ReadWriteWeb

Providing adequate software and tools for researchers has always been of great importance to organizations, but has often come at a great cost. In an era of constantly evolving technology and rapidly dwindling budgets, my IT team has had to work with a large pool of researchers to provide cost-effective solutions that meet the ever-growing demand for innovation and computing power.

I am an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. The Department is home to award-winning faculty with a wide variety of expertise in fundamental and interdisciplinary research, and over 100 graduate students from all over the world. Keeping the faculty and students ahead of their research is a constantly evolving challenge for my team and I.

Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here.

Mozilla has some big plans up its sleeve in 2012. The non-profit open source foundation is planning some features for its Firefox Web browser and beyond that will require greater access to user data. In a blog post, the organization explains exactly how it intends to use and handle that data. In short, very carefully.

Some of Mozilla's initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.

Google announced yesterday that its layered 3D browser of the human body has become an open-source project. Google Body was built by Google engineers in their "20% time" - the 1/5th of Googlers' time and energy they can devote to creative projects - of which all other human beings are jealous.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

There is a new word making the rounds in technology circles that has caused a stir this week: "clopen." The nature of clopen is that a platform is ostensibly open to be built upon but it must while also creating a profit for the company providing the platform. The clopen argument this week has centered around Android with the fundamental question: How open is Android, really?

Android is open source. Even by the most traditional definitions, the mobile operating system open for developers, manufacturers, carriers, custom ROM builders and hobbyists to build upon. From a consumer perspective, the nature of Android "openness" is cloudy. Is Android "clopen?" Answer for yourself in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich has made its first appearance in Google's fragmentation numbers for the platform. Android 4.0.x is now running on less than 1% of all devices that have accessed the Android Market in the last two weeks, coming in at 0.6% overall.

Meanwhile, Gingerbread continues to climb the charts. Android 2.3.x is now running on 55.5% of all devices, up 4.9% from a month ago. Froyo still commands about a third of the Android landscape, dropping precisely what Gingerbread gained at 4.9%, down to 30.4%. The biggest question for Android heading into the new year is: who gets Ice Cream Sandwich updates and when will the carriers and OEMs push them out?

Ambitious but largely defunded open government data platform Data.gov is now working with counterparts at India's National Informatics Centre to offer an open source body of code known as the Open Government Platform or "Data.gov-in-a-Box."

It's the kind of move that, in theory, the political Left can support because of its impact on transparency and government accountability and the political Right can support because it puts government in a role that emphasizes facilitating innovation and economic development. It sounds like a very smart way to deal with the declining financial support for Data.gov itself. It could be a big win for developers everywhere and for the people who love to use the apps they make.

Netflix has taken the wraps off of its ZooKeeper library and has given some insight to coming open source projects as well. The company announced four projects in its pipeline, and a portal on GitHub for its projects.

Curator is a set of libraries that are supposed to make using Apache ZooKeeper simpler. While ZooKeeper has its own client, Netflix says "using the client is non-trivial and error prone."

Sticking with her original deadline announced last year, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes told a European interoperability standards forum yesterday that a public portal for access to government and public data from across the continent is on track to go online in Spring 2012. Following that, the next stage in Comm. Kroes' agenda includes an ambitious project to launch a community-built, crowd-sourced public data platform for all of Europe.

Kroes told the OpenData Forum in Brussels she expects for a pan-European forum for public data mining to go live no later than 2013. "Will she really be able to pull off all that?" the commissioner asked rhetorically, referring to herself.

This week Zenoss announced ZenPack, a new way to monitor your Open Stack servers. It is a great way to keep track of things in your cloud and is simple to use and quick to install. It is free and open source and can be used to look at real-time server inventories, performance and health stats, as well as what apps you have deployed to the cloud.