Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: the debate over compensating open-source maintainers takes on a new challenge thanks to supply chain security regulations, Microsoft promises customers its AI products will be totes legal, and this week in enterprise moves.
Hello and welcome to Runtime! Today: the debate over compensating open-source maintainers takes on a new challenge thanks to supply chain security regulations, Microsoft promises customers its AI products will be totes legal, and this week in enterprise moves.
The open-source software movement unleashed a torrent of innovation and economic activity by creating free, reusable building blocks for the internet infrastructure that runs the world's economy. More than two decades later, the maintenance bill for those projects is coming due.
Maintaining an open-source project is an extremely important and underappreciated job, the kind of work people take for granted until something goes wrong, and there are increasing calls to compensate maintainers directly for their efforts. Countless open-source projects have been used to build software, some of which are maintained by foundations with nine-figure annual budgets and some of which are maintained by one or two people in their spare time.
All software — open source or commercially produced — requires maintenance.
Chad Whitacre is head of open source at Sentry and co-creator of FOSS Funders, a project designed to funnel contributions from individuals and companies using open-source software to those maintainers.
Still, like all maintenance issues, it's a problem that will only get worse with time.
Read the full story on Runtime.
Burned in the past by vendors, big enterprise tech organizations tend to move slowly, even when operating within one of the greatest AI hype cycles ever created. Microsoft, the orchestrator of the latest cycle, unveiled plans Thursday to nudge those customers along the "journey" to AI glory.
"...today we are announcing three AI Customer Commitments to assist our customers on their responsible AI journey," Microsoft announced in a blog post explaining its approach to guiding your forced march to AI. It promised to share information about its own experiences deploying AI, help customers comply with "legal and regulatory requirements" that will spring up as regulators learn more about the AI "journey," and help its legions of partners work with customers to tie up all the loose ends.
It's hard to understand why any customer of Microsoft's (or any vendor, really) should feel better about embracing its AI tools now that the company has issued a set of vague promises to follow rules that no one has yet created. The simple truth is that no one — not even the creators of AI technology — has any idea where it's heading, and everyone is proceeding at their own risk.
Ian Knight joined Isovalent as chief revenue officer after a long stint at Red Hat.
Susan St. Ledger is now president of worldwide field operations at HashiCorp, after working in similar roles for Okta and Splunk.
HashiCorp beat Wall Street expectations for revenue after a 37% jump, but its stock was pummeled Thursday after announcing plans to lay off 8% of its workforce.
Google Cloud announced new partnerships with Salesforce, Twilio, and Mayo Clinic while also rolling out a new security tool designed for AI workloads.
Google's DeepMind AI unit announced that it had figured out how to sort items in a list 70% faster than existing methods, which sounds trite but has already been adopted by the C++ programming language as a time-saver.
AWS has a new "military grade" rack server for hybrid cloud customers. Really think they should have gone with "tactical" there.
Adobe's Firefly AI image generator is now available for enterprise customers to slap cool images on hastily constructed PowerPoints explaining their AI strategies.
Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!