ReadWriteWeb

Despite Amazon's leadership and market share in cloud computing, many in the industry have been reluctant to crown Amazon S3's API as the standard, arguing it's too early and too vendor-specific.

And while the former may still be true, the latter could be addressed with yesterday's announcement by Red Hat that the company is open-sourcing its Deltacloud API. More importantly, perhaps, Red Hat has contributed Deltacloud to the Apache Software Foundation where it is currently an incubator project. This moves the API out of the control of a single vendor and under the supervision of an external governing body.

The back-to-school season marks the end of a number of summer camps and summer programs, including the close of Google's Summer of Code which officially wraps up today.

Now in its sixth year, Google Summer of Code gives students the opportunity to spend three months coding for various open source projects. 1026 students participated this year, and historically, the program has brought together over 3,400 students with over 200 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

A mobile application which connects Android phone owners to their representatives in the U.S. Congress has just been released by the non-profit, non-partisan organization Sunlight Labs, a group dedicated to government transparency. After months of public beta testing, the newly finished application is now a comprehensive toolset that helps you stay on top of congressional activity, voting records, new bills and laws, and more. It even provides one-touch access to your Congressional representatives, allowing to you to call their office directly from within the application, watch their YouTube videos or read their latest updates on the microblogging social network, Twitter.

I spent much of the week at OSCON, which served in part as a very visual reminder for something that is always on the back of my mind: the absence of women in tech. While women make up 25% of those who work in the tech industry, they comprise only 1% of those in open source. And wandering around the halls of the Portland Convention Center with thousands of men and a handful of women, I was both frustrated and depressed by the statistic and its reality.

Want to turn your website into a storm of real-time user activity? Another way to do so has just arrived. The real-time web framework called Tornado, which Facebook open sourced last Fall, has just released version 1.0.

Tornado is a real-time web server built in Python that supports tens of thousands of continuous connections and thus the long-polling method of real-time data delivery. It is the core of FriendFeed, a technically innovative service built by two ex-Googlers and leaders in the real-time web community, which was acquired by Facebook in August, 2009. Built largely by the man who is now CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor, this first version of Tornado was taken across the finish line by another heavy hitter: Ben Darnell of Thing Labs.

Since the announcement of OpenStack crossed the wire on Monday, much of the emphasis has been on Rackspace's decision to open source their code and what this might mean in terms of the other major (proprietary) cloud players. But there are 25 companies who've signed on to the OpenStack organization and the benefit of the open source project will be far-reaching beyond just the cloud service providers.

Portland, Oregon-based Puppet Labs, commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announced today that it has secured a $5 million Series B funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners also contributed, bringing Puppet Labs' total funding to date to over $7 million.

This round of funding will help the company build its engineering team and build on its growth in the enterprise.

Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called "Open@Adobe."

"Open@Adobe is a site aggregating Adobe's openness programs, which includes source code hosting, such as the Adobe® Flex framework, and contributions from Adobe to standards organizations, as well as specifications."

AOL's MapQuest announced today that it is launching an open-source mapping initiative, beginning with the U.K. and then heading to the United States. The project, available now at open.mapquest.co.uk, uses the new modern design and layout for MapQuest revealed last week in beta format. However, the data on the site comes from the OpenStreetMap community, an ongoing effort to create free and editable maps worldwide.

Along with the launch of "MapQuest Open," as the project is called, AOL also announced a $1 million OpenStreetMap investment fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the U.S. "MapQuest is the first large-scale mapping site to embrace the open-source community," said Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local and Mapping.

The argument over the utility of open source has one more voter in the yes camp. This time, it's the Journal Register Company, a U.S. newspaper chain with 170 publications.

Calling it the Ben Franklin Project, the company tried open source for a month. Things went so well it decided to make it permanent and company-wide for its 18 daily newspapers and their websites.