said by Rik Myslewski :

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Skype for Linux Set for Open Source

Skype for Linux will be open sourced at some point in "the nearest future."

Word of the open sourcing first arrived from French blogger Olivier Faurax, and it's now been confirmed by Skype itself.

In a back-and-forth to Skype Customer Support about the possibility of a Skype-supporting RPM package manager for the Mandriva distro becoming available, Faurax was told: "We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community."

When Faurax asked for clarification of that assertion, customer-support minion "Joerg" affirmed the statement, saying: "Yes, indeed, the Linux Skype version will become open source in the nearest future."

When The Reg asked Skype about this report, a spokeswoman confirmed that open-sourcing is in the cards. "We realize the potential of the open source community," she wrote in an email, "and believe that making Skype for Linux an open source application will help to speed up its development and enhance its compatibility with various Linux distributives."

However, she wouldn't provide a more-specific definition of "the nearest future," saying only: "While it is our goal is to make Skype for Linux source code available to the community in the nearest future, we are not at a point to disclose exact release date yet."

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said by Gavin Clarke :

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Virgin America dumps servers, flies for the clouds
Open-source payload

"Because we are such a tech heavy company, we have to keep our eyes on the ball," Simhambhatla [Ravi Simhambhatla, Virgin CIO] said. "We are consciously pushing ourselves to implement technologies that bring value our guests. That's the biggest challenge because the entire landscape is changing."

Faced with little budget, Simhambhatla picked open source to get things running. He built the web site on MySQL, Red Hat, Apache, Tomcat and UltraMonkey. The email system went Postfix for the MTA, with ClamAV with Amavisd-new, spamassassin, and Maia Mailguard for the anti-virus and anti-spam defenses. The VPN server is OpenVPN integrated with Microsoft's Active Directory, document management comes courtesy of Knowledge Tree DMS and issue tracking is from Scarab.

And there were no support contacts. Even today, Virgin's kept things light, with just two support agreements for its open source - for Red Hat and MySQL.

Simhambhatla - who joined Virgin from outside the travel industry - faced skepticism from colleagues who'd been recruited from competing airlines, with IT budgets of billions of dollars spent on products and services from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

"One of my biggest challenges was being able to convince my peers, seniors and executives that open source was the right way to go, not because it was great but the right way to go because it was technologically superior. All these guys come form other airlines where IT has $10m budgets, but my challenge was to show I could deliver the same and better for a fraction less," he said.

Open source proved itself, however, and Simhambhatla notes there's never been a single issue. Open-source proved itself reliable, overcoming early skepticism.

Today, that open-source website, Virgin's financials, its frequent flyer club, the email system, and a host of servers - specific to the airline sector plus more bread-and-butter business systems - live on 100 massive servers at Virgin's Burlingame, California, head office. The typical box is a one-, two- or four-U unit quad-core 4Gb machine with a handful of 32Gb machines.

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said by Cade Metz :

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Yahoo! open sources uber web server
'400-terabytes-a-day' Traffic Server lands at Apache

Yahoo! has open sourced the back-end software platform that underpins the company's webmail client and countless other applications offered up across its sweeping web portal.

Known as Traffic Server, the platform handles general edge caching, edge processing, and load balancing at Yahoo!, but it's also used to manage traffic on the company's internal storage and server-virtualization services.

"It's used at the edge, but it also gets used almost like an application server," Chuck Neerdaels, Yahoo! vp of content storage, delivery, and edge, tells The Reg. It serves up the latest version of Yahoo! Mail, for instance, which the company calls "Candy Gram."

Acquired with Yahoo!'s purchase of Inktomi, Traffic Server has been in active use at the two companies for the past eight years. According to Yahoo!, it now handles 30,000 requests per second, serving 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data a day.

"It is a very mature, very reliable piece of technology," says Shelton Shugar, Yahoo!'s senior vp of cloud computing. "In some form, it supports more than half of Yahoo!'s traffic."

The company donated a version of the platform to The Apache Software Foundation last week through the Apache Incubator program. "This is part of our overhaul strategy to open source cloud services that are mature and not laden with Yahoo!-specific stuff that wouldn't make sense for open source," says Shugar.

In June, the company open sourced its internal Hadoop distro, an internet-scale distributed data-crunching platform based the Apache project of the same name.

Neerdaels says Traffic Server was originally designed as a proxy cache. But it's Yahoo!'s go-to tool for http session management, and it includes an API for tweaking content all the way down at the protocol level. "You can poke around with various headers and inject content and direct client requests to different backends, all through a relatively clean API," he says.

Neerdaels and Shuger also describe Traffic Server as an "extensible framework" that lets you tweak the architecture according to the task at hand. And, according to the company, it suits web operations both large and small. "It's simple enough for a small operation to pick it up quickly," says Neerdaels. "But the big players can pick it up and it will scale to meet their needs pretty impressively."

Those 400 terabytes are served up from between 100 and 150 "commodity" machines.

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