links for 2008-09-17

"IBM plans to collaborate with government agencies, businesses, universities, and other research institutions, and the venture capital community on future Center for Social Software projects. Partners can send employees to the facility to work with IBM's researchers on anything from internal networks at businesses to social search and discovery or cloud computing."

"VMware CEO Paul Maritz said the company has considered open sourcing its hypervisor and supporting virtualization tools made by competitors, but didn’t give any indication about if or when those changes will be implemented."

"As the opening keynote at the Linux Plumbers Conference, Greg Kroah-Hartman delivered a talk entitled 'The Linux Ecosystem, where do you fit in it?' There were, let’s say, a few elements of it which I found objectionable."

"After a bunch of work the last couple of days, I think we’re in a much better place with respect to notices & licenses for Firefox…Canonical/Ubuntu has worked with us on this a lot, and has been very helpful, as have the RedHat and Fedora teams."

"In summary, it's safe to say you'll see a significant disk performance increase if you switch over to using EBS with your EC2 instances. In addition to the performance increase, it's a no-brainer that you want persistent storage for your databases. One other huge benefit is snapshots. You can quickly and easily snapshot your database for backup purposes or for testing/reporting you may want to run against your most recent production data."