Open source management community unveiled

Open source monitoring tools and management applications will soon enjoy a new home online as commercial vendors and open source supporters unveil a community devoted to the flexible, free IT software, reports Computerworld.

MonitoringForge.org went live in beta last week, and welcomes developers and users of open source network and systems management and monitoring applications to share their tools, experiences and plans for future work.

GroundWork Open Source, a maker of open source applications offered as commercial software, started the online effort earlier this year after realising how many projects specific to management exist.

The London Stock Exchange's (LSE) decision to acquire Millennium IT, its next platform technology supplier, has sparked a war of words about open source versus proprietary software in high demand environments, says ComputerworldUK.

The LSE is currently using a platform that runs on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000 systems, on HP ProLiant servers and within a Cisco network architecture.

But that system, known as TradElect and built by Accenture, will be replaced by an open source-based system.

MySpace will release a technology called Qizmt this week, which it developed in-house, as open source, according to PC World.

The technology mines and crunches massive amounts of data and generates friend recommendations in MySpace's social-networking site.

Qizmt is a distributed computation framework based on the MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets in processor clusters. The company hopes the developer community will be able to benefit from Qizmt, as well as enhance and extend it, says Hala Al-Adwan, MySpace's vice-president of data.