Nasa, Rackspace partner for platform development

Nasa and Rackspace have joined forces to open source a new platform for building so-called infrastructure clouds, states Channel Register.

Known as OpenStack, the platform is available under an Apache licence, and when completed - possibly by the end of the year - Nasa and Rackspace will ditch their current infrastructure cloud platforms, which do not scale as they would like.

Nasa's Nebula infrastructure cloud is installed at Nasa's Ames Research Centre and is in the process of being and extended to the Goddard Spaceflight Centre outside of Washington, DC.

Today's commercial-grade programming languages - C++ and Java, in particular - are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, said Google's distinguished engineer Rob Pike in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, last week, reports PC World.

Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon. He detailed the shortcomings of C++ languages as a way of describing the goals that he and other Google engineers have for a new programming language they developed, called Go.

"How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry?" he asked. This sort of programming "is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler," he said.

Several major IT vendors, including Dell, HP, Citrix and Rackspace Hosting gathered at Oscon this week to deliver a host of open source-related announcements to the ever growing open-source market, says Channel Insider.

While open source initiatives have always enjoyed a following despite scepticism and obstacles, this week's O'Reilly Open Source Convention points to a growing momentum around the movement.

A decade ago, there were big question marks around how open source - in particular, Linux - would fit into business and consumer markets, but those question marks have mostly vanished to show a clear market for open source solutions, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.