The Engine Yard OSS Community Grant Program supports developers by giving them the means to attend conferences and speaking opportunities, create documentation, develop marketing campaigns, and more.

"Engine Yard believes passionately in the value of open source software and this program is an example of our commitment to the community. We want to ensure critical open source projects have long-term, healthy lives and OSS contributors can successfully grow their user and contributor bases," Dr. Nic Williams, vice president of technology, said in a prepared statement.

The most recent grant went to Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of Vagrant, a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. Williams says the grant package supplied by Engine Yard will help fund various aspects of Vagrant's development, and receive additional exposure from inclusion in upcoming Engine Yard webinars and blog posts.

Williams requests you email him directly if you want to learn more about the program or are interested in applying for a grant (be sure to include a link to your project). This company is doing a great thing by supporting OSS developers and helping advance project development. If you know of similar programs offered by other tech companies, please share in the comments.

• Mashable's Jolie O'Dell predicts Ruby will get some new tools this year. "The Ruby language is becoming extremely popular in developing consumer-facing web apps, and we’re sure to see some big-name companies release open-source tools and even improvements to the Ruby core — think along the lines of what Facebook did last year with HipHop or Google’s Unladen Swallow project," writes O'Dell. Ruby's popularity among developers has been steadily growing over the last couple of years, as the recent purchase of Ruby application Platform-as-a-service Heroku by Salesforce.com suggests, it's well-respected among businesses as well.

• Katherine Noyes over at PCWorld thinks we'll see an uptick in dual-boot computing devices that include a Linux operating system in the coming year. "[W]e've already seen tablets from the likes of Acer and Augen offering the dual-boot option... Choice is always a good thing, and I believe manufacturers will increasingly recognize that in their operating system decisions," she says. Since Chrome OS will ship on Acer and Samsung netbooks later this year, it's a safe bet some hardware vendors will make the leap to dual-boot devices in order to keep market share.

• Blogger extraordinare Matt Asay says 2011 will be the year more businesses finally realize the value of the public cloud. "In 2011 many more CIOs will jump into private clouds…and will quickly discover that they're going about it all wrong, as Forrester's James Staten speculates. But this is a good thing, he reasons, because " through this failure [CIOs] will learn what it really takes to operate a cloud environment." This, in turn, should lead them toward public cloud providers like Amazon or hosted private cloud providers. Either way, open source wins, because both sets of clouds are largely open source-driven." For companies that can't or won't jump into a public cloud, there's always the community cloud option.

• CMSWire columnist Dee-Ann LeBlanc went straight to the source to learn about what to expect from open source content management systems (CMS) projects -- the vendors themselves. Alfresco says CMSs will support "a greater diversity of content distribution channels, such as consumer-oriented social networks, as more and more businesses express a desire to gain better visibility and 'control' over their respective brand and messaging," while DotNetNuke anticipates a tighter focus on cloud deployments and social media application integration. Check out the post for details on what 23 popular CMS vendors expect to see in 2011.

Have a prediction of your own about the future of open source? Share it in the comments.

According to the Foundation's report, "[T]he survey found that Linux is poised for growth in the coming years; 76.4% of companies are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months. In contrast, only 41.2% of respondents are planning to add Windows servers in the next year, while 43.6% say they will be decreasing or maintaining the number of Windows servers in their organizations over the same time period."

According to analyst firm IDC, Linux servers represent 17.5% of total revenue in the server industry. What accounts for the uptick of interest in Linux? Respondents say they believe Linux is continually improving and companies have much more faith in its technical and security abilities than in the past. In fact, a full 60% of those surveyed plan to use Linux for mission-critical deployments and 66% are choosing the platform for brand-new deployments over Windows or Unix.

One of the biggest hurdles IT departments face when attempting to adopt Linux is resistence from management, however this survey shows CIOs now view Linux as "more strategic to the organization as compared to three years ago." Although cloud computing is all the rage right now, a mere 26% showed any interest in moving to the cloud within the next year. Those that did, however, overwhelmingly selected Linux as their cloud platform of choice.

While the report was sponsored by the Linux Foundation itself, there's no reason to make light of the results or consider them as less vaild than if gathered from an independent research firm. As Computerworld columnist and tech blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols notes, "[U]nlike similar surveys, sponsored by proprietary software companies where you have to dig to find out who paid for the research and who's actually being surveyed, the Linux Foundation comes right out and tells you."  To learn more about the important results of this study, download the full report, "Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users[PDF]" from the Linux Foundation's website.

• AMD announced its intent to contribute engineering resources to the MeeGo project. Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, software development, AMD said the the move will "help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units.”

• Doug Fisher, Intel Vice President, Software and Services Group, General Manager, Systems Software Division, discussed how MeeGo brings strategic freedom to the computing ecosystem, particularly handheld devices. He says the next generation of computing devices "will be built upon a wide range of connected and intelligent devices [and] will enable new experiences that exist in between devices as much as on them." Fisher goes on to suggest that Meego's open OS is the perfect design to enable devices to work together and "support the continuous, connected experiences that define the next era of computing."

• MeeGo Community Manager Dawn Foster took an inside look at the MeeGo community metrics, based on the monthly data she collects on everything from membership numbers and content stats to the type and amount of media coverage the project gets. "The most interesting part of gathering metrics data is looking at the trends in all of these various areas over time, and the growth in the MeeGo community over the first 6 months has been impressive. While the growth is great to see and easy to measure, the really interesting part is in the analysis and looking at the conversations that people are having and the topics that generate the most discussion," says Foster.

Dozens more presentations and Birds of a Feather sessions were held during the event, including an in-depth look at MeeGo's infrastructure, MeeGo security, and how to get started with the MeeGo SDK. Check out the session summaries at the conference's website for a complete overview of all the talks. As a happy surprise, each conference attendee received a free Lenovo Ideapad, courtesy of the Linux Foundation, Nokia, and Intel, giving developers get the opportunity to test their apps on a MeeGo-powered netbook as they build them.

Given how quickly the technology is evolving, expect to see three elements of cloud computing evolve within the next four to five years:

• Federated  - clouds that allow enterprise users to share data across internal and external clouds

• Automated - A way for users to securely move software applications and resources over a network for better data center energy efficiency and workload balancing to better utilize resources

• Client-aware - PC and device-savvy clouds optimize the users online experience by automatically identifying what processes should happen in the cloud in addition to a laptop, smartphone or other device

Watch for new software in the coming months to support these goals, as well as new capabilities built into Intel's Xeon processors.

Open Data Center Alliance

Of course, with emerging cloud computing technology comes the need for industry standards and best practices. Dozens of big-name companies including Lockheed Martin, BMW, and Marriot, form the newly-launched Open Data Center Alliance. Its goal is to develop a roadmap of hardware and software requirements "that lead to more open and interoperable cloud and data center solutions." Intel's role will be primarly in an advisory capacity.

ZDnet's Larry Dignan says, "This Open Data Center Alliance includes 70 companies that represent $50 billion in annual IT spending... That buying power is why this open data center push is interesting. Given the buying clout, vendors will have to play the cloud interoperability game. While it’s unclear how successful this alliance will be it is at least shedding the spotlight on cloud interoperability, a big emerging issue."

The Register's Dan Olds caught up with Red Hat's Cloud Evangelist Gordon Haff to get his thoughts on the practical implications of community clouds and what types of companies are likely to use them. Obviously, security is a chief concern in a group cloud environment so it's probably not right for businesses that manage sensitive information. Haff says they are ideally suited for other types of companies, however.

"Perhaps in the pharma industry there may be some specific set of requirements around testing and compliance, and so forth. They might want to share a cloud among a number of companies but they can't just go out to Amazon. They have some specific requirements," says Haff. He goes on to suggest that the government could use community clouds to manage a chain of inter-agency departments with the same regulations and compliance needs in common.

Olds isn't convinced that businesses will be too quick to jump into a community cloud. "I think this type of public cloud may get some traction, perhaps for government or research organizations; however, I have a hard time seeing competitors sharing computing resources for any workloads that are even vaguely important."

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation says the toolkit's best practices guidebooks and training resources can potentially save companies lots of money, time, and headaches. As a fantastic side benefit, Zemlin says the program "will help spread the use of open source software as it will eliminate the very few [non-compliance] legal cases and most importantly the FUD around legal compliance that some vendors like to spread."

Amanda McPherson, the Foundation's vice president of marketing and developer programs says the program is quickly gaining traction since its August launch. "We've had a very positive response to the program. People are seeking information and support through our free white papers, and our training sessions both in the US and internationally. We've also been connecting developers and companies through the rapid alert system. We feel good that people are making use of the resources and reaching out to us for more help." According to McPherson, feedback from businesses about the program has been quite positive. "Companies tell us the free resources and ability to connect with the right people inside other companies is a huge help [since it] reduces both time and money."

The Foundation plans to continually add more tools and services to the program, including a newly-released checklist that businesses can use as a self-administered test to evaluate their compliance relative to top-tier best compliance practices. "We expect the checklist to be a real star of the program," notes McPherson, "and are looking forward to working with companies on that and offering more training and consulting as needed."

Head over to the Linux Foundation's website get started using the tools and training materials the Open Compliance Program has to offer. Of course, nothing takes the place of legal counsel when it comes to identifying potential issues and pitfalls of open source compliance, but the Foundation has done a great job of putting together a toolkit of best practices that companies can use to get started in the right direction.

Nearly 400 projects in Black Duck's knowledge base are aimed at managing and storing data in the cloud, scaling private and public clouds or provide support integration with cloud services. While not all projects referenced usability in specific cloud environment, among those that did Amazon EC2 and S3 took a sizable lead ahead of Microsoft Azure, Google Apps Engine, and other platforms.

Many of the projects provide solutions for cloud security, privacy and management, but that came as no surprise to the research team. "The reason we thought we’d see those categories high on the list is they are the ones most often cited as the leading issues for cloud." says Vescuso. "The ones we found outside of that scope were more about enabling infrastructure and scalability, such as Eucalyptus, and enabling development, such as deltaCloud."

A 70 percent growth in cloud computing apps doesn't mean there isn't room for more within the ecosytem, however. "Database scalability is still an issue," says Vescuso. "Traditional RDBMSs [relational database management systems] assumed stateless applications that store everything in the database. Scale was achieved by scaling up the DB to bigger hardware, or adding app servers (scaling out). While there are a number of projects focused on addressing the issue of database scalability in the cloud -- by separating data from the application, as in so-called NoSQL solutions such as the Voldemort and Cassandra projects -- this area is still young and unproven."

Image courtesy of Black Duck. Graph published August, 2010.

One of the most talked about news items to come out of IDF was an early peek at Intel's new Sandy Bridge architecture. PC Perspective's Ryan Shrout has a valuable in-depth look at the details of this next-generation Turbo Boost technology from information he gleaned while speaking with some of the engineers behind Sandy Bridge.

One of IDF's primary goals is developer education -- to wit, more than 150 technical sessions provided loads of opportunities for developers to leave with an increased knowledge of everything from new mobile standards to changes in gaming technology. Attendees also got the chance to participate in hands-on labs and interact with panelists during Q & A sessions that covered a wide range of topics including academic research and packet processing on Intel architecture.

All of the IDF keynotes are available online as webcasts, so be sure to check them out. Intel exec Renée James, spoke about the how consumer expectations are changing the way developers need to create their products for maximum adaptation and colleague Justin Rattner elaborated on why contextual user interfaces will be the next wave of technology. Other keynotes focused on performance computing, how Intel Atom processor based SoCs will drive next-generation technology, and what the future holds for Intel at large.

Also worth noting is Intel's green initiative, in evidence throughout the conference. Event attendee Charlene Zvolanek notes, "I can’t congratulate Intel and the IDF team enough for their efforts to green the conference in a variety of ways. With the digital forum guide, the recycled carpet and LED lamps in the keynote hall, the compostable dinnerware, the 100% post-consumer recycled paper in the Pocket Guide, the solar-powered recharging station, and the carbon offsets paid by Intel for the nine-day rental of the Moscone Center West, Intel has shown an ever-increasing commitment to conserving natural resources."

For more webcasts, presentation documentation, and session overviews from this year's conference, head over to the IDF website, or check out the videos on Intel's dedicated user channel.

Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of enterprise collaboration platform vendor Mindtouch, brought the importance of good user documentation front and center in his recent article in Forbes Magazine. He says it's not just big tech companies that need to be mindful of documentation, but everyone that markets a product with an end user in mind.

In a recent interview with me, Fulkerson acknowledged that open source projects don't always focus on documentation as well -- or as often -- as they should. "This is because [FOSS projects] tend to grow more organically and documentation, for those involved in open source projects, is less interesting to invest in than cutting code. However, open source projects were early pioneers in using content strategically. Indeed, open source companies like JBOSS, RedHat and MySQL pioneered using documentation strategically to generate new customers."

Even so, says Fulkerson, FOSS developers must be sure to place a high value on documentation, even if the goal of the project is simply to build an ecosystem around a particular app. "Open source projects that build community are always the winners in their category. It doesn't matter how good the technology is or how well written the code is. The fact is, winners help their users and customers to kick butt with their products, and that's what creates customer evangelists. Documentation facilitates this. Furthermore, documentation increases the projects search engine ranking and makes it more likely that a prospective user adopts the project."

• Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, used her keynote to implore developers to use free software when creating Web services. Peters says the lack of Web services based on free software is troubling -- developers should be "embarrassed" by it and push for change. She also encouraged people who use Web services to be mindful of privacy and data-sharing concerns. "In addition to encouraging developers to build new free software-based Web services, Peters said free desktop software needs to be better integrated with Web services. One challenge is that more developers are building for the Web and could use tools to build desktop apps that work with the Web," writes CIO's Bob Brown.

• Red Hat executive and Linux kernel contributor Matthew Garret led a discussion called Android/Linux: Lessons Learned. He defended Google's decision to partially fork Android's code and leave it out of the kernel for the time being. "He said one major difficulty is that Google’s wave lock code is unique to Android and not a baseline technology that would be used by other mobile platforms. The 'partial forking' is disappointing but much better than not having any open source mobile platform to compete against Apple’s iPhone," writes ZDNet's Paula Rooney.

• The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Open Compliance Program, an initiative designed to help companies comply with open source licensing requirements. With support from big name companies in the software industry like Adobe, IBM, Sony, and Intel, The Linux Foundation put together tools and training materials businesses can use to understand the nuances of open source licenses and make sure they stay within established guidelines for the licenses they choose.

• MeeGo Community Manager Dawn Foster gave an informative presentation about the status of the MeeGo project and its surrounding community. She reviewed the project's progress, including the recent releases of the fully functional netbook code and the limited functionality handset code for developers. Foster says plans for MeeGo's immediate future include taking steps to further unify the community and build a strong ecosystem around the project. For an in-depth look at Foster's presentation, check out the slides [PDF] posted on MeeGo's Web site.

If you're outside of North America, make plans to attend LinuxCon Brazil at the end of this month or LinuxCon Japan in September.

According to Tsur, making open source an integral part of Kaltura's business strategy brings several benefits to the table. " Open source allows us to build an ecosystem of innovation around our platform and business. We can build on and incorporate existing projects, and also include add-ons developed by others to our platform.

"Open source has allowed us to implement a horizontal strategy. Rather than focusing our platform solutions on a particular vertical (e.g. media and entertainment, education, enterprise, government), our openness allowed us and our partners, to easily adapt our core platform services to all of these verticals. This way, we provide solutions to Media companies, universities enterprises and government."

Kaltura had its work cut out for them beyond just creating a good video platform. "The main challenge is that of building a profitable company around free and open software, as well as building a true strong and involved developer community, " says Tsur. The company is meeting those challenges head on by "building an ecosystem of network services on top of our free software that has significant distribution [and] adopting a dual licensing strategy, which allows us to offer a commercial license to our software, with full maintenance and support." The company maintains a strong user community on its Web site and also offers a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) option for customers who prefer not to self-host.

In keeping with its dedication to use open source software, Wikipedia currently uses Kaltura's technology to power its video needs. Universities and government agencies are choosing it as a cost-effective way to produce and distribute video in-house. Whether businesses to use Kaltura's products due to its open source licensing or because it's a less expensive alternative to commercial video platforms, the message is clear. An open source business strategy is worth considering when you're developing products and services for mass appeal.

There were plenty of notable announcements, presentations, and ideas flowing during OSCON:

Hosting provider Rackspace surprised a lot of folks with the release of its Apache 2-licensed cloud platform called OpenStack. Since the project incorporates some of the same technology used by the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform, Rackspace generated a huge amount of buzz across the Internet when the news broke.

Facebook's Senior Open Programs Manager, David Recordon, used his keynote session to give conference-goers a peek under the hood of the infrastructure used at the social networking behemoth. Check out Recordon's presentation slides or watch the video for a better understanding of how the LAMP stack's emerging focus on database innovations are driving data management at Facebook.

Intel's Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist of the Software and Solutions Group gave a terrific keynote about the MeeGo project. Attendees got an inside look at how the development MeeGo 1.1 is coming along and Intel's future plans for the open source mobile operating system. For those who wanted a more technical look at MeeGo, Intel's Senior Principal Engineer Sunil Saxena gave an in-depth presentation that took a look at the whole MeeGo stack from its core operating system and hardware layer to apps and APIs. Check out MeeGo's OSCON wiki page for links to all things MeeGo at the convention.

In light of Web and cloud services, Splunk Community Manager John Mark Walker asked if FOSS is even necessary anymore. In a service world, says Walker, "interface is everything." Even if it's built on free software, users are still at the mercy of the interface -- which is "only as good as its creator." As a result, rules and policies make sense even for free software when it comes to creating solid, reliable Web services. The good news, says Walker, is that effective rules and the sustainable systems that occur as a result "happen because a lot of good people work really hard to make them happen." The FOSS community loves its open data, formats, and initiatives, and with the right guidance, really strong ecosystem can emerge for creating powerful Web services across the Internet.

Aaron Williamson from the Software Freedom Law Center gave an excellent presentation on why Your Smartphone May Not be as Open as You Think. He says that just because a mobile device ships with an open source operating system, patent restrictions and FCC regulations still prevent vendors from creating a truly open phone. To learn more about what Williamson had to say about the issue and what ideas he has for overcoming the challenges open source smartphone vendors face, check out PreCentral.net's man-on-the-ground blog post by OSCON attendee Robert Werlinger.

Highlights and slide decks from many of the presentations are available at the OSCON 2010 Web site, along with dozens of videos and full recaps of all the keynotes. If you missed this year's convention, plan ahead to catch the next one in 2011. There are plenty of open source conferences to attend around the country, but the sheer amount of information and education available at OSCON makes it a don't-miss event.

When the FOSS community rallies behind an idea, it doesn't mess around. Indeed, seed money for the Diaspora project jumped to more than $24,000 in a matter of weeks (the developers say they're not looking for further donations at this time). Although part of the Diaspora team's initial success was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, it also speaks to how quickly the open source community comes together over projects that meet an immediate social need. Businesses and developers alike, take note: the next time you're brainstorming your Next Big Idea, consider what the FOSS community might bring to the table when you need an "all hands on deck" development approach.

There's a slight irony in seeing a community whose very foundation is based on open data sharing come together around a project that's based, in part, on trying to protect the privacy of its users. Perhaps that's why the Diaspora project has the potential to be so successful, however. Created primarily in Ruby, the source code will be available this fall so "anybody will be able to write a plugin to use Diaspora to manage permissions and notifications for any kind of content."

The fundamental issue Facebook users are dealing with is a complete lockout from their personal and private data -- any content you provide Facebook is theirs to do with as they wish. Diaspora returns total control to the user by putting them back in charge of their own data. While Facebook has been busy playing cat-and-mouse with its user base, the open source community has started building a better mousetrap.

Canonical COO Matt Asay says Linux has the opportunity to beat Apple's iPhone as long as developers don't stretch themselves too thin working on various iterations of the mobile platform.

"The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. [...] Meanwhile, Intel and Nokia have fused together their Moblin and Maemo projects under the MeeGo brand, while Samsung backs Bada and Google stands atop the heap with Android.

"To beat Apple, the industry needs to collaborate, even as it has done in servers to fix the Unix mess and meet the growing Microsoft Windows threat."

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, has a slightly different take on the matter. He acknowledges that the application ecosystem is fragmented but says the real focal point is what's going on with the core libraries common to most forms of mobile Linux; namely, code contributions swim upstream to strengthen the overall code base.

"Linux distributions are... unified at the core library level. In addition to the kernel, you have projects like X.org, glibc, gstreamer, Gnome, QT, webkit, CUPS, clutter, etc. These are all example of core libraries that generally are included in almost every variant of mobile Linux; Chrome, Android, MeeGo, WebOS, LiMo, etc. They all use these same “base” components. In the MeeGo project, for example, the development philosophy echos this with an 'upstream first' mantra. Most of the actual coding for MeeGo or many of these other Linux distributions takes place upstream. That means that when Meego contributes upstream, all downstream distributions benefit. This is the same in the server and desktop market, and why it’s so important for distributions to focus their development upstream."

The issue is further complicated by a lack of a common API and user interface that leave a lot to be desired. The real question becomes at what point should the community pool work and resources to reach a common goal. Asay says it begins at the distribution level, however that means stripping away each distro's uniqueness for the sake of homogeny. Zemlin, on the other hand, believes the real unity comes from upstream collaboration.

Mobile devices aren't going away anytime soon, and Linux-based operating systems are clearly gaining a foothold within the mobile developer community. Whether Linux finds it strength in collaboration or compartmentalized development, it's still poised to emerge as a leader -- perhaps the leader -- in mobile computing.