Development by Davis: “What innovations can change America’s voting rates?” plus 4 more

What innovations can change America’s voting rates?
Is information a competitive differentiater?
OSBC 2012: Advancing Interoperability in the Cloud
OSBC 2012: Advancing Interoperability in the Cloud
OSBC 2012: Advancing Interoperability in the Cloud

What innovations can change America’s voting rates?

Posted: 22 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT

People often ask me about various innovative efforts to change America's voting rates, habits, or options. There is a ton of interesting experimentation happening here, from TurboVote to ElectNext to Americans Elect. I haven't dug in deeply to any of these projects, but it's clear they are offering some new thinking to a deep and important problem.

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Is information a competitive differentiater?

Posted: 22 May 2012 05:04 AM PDT

I started thinking about the value of information here in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held May 21-22. It's the first day of a two-day conference, and some of the leading experts in open source are here presenting, learning, networking and more. During the opening remarks by John Amato, Vice President & Publisher, Computerworld, and Matt Asay, Vice President Business Development, Nodeable, we discovered that about half the attendees are new to the conference, which is great for open source.

The first keynote speaker was Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO, Red Hat. Whitehurst focused his talk on

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OSBC 2012: Advancing Interoperability in the Cloud

Posted: 21 May 2012 12:08 PM PDT

At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today, Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, along with Alan Clark, Director of New Initiatives and Emerging Standards for Open Source at SUSE, announced the release of a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center.

In a blog post, Gupta said the announcement, which was made in collaboration with SUSE, lets this management pack connect the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft's management platform.

"As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console," he said.

Gupta positioned the management pack as one example of the work Microsoft is doing to advance interoperability for private clouds. You can try the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center here.

"On the public cloud front, there's extensive work going on across the company to facilitate interoperability between Microsoft and open source cloud tools and services. One of the most exciting examples of this comes from the SQL Server Team -- the Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure, for which Microsoft released a second preview last month," he said.

This solution for managing "big data," connecting it and turning it into business insight, is a prime example of the type of value customers want to realize as a result of leveraging open source and Microsoft software together, he noted.

You can read his full blog post here.