ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn reports today on a new open source navigation project launched by European GPS company TomTom that adds additional functionality to navigational devices, regardless of the make or model. The OpenLR project aims to put navigation data on top of a GPS unit's existing database so drivers can access local traffic, weather, and other useful information as they travel.
With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
REvolution Computing offers REvolution R, an enhanced distribution of R, as a free download. It also offers REvolution R Enterprise, a subscription-based version of R aimed at large companies that work with large data sets, and ParallelR (included in the Enterprise edition), which can take advantage of multi-processor systems and clusters for large data crunching tasks. R itself, and REvolution's versions, are being embraced in a number of fields, with a number of innovative new applications arriving.
It’s clear Google and Amazon wouldn’t be where they are today without the use of open source software,” said Stevens. The Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. success stories were also echoed by Aslett, who said both public cloud platforms benefited from low cost licencing and flexibility, as well as the ability to empower their developers. “For Google, it’s about ability to make changes to their operating system without having to ask anybody’s permission or pay for client licence fees,” he said, adding that development times are also speed up in the process.