Orchestrate all the Things

Trying to capture the value open source software generates can be a bit chaotic. The CHAOSS project may lend a helping hand.

By now, the tension between commercial interests and open source projects is well known. 

Trying to balance building a sustainable business and a community around open source software, in a cloud-first world is not the easiest thing in the world.

In the latest episodes of a long-winding saga, two more commercial open source vendors, Elastic and Grafana, changed their licenses.

Their rationale was clearly communicated as trying to protect the business they have built around the respective open source projects from cloud vendors that they feel compete unfairly with them, without contributing as much as they do.

Interestingly, all parties involved refer to "the community" as being front and center in what they do. While obviously important, however, what constitutes an open source community, how it's faring, and what value it generates all seem rather vaguely defined.

The people working on the CHAOSS project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation want to change that. We caught up with Georg J.P. Link, CHAOSS project co-founder, to find out more.

Article published on ZDNet

Open-source stacks enabled software to eat the world. Some of the most innovative companies in the world are working on building an open-source stack for AI.

Dan Jeffries was there when the LAMP stack enabled software to eat the world. Perhaps you don’t know, or remember, what the LAMP stack is, but it's actually pretty important.

LAMP is an acronym made out of the initials of key open-source technologies used in software development - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. These technologies were hotly debated back in the day. Today, they are so successful that the LAMP stack has become ubiquitous, invisible, and boring.

AI, on the other hand, is a hot topic today. Just like the LAMP stack turned software development into a commodity and made it a bit boring (especially if you're not a professional software engineer), an AI stack should turn AI into a commodity - and make it a bit boring, except maybe for data engineers. This is what Dan Jeffries is out to do with the AI Infrastructure Alliance (AIIA).

Article published on VentureBeat.

A new whitepaper just released by leading blockchain oracle service Chainlink lays the foundation for new capabilities for application and smart contract developers.

Chainlink provides an oracle service, enabling smart contracts to interoperate with the world. Today, Chainlink released a whitepaper outlining what they dub Chainlink 2.0. We connected with Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov to discuss what this means.

Article published on ZDNet

Google uses machine learning and graphs to deliver search results. Most search engines do not. Weaviate wants to change that.

Bob van Luijt's career in technology started at age 15, building web sites to help people sell toothbrushes online. Not many 15 year-olds do that today, and fewer still did it then. Apparently that gave van Luijt enough of a head start to arrive at the confluence of technology trends today.

Van Luijt went on to study arts, but ended up working full time in technology anyway. In 2015, when Google introduced its RankBrain Algorithm, the quality of search results jumped up. It was a watershed moment, as it introduced machine learning in search.

A few people noticed, including van Luijt, who saw a business opportunity, and decided to bring this to the masses.

Article published on ZDNet

GraphQL was never conceived as a query language for databases. Yet, it's increasingly being used for this purpose. Here's why, and how.

Manish Jain and Josh McKenzie are both engineer rock stars who wear many hats. They also have something else in common: they are both avid GraphQL users and builders, despite getting there from different start points.

Article published on ZDNet

What do you get when you juxtapose two of the hottest domains today - AI and healthcare? A peek into the future, potentially.

In 2020, few things went well and saw growth. Artificial intelligence was one of them, and healthcare was another one. Artificial intelligence remained on a steady course of growth and further exploration -- perhaps because of the Covid-19 crisis. Healthcare was a big area for AI investment.

Today, the results of a new survey focusing precisely on the adoption of AI in healthcare are being unveiled. We caught up with 2 of its architects: Gradient Flow Principal Ben Lorica, and John Snow Labs CTO David Talby, to discuss findings and the state of AI in healthcare.

Article published on ZDNet.

In 2014, IOTA set out to offer an alternative to the key issues with blockchain: Scalability and transaction fees. Somewhere along the way, things went wrong. Not everything is lost, however, and IOTA is looking to regain momentum.

IOTA's main premise, namely solving the issues around blockchain by introducing a different data structure, remains. IOTA, like blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, is a distributed ledger. Unlike those, however, the data structure it uses is a directed acyclic graph, called the Tangle.

We discuss with IOTA Foundation Co-founder and CEO, Dominik Schiener, on what IOTA got wrong, what it got right, and what is being done to build on what it got right and fix what it got wrong. 

Starting with the release of a new wallet, IOTA has been reinvented and rewritten from the ground up over the last one and a half years. This new phase of the project is called Chrysalis, introducing a network upgrade. It promises a truly decentralized solution with high throughput and no transaction fees, oracles, and smart contracts.

Article published on ZDNet

Machine learning operations, or MLOps, is the art and science of taking machine learning models from the data science lab to production.

It's been a hot topic for the last couple of years, and for good reason. Going from innovation to scalability and repeatability are the hallmarks of generating business value, and MLOps represents precisely that for machine learning.

Apache TVM has become a de facto standard in MLOps, and OctoML is the company gearing its commercialization and scale up. 

As OctoML secured a $28 million Series B funding round, we caught up with its CEO and co-founder Luis Ceze to discuss TVM, OctoML, and MLOps.

Article published on ZDNet

Another day, another funding round in the graph market

Katana Graph, a high-performance scale-out graph processing, AI and analytics company, announced a $28.5 million Series A financing round led by Intel Capital.

We discuss with Keshav Pingali, Katana Graph CEO and co-founder, on the company's background, technology, and prospects

Article published on ZDNet

The largest funding round to date in the graph market is good news not just for TigerGraph, but for the market at large.

We review TigerGraph's progress and the market landscape with TigerGraph CEO Yu Xu and COO Todd Blaschka

Article published on ZDNet