Open source news for your reading pleasure.

August 23 - 29, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the most popular cloud projects of 2014, how open source aids the Okavanga wildlife project, Walmart's investment in open source, and more!

Most popular open source cloud projects of 2014

At ZDNet this week, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols provides us with the numbers on the most popular open source cloud projects for 2014. Vaughan-Nichols article is based on a survey by the Linux Foundation. The survey found OpenStack to be the most popular overall project. Interesting fact in the article: Docker is number two on the list. As Vaughan-Nichols writes, "to go from nowhere to the second most popular project in 12 months? That's amazing and speaks to its rockstar rise in popularity."

Open source #Okavango14: The heartbeat of the delta

The African wilderness, elephants, open source, and Raspberry Pi? Read on National Geographic how engineer Shah Selbe puts open source and the Raspberry Pi to use in the Okavango Wildlife Project. With the Raspberry Pi, they “measure the heartbeat of the delta.” Data such as temperature, pH, conductivity, and more are sampled and gathered, and then sent to the Okavanga website.

Walmart's investment in open source isn't cheap

Simon Phipps writes at InfoWorld about the investment in open source by Walmart and how it wasn't cheap. Phipps raises a few interesting questions in his article, like why would Walmart even bother to use open source? Walmart's work on the Hapi.js, a Node.js framework, is used as an example. He describes how Walmart put metrics in place to measure their return on investment. Also, how open development brings Walmart other tangible benefits like thorough testing of new features.

Open source survey tool to collect student feedback on teaching and learning

Over at TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden covers the announcement of a partnership between Panorama Education and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to launch the Panorama open source student survey. From the Panorama Educaiton blog: "Feedback gathered through the Panorama Student Survey will help educators work toward a future where every student has great teachers, great schools, and a great education. The Panorama Student Survey provides teachers and principals with feedback about how students see their classes."

Why we need an open source movement for the web

At TechRepublic, Matt Asay makes a great case about the need for an open source movement for the web. In his article, he wonders if it's possible to make the web truly as open as open source is today. According to
Asay, this depends on developers. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter "compete for developer interest in their platforms, so they're going to have to compete on openness."

In other news

• Arduino as a programmable logic controller (PLC)
• Mozilla launches £20 Firefox OS Smartphone in India
• U.S. military to launch an open source academy

A big thanks, as always, to staff members Jen Wike and Michael Harrison, and moderators Scott Nesbitt and Joshua Holm for their help this week.