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The overarching goal for both CloudStack and OpenStack is logical cloud-layer management with plenty of ways to control various workloads. Here's a comparison of the two, which ideally gives you enough data to make your own informed decision.

Are you on the fence about MySQL versus other open-source databases? Sometimes it helps to have two tech-savvy experts take opposite sides of an issue to duke it out. (I like to think of these as, "Jane, you ignorant slut!" articles.) Then you can make your own decision about the right choice for your own circumstances.

In this new age of software-centric everything, Linux provides the stability of a proprietary system without all the added-on licensing costs that tend to pile up quickly. There are still some challenges to open-source networking equipment, but the cost savings they deliver will likely overcome all obstacles.

The PC solution for the CPU performance wall was to throw more cores at it. That’s not necessarily the best way to improve mobile app performance.

At the Google I/O Conference, the company announced new APIs that every developer should know about – especially those who care about location services, cloud messaging and Bluetooth. Rob Pegoraro summarizes the news.

At some point, you will hire junior team members. It makes sense to help those newbies become productive and happy as quickly as possible, for your own benefit as well as theirs. Here’s a few practices that may reduce their stress and improve your train-the-new-hire effectiveness.

Have you gotten frustrated with Puppet? Corey Quinn offers an impassioned argument for his favorite open source alternative.

In the software ecology, a special type of evangelist works with organizations that are open to incorporating open source into their technology infrastructure. These “integrators” (sometimes called value-added resellers or just computer consultants) can encourage a business to adopt software because the integrator is a trusted outside party without a sales agenda. If you capture the integrators and keep them interested and dedicated, the growth of your project is guaranteed.

We’ve all heard about flexible displays coming…coming…coming—but where are they? Rollable and foldable displays could create more possibilities for developers, who could create software to take advantage of dynamically reconfigurable screens. Do technical hurdles make these devices a mirage, or are they really on the horizon, and if so, what’s the ETA? Here’s a (flexible) look into the future.

Open source is all fine and dandy, but before throwing yourself – and untold lines of code – into a project, make sure you understand exactly what’s going to happen to your code’s copyrights. And to your career.

Want to tweak your code on the go from the comfort of your Android handheld? We round up seven affordable Android code editors and viewers – free is affordable, right? – that can help you with HTML or other coding on an Android tablet or other device.

Imagine There’s no IDEs. It’s Difficult if You Try.

There was a time when programs were written in text editors. And when competition between C++ vendors was actually fierce. Step into the time travel machine with us in The History of Visual Development Environments as we revisit the evolution and impact of the visual development metaphor.

Most open source developers like to think about the quality of the software they build, but the quality of the documentation is often forgotten. Nobody talks about how great a project’s docs are, and yet documentation has a direct impact on your project’s success. Without good documentation, people either do not use your project, or they do not enjoy using it. Happy users are the ones who spread the news about your project – which they do only after they understand how it works, which they learn from the software’s documentation.

For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits — Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others — on which so many graphical applications already depend?

Researchers find that each graphic processing unit has a unique identifier that could be tied to a person or PC. This has potential upsides for security and authentication… and downsides.

The Twitter Tweet's Tale: At 2.8 billion tweets per day, Twitter handles a lot of data very, very quickly. And they accomplish it largely with Linux and open source software.

They're not calling it a fork, but the W3C and the WHATWG are taking separate paths to finalizing HTML5.

Sure, you can use any of the fancy graphical tools for updating Linux or for adding new programs to the open source OS. But sometimes it's faster and more efficient to use brute force and a command line. For those days, you need to know these shell commands update and add programs to your Linux system. Behold.. the command line!

True, you don't need to know Linux shell commands these days; you can get along just fine with a GUI interface. But the command-line tools can still come in darned handy sometimes. Here’s the commands with which Linux desktop users should be most familiar, and guidelines about when to use them.

Whether you rely on Microsoft Windows, Linux, or other operating systems, system log managers can digest system reports and make them understandable and optionally actionable. Two examples are shown of syslog managers, how they work, and why they can be invaluable.