Business

Microsoft continues to make in-roads into open source development. Early last year it open sourced several development related tools, including NuGet and several libraries for its ASP.Net language. And by the end of the year the company announced sponsorship of projects to port both the Node.js development platform and the big data analytics tool Apache Hadoop to Windows. It’s even making Linux available on Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform. And now it has open sourced Entity Framework, a framework that helps developers simplify data manipulation. Entity is now part of Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary launched earlier this year to house open source projects. You can find the source code for Entity on Codeplex, Microsoft’s answer to GitHub. It’s another step in the right direction, but it’s nothing earth shattering. Microsoft is continuing to put its open source efforts into low risk developer tooling projects. Although representatives Microsoft’s partners in port...

Although the company behind Meteor, a framework for building real-time JavaScript applications in vein of Google Docs, just announced a nice big $11.2 million round of funding, it’s not the only game in town. In my story earlier this week I mentioned Mojito, a framework developed by Yahoo. But there’s still another framework that has escaped my attention, even though it’s around longer than Meteor: Derby. Much like Meteor and Mojito, Derby is a client and server side JavaScript framework for building real-time applications. Its synchronization engine Racer can be used independent of Derby. Nate Smith (an ex-Googler) and Brian Noguchi are the core developers of the framework, and the founders of the stealth startup Lever. “We have a stable financial base,” Smith wrote on the project’s Google Group. “We have a very different business model than Meteor, and we are creating a product-focused company that will continue to support the framework.” Meteor, on the other hand, is being develop...

Meteor, the company behind an application development framework of the same name, today announced $11.2 series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners also contributing. The investment follows Andreessen Horowitz’ record breaking $100 million investment in Github. The Meteor framework is free and open source and can be used for creating rich, Google Docs style applications in the browser. A preview was released last April. The company plans to monetize the product by selling enterprise support and services. Meteor was founded by ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis, MixApp co-founder Nick Martin and early Asana employee/MixApp co-founder Geoff Schmidt. David Greenspan, who co-founded AppJet (the company behind EtherPad) and went on to work on Google Wave, is another early employee. These are guys who know how to build richly interactive, real-time web apps. And they know painful it can be to develop modern, desktop-like apps for the browser. It takes a lot of work to b...