Mavenir and Red Hat team up to transform mobile network infrastructures
Mavenir has announced a strategic collaboration with Red Hat to certify
Mavenir applications for mobile networks with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, creating solutions and platforms to transform the mobile infrastructure towards the new future of containers and 5G. The intent is to develop common solution blueprints for transformation to 5G for Mavenir’s 5G Core, vRAN and IMS workloads.
Pardeep Kohli, president and CEO of Mavenir, said, “We are proud to work with a leading company like Red Hat to certify our workloads and to continue to demonstrate the capabilities of Mavenir cloud-native software. We are looking forward to collaborating and demonstrating our agility together to deliver highquality software for our customers, boosting the 5G cloud-native ecosystem.”
Mavenir and Red Hat believe that the future of mobile communications is built on the open hybrid cloud, Linux containers and cloud-native microservices. This will give both communications service providers and enterprises the ability to implement a variety of 5G services, like network slicing and edge computing, in an agile and automated way.
Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat, said, “Modern networks that deliver the agility and flexibility customers require are rooted in open source technologies, including Kubernetes and containers. This is where Red Hat is an industry leader, and we are pleased to collaborate with Mavenir to certify its workload and deliver solutions that ease deployment on mobile networks.
Red Hat OpenShift can help the telecommunications industry deliver 5G services, such as massive machine-type communications and ultra-reliable low latency communications with greater agility and automation, across public, private or hybrid clouds.”
KITE releases FOSS based operating system
The Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) has released a new, customised free and open source software (FOSS) based operating system called KITE GNU-Linux Lite 2020. It will feature on the student laptops being provided as part of the Vidyashree scheme by the state government.
The OS is based on the Ubuntu free software platform and comes preloaded with software that ranges from office packages, language input tools, database applications, DTP-graphics image editing software, sound recording and video editing packages, programming IDEs (integrated development environment), and scratch visual programming. It also has utility packages such as gImage Reader that provide image-to-text conversion, as well as a vast collection of Malayalam Unicode fonts and a dedicated English-Malayalam dictionary.
The installation assistance will be arranged through the Little KITEs student club units in schools. There is an option of using the Lite version software through a pen drive without the need for actual installation.
Yugabyte raises US$ 48 million in funding
Yugabyte has announced a US$ 48 million funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation by Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. It comes on the heels of a US$ 30 million capital raise announced in June 2020. The round brings Yugabyte’s total funding to US$ 103 million.
The company said that the funding will be used to expand Yugabyte’s R&D, sales and customer functions in the EMEA and APAC markets. To support its aggressive expansion plans, Yugabyte will double its headcount in 2021.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder and president of Yugabyte, said, “Today’s business environment demands flexibility and elasticity from database solutions, and distributed SQL is now critical for any organisation where developer productivity and application uptime are top priorities. YugabyteDB makes something as fundamental and featurerich as PostgreSQL truly cloud native, resilient, elastic, and distributed.
With companies of all kinds accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, technologies that help them accelerate, like YugabyteDB, are in high demand. This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets.”
With the new infusion of capital, Yugabyte is building its engineering, DevOps and support staff in India, Russia and Canada. It recently acquired India-based Falarica.io to accelerate its development and recruiting efforts in the APAC region. It is also expanding its sales teams in EMEA and APAC because of strong demand for its open source distributed SQL database, and related products and services.
The funding will also be used to further accelerate enterprise adoption of Yugabyte’s commercial products. Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure, and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service currently available on AWS and Google Cloud, have seen broad adoption in the past 12 months, as per the company. Yugabyte also recently announced YugabyteDB 2.4, a major update including hardened enterprise-grade security features, enhanced multi-region deployment capabilities and significant performance improvements.
There was greater open source activity in 2020: DigitalOcean Survey
While overall participation in open source was down in 2020, 63 per cent of those who actively participated reported an increase in their activity as per a DigitalOcean Survey. According to the respondents, the increase can be attributed to three factors. Twenty-nine per cent of the respondents had ‘more free time’, 28 per cent wanted to ‘use the time to learn’, and 15 per cent were ‘adamant about contributing to a cause they cared about’.
Of the more than 9,500 developers surveyed, the report focused on the 4,440 responses of those who actively participated in open source throughout 2020. The survey revealed the role that open source played in the lives of its members in what was a year unlike any other, and explored whether the core tenets of open source – ‘free’ and ‘open’ – still hold today.
Raman Sharma, VP product and programs marketing, DigitalOcean, said, “There’s no denying that technology played a major role in 2020. However, what we found most inspiring was how the individuals and community behind the code rose to the occasion. Our survey showed that developers dug deeper into the open source community, participating more actively and
contributing to the causes that mattered to them most. Many also questioned the traditions of the past in favour of a more ethically accountable and economically sound ecosystem. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for the community and its participants.”
Respondents reported an increased focus on mental health, inclusivity, networking to help others find new jobs, and mentoring to help others learn. Twenty-nine per cent are helping community members learn and develop their skills, and 17 per cent are contributing to mission-oriented projects, such as those focused on pandemic relief or social issues.
The report added that 59 per cent of respondents believe open source is inclusive to people of all demographics, experience levels, and locations. Respondents who are women, non-binary, or caregivers reported lower levels of inclusivity. Sixty-two per cent of men agree or strongly agree that the community is inclusive, while only 46 per cent of women and 42 per cent of non-binary respondents feel that way.
Instaclustr acquires credativ to expand open source data-layer services
Instaclustr has announced that it has acquired Germany- and US-based credativ. credativ provides a comprehensive suite of technical expertise, services, and support to ensure successful implementation, operation, and optimisation of key open source data-layer technologies for business applications. In particular, credativ provides expertise and support for relational database PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Debian, and other solutions critical to a modern enterprise infrastructure.
It said, “credativ adds to Instaclustr’s growing platform of open source software and services, which enable its 500+ customers across a wide range of industries to plan, build, and operate global-scale applications and solutions using the world’s leading open source technologies in their 100 per cent open source versions.”
Peter Lilley, CEO of Instaclustr, said, “credativ brings a potent combination of particularly strong technical expertise across key open source data-layer solutions, and proven experience leading enterprises through future-proof implementations and digital transformations using those technologies. We’re incredibly excited to welcome credativ to our team and look forward to
reaching more businesses with an ever-expanding suite of open source services and solutions.”
Audacity 3.0.0 released
After fixing over 160 bugs that had been accumulating over the years, Audacity 3.0.0 is a result of quite a staggering amount of work. The majority of these bugs were minor problems, and were easily worked around. Some, though, were really juicy high priority bugs that would have mattered a lot to the people affected by them.
Audacity 3.0.0 is a major update on the previous Audacity 2.4.2. It introduces a new file format in which the Audacity projects are saved. Previously, the saved projects had a large number of small files, with an ‘.aup’ file to coordinate them. This way of doing things is sometimes called ‘pile of files’ storage. The problem, which happened all too often, was that
data files and .aup file parted ways. Users quite reasonably expected the .aup file to contain the entire project. The new .aup3 file does contain the data as well. The open source database, SQLite3, is now being used to store everything in one .aup3 file.
Importantly, note that you can open your older .aup projects in Audacity 3.0.0, where they will be converted to the new .aup3 format.
D-Link joins the Open Invention Network community
D-Link has become an Open Invention Network (OIN) community member to protect open source software against patent risks and promote open collaboration and innovation.
D-Link Corporation announced it has become a licensee and community member of OIN, the largest patent non-aggression community. As a global leader in networking and connectivity solutions for consumers, enterprises, and service providers, D-Link recognises the benefits and values of supporting the development of open source software (OSS).
“More than 70 per cent of D-Link’s networking and communication solutions have implemented open source software since the beginning phase of research and development,” explained Mark Chen, president of D-Link. “We have and will continue to advocate for OSS and patent non-aggression, and we look forward to making our contributions to the OIN community to encourage innovation,” he added.
“We are pleased D-Link is employing open source code in its products and welcome its commitment to patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open source technologies required under the OIN licence. The diffusion of a common set of values in terms of patent risk mitigation, coupled with more broad-based adoption of rigorous compliance management processes, creates a context for IP governance that OIN encourages among all its community members,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network.
Akash MAINNET 2, the first decentralised open source cloud, launched successfully
Akash Network, a project out of Overclock Labs, has confirmed the successful launch of Akash MAINNET 2, which it says is the first open source cloud and the only viable decentralised cloud alternative to centralised cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Akash MAINNET 2 empowers developers to break free from the limitations of traditional cloud infrastructure, and accelerates growth and scale in the blockchain ecosystem by enabling developers and companies to decentralise their cloud infrastructure, deploying applications faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost.
“With the ongoing pandemic, we’re seeing more of people’s lives and work moving to the cloud. In the US$ 370+ billion cloud computing market, MAINNET 2 provides a decentralised, faster, more efficient, and lower cost option in the market,” said Greg Osuri, CEO of Akash Network. “Akash MAINNET 2 propels our vision to enable high-growth blockchain companies and developers a viable alternative to centralised cloud services,” he added.
“Having previously worked with product engineering--both open source and proprietary, I’ve experienced first-hand the constraints of centralised cloud services. I’m excited to bring MAINNET 2 to market with a Uniswap-style experience to cloud deployments in a costefficient, permissionless, censorship-resistant, and non-custodial way,” said Adam Bozanich, CTO of Akash Network.
Akash Network is a proof-of-stake chain, built on Cosmos
Hub, which leverages Akash Token (AKT), a native utility token, to govern and secure the blockchain, and provide a store and exchange of value.