sizable number of people are currently checking out Twitter alternatives. One of those alternatives is Mastodon, a decentralized social network that gained over 70,000 new sign-ups on Friday, the day after the Musk Twitter takeover completed. And this weekend, the official Mastodon mobile app saw a record number of downloads as more people fleeing Twitter began to seek out a new online home. Mastodon, to be clear, is not a new platform. The free and open-source microblogging service debuted in March 2016, offering a different approach to online social networking. Similar to Twitter, you can follow other users and create posts that can be liked and retweeted (or “tooted,” in Mastodon lingo), use hashtags, share media, and more. But unlike Twitter, Mastodon is a distributed social network where users sign up on individual servers, or nodes, each with its own theme, rules, language, and moderation policy. For instance, the most popular server currently is mastodon.social, touting 817,219 users. A Japanese server pawoo.net is just behind that with some 766,399 users. Users can generally view content and interact with people on other servers, with the exception of any servers in the “fediverse” — the group of interconnected, or federated, servers — that their own server admin has banned. Mastodon works on the web or mobile, including through native mobile apps. In addition to the main Mastodon mobile client, there’s a long list of third-party clients to choose from, too, with names like Tootle, Metatext, Mast, tooot, Toot!, Mastoot, Twidere X, Mercury for Mastodon, Tootoise, Tootter for Mastodon, Stella, and more. There were already signs last week that Mastodon was benefiting from the chaos and concern that’s accompanied the chaotic change in Twitter’s ownership. Looks like #Mastodon is trending on Twitter as more and more people are announcing their new profiles. Welcome to the better social media that does not belong to a single company and cannot be sold, welcome to the fediverse! pic.twitter.com/75pugCA0si — Mastodon (@joinmastodon) October 27, 2022 On Friday, the hashtag #mastodon began trending and many people were tweeting #TwitterMigration as they prepared to make the shift to the open-source service. Even in advance of the Twitter sale, some were checking out Mastodon, noted Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s founder and lead developer. He said that 18,000 people signed up for Mastodon accounts in the week leading up to the Twitter sale (Oct. 20 to Oct. 27), Wired reported at the time. On Friday, Mastodon shared that number had increased by quite a bit: over 70,000 people signed up for a Mastodon account on that day alone (Oct. 28). (Rochko later noted the figure was actually 70,849, up from 10,801 the day prior.) This influx of new users also helped boost the Mastodon mobile app. As of Friday afternoon, the app had jumped to No. 38 in the Social Networking category on the U.S. App Store, data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicated. This was the app’s highest rank since April 27, 2022 when it had ranked No. 37 — shortly after Musk made his initial offer to buy Twitter, prompting the first Twitter exodus. The highest rank the app had ever seen then was No. 31 on April 26, 2022. That’s since changed, Sensor Tower tells us. The app has now moved up to No. 21 in the Social Networking category on the U.S. App Store, topping its earlier high. It also saw the most installs ever in a single day on Saturday, Oct. 29, with 34,000 new downloads across both iOS and Android that day. And, over the past three days (Oct. 28-30) the app has seen around 91,000 new installs, Sensor Tower says. That’s up 658% when compared with the 12,000 installs from the prior three days (Oct. 25-27). It’s also a sizable chunk of the lifetime installs the app has seen to date, which now total 489,000 across iOS and Android. Germany is Mastodon’s largest market with 37% of installs, followed by the U.S. with 19% and Japan with 7%. However, despite breaking records, Mastodon’s mobile app hasn’t yet broken into the Top Overall iPhone apps on the U.S. App Store. That could be because Mastodon has such a long tail of third-party clients that some app downloads from new users are being siphoned away from the main app and directed elsewhere. For example, the Mastodon app MetaText jumped up 14 positions in its ranking in the Social Networking category while Mercury moved up 3 ranks. Neither are all that sizable, though, with Social Networking category ranks of 469 and 1,295, respectively. There’s no doubt this rapid growth in Mastodon app downloads is directly tied to the Musk Twitter takeover. However, Mastodon’s growth isn’t the only sign that some Twitter users are abandoning the platform. Twitter developer partner Tweepsmap, a Twitter analytics provider, saw a slightly higher than usual drop in the number of “unfollows” on the platform among a sample size of 400,000 Twitter users on Friday, Oct. 28 — or about 30% higher than the usual Friday average. This could signal a somewhat higher number of users were deactivating their accounts than is usual, leading to them “unfollowing” other users as a result. The only other pattern Tweepsmap could detect was that liberal-leaning accounts had higher than usual losses, with a follower drop of < 0.2% — a decline that’s not significant in the grand scheme of things, but also not entirely negligible, either, the company told us. That would likely correlate with the types of Twitter users who are looking to exit a Musk-led platform, but it’s still small enough of an exit to not really hurt Twitter at present. In the meantime, Rochko posted that he’s purchased more powerful hardware to upgrade Mastodon’s

Sigstore launches free software signing and verification service for open source projects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, kubecon detroit 2022, open source, sigstore, software security, supply chainNo Comments

Software supply chain quickly became a hot topic in the last few years, especially as the number of high-profile attacks increased and the White House got involved. Sigstore, an open source project supported by the likes of Google, GitHub, Chainguard and RedHat, has become somewhat of a standard for signing, verifying and protecting software projects — and the dependencies they use — to make sure that the software you install and run on your machines hasn’t been manipulated. These days, after all, there aren’t many software projects that don’t rely on at least one — and usually multiple — open-source libraries, which themselves probably rely on other libraries, too. And with many of these projects maintained by volunteers, they make for an easy target for hackers. Today, at SigstoreCon, a co-located event at the CNCF’s KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conference in Detroit, the Sigstore community announced the general availability of its free software signing service for open source projects. Sigstore is already one of the fasted adopted open source projects ever, with more than 4 million signatures logged so far. Both the Kubernetes and Python communities use it to sign their releases. And npm, the popular JavaScript package manager, is currently in the process of integrating Sigstore to ensure the provenance of its packages. Image Credits: Sigstore “Sigstore has rapidly become the standard for signing, verifying, and protecting software, so it’s great to announce the general availability to remove one last barrier for more widespread adoption during a time when software supply chain security is more important than ever,” said Priya Wadhwa, a member of the Sigstore Technical Steering Committee and software engineer at Chainguard. “It is our hope that this next phase of Sigstore will empower the rest of the open source software ecosystem to gain increased confidence in adopting this technology and benefit from its reliable and stable experience.” The Sigstore community promises a 99.5% uptime and pager support — more than most free projects can offer. Sigstore, it’s worth noting, is a nonprofit project that is funded under the Open Source Security Foundation. Sigstore itself consists of a number of projects for signing containers, saving that information in an immutable ledger and, of course, creating those certificates in the first place.

Acquia jumps on headless CMS bandwagon with open source starter kit • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Acquia, content management, drupal, Enterprise, headless CMS, open sourceNo Comments

Over the last decade or so, content management systems have evolved from monolithic systems managed by IT to a set of services made available to developers through an API. The more modern approach separates the presentation layer on the front end from the management on the back end. Today, Acquia, the company behind the open source Drupal project, announced its official entry into the headless CMS market, and not surprisingly it’s based on Drupal and open source. The company is calling this offering a “starter kit,” a way to take advantage of headless features as needed, says Jim Shaw, SVP and GM for Drupal at Acquia. “If you come to Acquia and you’re starting a digital experience project, we normally offer you Acquia CMS as the starting point to start with Drupal. But now we’re also offering a headless kit inside of that, so that you can use headless features to move content through an API,” Shaw told ZebethMedia. He points out that while it is releasing the headless kit, the company sees this as part of a hybrid strategy that includes the full-blown Acquia CMS working together with the headless piece. “And for us this is less about having a dedicated headless product that only does headless. It’s about having those capabilities available from the platform that allows you to do hybrid as well as headless,” he said. In fact, Shaw doesn’t see many customers going full-on headless. “I think it’s unlikely that people will go 100% headless, that they will have only headless use cases. I think what we see is people doing both, and as a result what we’re doing is we’re we’re building these capabilities inside the Acquia platform,” he said. In addition to the headless starter kit, the company is also introducing a kit for next.js, an open source web development framework, to help developers build a front end too. “[We’re also offering] a starter kit for next.js that primes the pump in terms of getting a next.js front end working with a headless back end,” he said. He says some customers have been taking this approach on their own, and the company wanted to build something to make it easier to do this without building a full-blown product. “So that’s why we offering these are starter kits, not entire new product. They are layers inside, things that we have that then allow our customers — and hopefully new customers — to accelerate those headless projects on our platform and still have all the options available to them in terms of having a hybrid approach available as well.” The two kits are being announced today at Acquia Engage, the company’s customer conference taking place in Miami this week. The kits will be available for download today.

Podcast app Pocket Casts goes open source • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, Automattic, Media & Entertainment, open source, Pocket CastsNo Comments

Popular podcast platform Pocket Casts has released its mobile clients under an open source license. WordPress parent company Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, having been acquired by a group of public radio companies, including NPR, back in 2018. Pocket Casts is one of the most popular “podcatcher” apps outside the big tech ecosystems of Google, Apple, and Spotify, allowing users to search and subscribe to podcasts for free, with premium features such as desktop apps available for a fee. It perhaps should come as little surprise that Automattic has elected to push the Pocket Casts app code onto GitHub, given that Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg is a huge proponent of open source — and WordPress is among the top open source projects on the planet. By making Pocket Casts open source, this means that anyone can access the code, fix bugs, create new features, and even fork it to build their own competing service on top of the Pocket Cast codebase. The Android and iOS apps are available now under a Mozilla Public License 2.0, a copyleft license that stipulates all derivative projects or modifications have to be released under the same license.

The Open 3D Engine adds improved terrain creation and collaboration tools • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Enterprise, epic, open 3d foundation, open source, unity, unrealNo Comments

For a long time, the world of 3D engines — especially for game developers — was all about Unity and Epic’s Unreal Engine. Then, when Amazon started its ill-fated attempt to get into gaming, it launched the Lumberyard engine (which itself was based on Crytek’s CryEngine). And while you hopefully don’t remember the disappointment that was Crucible, the fact that those games didn’t pan out had an interesting effect. Amazon, which hasn’t always been known as a champion of open source, open-sourced Lumberyard and launched the Open 3D Foundation (under the Linux Foundation banner). Since then, Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, Huawei, Niantic, LightSpeed Studios and, most recently, Epic signed on as Premier foundation members. This week, the foundation, which is now just over a year old, is hosting its 3DCon conference and launching the latest version of the Open 3D Engine. The newest release (22.10) focuses on quality-of-life improvements around performance, workflow and usability. There is a new onboarding experience for new users, for example, and new tools for collaborating with other team members on remote projects, something that has only become more important in this day and age. Teams can now share and download projects by just sharing a URL, for example, and new project templates make it easier for new team members to get started. The developers also launched new features to make setting up and debugging multi-player applications easier, and for artists, it’s now easier to bring their animations in the Open 3D Engine. And for all of those developers building open-world games and experiences, there’s now an improved Terrain system that can scale up to 16x16km worlds. Image Credits: O3D Foundation “With this latest version, our community continues to focus on making it easier for developers, artists and content creators worldwide to build amazing 3D experiences, with an emphasis on performance, core stability and usability enhancements,” said Royal O’Brien, general manager of digital media and games at the Linux Foundation and executive director of O3DF. “It is gratifying to see the results of their hard work as the Open 3D Engine’s maturity accelerates on the path to becoming the go-to choice for creators who want a modular approach to building immersive experiences.” Image Credits: O3D Foundation It is, of course, interesting that the likes of Epic are joining an effort like the Open 3D Engine, which at first may seem like a competitor — and a free one at that. When I talked to O’Brien about this, he noted that this isn’t all that different from other open source projects that bring together competing vendors. Not only are these engines becoming increasingly complex, but a lot of what they offer at this point is also table stakes. Efforts like the Open 3D Foundation allow them to focus on the features that really set them apart. It helps that Lumberyard and now the Open 3D Engine were, from the outset, meant to be modular. But on top of that, the foundation also provides a neutral place for working on shared standards for interoperability to help developers and artists use the tools they want and then bring them into the engine of their choice, no matter whether they are building games or new AR/VR experiences.

NocoDB takes on Airtable with open source no-code platform that connects to production databases • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Airtable, Apps, Baserow, Enterprise, no code, NocoDB, open sourceNo Comments

A new company is setting out to challenge Airtable, the 10-year-old company recently valued at a whopping $11 billion, with a slightly different take on what it means to be a no-code database platform. NocoDB is one of a number of startups to emerge on the scene with plans to usurp the mighty Airtable, with an open source foundation serving as a core selling point. While NocoDB works in a similar fashion in terms of allowing non-technical users to create fresh databases, its twist is that it also works directly on live “production” data that resides in databases such as Postrgres, MySQL, or MariaDB, or data warehouses, and turns them into what it calls a “smart spreadsheet”. This allows anyone to leverage legacy databases without needing IT’s input — no SQL queries or code required. It’s all about enabling business, finance, or even marketing teams to connect to live data and collaborate with developers to build no-code applications. U.K.-based founder and CEO Naveen Rudrappa claims that the core open source project has already been used by more than 2,000 companies including behemoths such as Google, Walmart, American Express, and McAfee. “The adoption we’ve seen has been really unprecedented — we’ve had 7 million Docker downloads within one year of launch and more than 30,000 GitHub stars, putting us amongst the top 350 open source projects in the world,” Rudrappa told ZebethMedia. NocoDB: Grid view Image Credits: NocoDB A little more than a year on from its inception, the company is announcing a sizeable seed funding round from a veritable who’s who from the angel investment world. The funding has in fact dripped in over a couple of tranches since its incorporation in June last year, but in total the round amounts to around $10.5 million, with institutional backers including Decibel, OSS Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Together.fund. The angel side, meanwhile, includes YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley; WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg; RedHat cofounder Bob Young; early Google investor Ram Shriram; and founders from Cloudera, CockroachDB, PipeDream, Talend, AngelList, BrightRoll, and Freshworks. The story so far The genesis of NocoDB can be traced back to 2017, when Rudrappa was working on a related open source database “passion project” under a different name, one that was purely a backend with no user interface at all. The problem he was trying to solve involved creating APIs to access a MySQL database of U.K. real estate data — something that wasn’t easy to achieve. “I realized that the fundamental problem of making a database API-accessible still remained unsolved,” Rudrappa said. “So, I built a prototype, released it on GitHub, and the next morning woke up to see a thousand GitHub stars for my project. The problem was much more widespread than I had imagined and my initial prototype had struck a chord with the users. This hobby project received a quarter of a million downloads, then I decided to team up with a friend and started building NocoDB.” When NocoDB arrived on GitHub last year, Rudrappa said that it garnered more than a million downloads within the first ten weeks. “Live production data stores, like MySQL or Snowflake, are intimidating for business users, or even to developers who aren’t used to working with the backend tech stack,” he said. “But they need access to this data in order to build useful applications quickly. NocoDB makes it possible to connect any organizational data source to the universally well-understood spreadsheet interface, allowing users with zero coding experience to build workflows and automations that work in concert with real business data.” With $10.5 million in the bank, and the support of some of the biggest names from the technology sphere, NocoDB is well-positioned to build out a commercial component to the main open source project. This includes a new premium incarnation that’s currently in private beta, one that allows companies to connect to Oracle Database and Snowflake. “This commercial version is a request from the customer side, as they need a working contract with us when they use the software,” Rudrappa explained. “Enterprise customers need different support, and we want to accommodate that while also balancing the needs of our open source community.” On top of that, NocoDB is also working on a managed and hosted cloud version, replete with enterprise-grade features including connectors, single sign-on (SSO), access control, auditing, and more.