ownCloud Forked

Frank Karlitschek, the founder of ownCloud, has forked the project and created a new open source project called Nextcloud. Karlitschek joined with Niels Mache, CEO of struktur AG/Spreed, to form a new company with the same name. Mache is making a seven-digit investment in the new company. Both Mache and Karlitschek will serve as the managing directors. Nextcloud is setting up a foundation to manage the project and trademark.

Within 12 hours of the Nextcloud announcement, ownCloud Inc, closed their US offices. ownCloud said in a blog post that the main lenders in the US cancelled their credit, which forced them to close the US office and terminate the contracts of eight employees.

A majority of former ownCloud employees, who quit the company after Karlitschek's departure, have already joined Nextcloud. Karlitschek said Nextcloud welcomes all ex-employees of ownCloud Inc.

Nextcloud said it will honor the existing contracts of those ownCloud customers who want to switch to Nextcloud. Nextcloud will be available in two versions: enterprise and community. The first release of Nextcloud is expected in July. Contributors won't be required to sign a contributor license agreement to contribute to Nextcloud.

HP Enterprise Unveils a Futuristic Computer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is inviting the open source community to collaborate on their ambitious project known as The Machine. Back in 2014, HP introduced the concept of The Machine, which places memory instead of the processor at the core of the computer.

According to HP, "Imagine a computer with hundreds of petabytes of fast memory that remembers everything about your history, helps inform real time situational decisions, and enables you to predict, prevent, and respond to whatever the future brings."

The Machine is based on a new concept that HP calls "Memory-Driven Computing." Memory-driven computing collapses the memory and storage into one vast pool of memory called "universal memory."

Bdale Garbee, veteran Linux developer and HP Fellow, said in an interview that Linux is the primary operating system HP is targeting with The Machine. Teams at HPE are working very closely with the Linux kernel community.

Garbee said that this is the first time a major company has taken a project at such an early stage to the open source community. HPE has released four tools to help the open source community in getting involved with The Machine: Fast optimistic engine for data unification services, 2) fault-tolerant programming model for non-volatile memory, 3) Fabric Attached Memory Emulation, and 4) performance emulation for non-volatile memory bandwidth.

HPE says these tools enable existing communities to capitalize on memory-driven computing in ways that could lead to breakthroughs in machine learning, graph analytics, and event processing.

HPE plans to release their internal research work on The Machine to the open source community.