PORTLAND, Ore. — My colleague Christine Hall beat me to the punch this morning about Capital One’s announcement on their open source development tool, but IBM and Hitachi also both made a big splash at OSCON today.
“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.
The project is called developerWorks Open, a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. Developers can download the code, but also access various items like blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.
Who would ever think that Capital One, the what’s-in-your-wallet folks, would want to get serious about becoming an open source software developer? After all, it’s a banking institution, and while it’s not hard to imagine a bank would be developing some back end tools to be used in-house or by its clients, it’s not expected that it would spend big bucks publicizing these tools at OSCON.
The trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization 
MS Writes a Check: Well, this was probably inevitable. With a generous donation, Microsoft has become a gold contributor to the OpenBSD project — the first gold contributor — in an effort to get OpenBSD’s help in porting OpenSSH to Windows. This comes from a 
Apple? So long as it continues to be an overpriced walled garden, it’s not likely to pose much of a threat. It’ll always be held in disdain by free tech folks, but always in the number two position because it’s easily ignored.
Red Hat, Samsung Team Up: While there has been a lot of oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over what’s been coming out of the