This year’s CES may have been about startups more than ever before, but over the last few years, the car industry has also increased its presence at the show. In previous years, we heard a lot about the connected car, but until now, those cars remained virtually closed to developers. In one fell swoop, that changed this year, as Ford and GM announced concrete programs with SDKs and APIs that are either already open for developers or will be available within the next few months.

The approach the two companies are taking is very different: Ford is betting on drivers bringing their own smartphones into the car and having apps run on the phone, while GM is actually setting up a framework for running apps right in the car’s built-in infotainment system. Read more →

Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.

The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release has bug fixes but without a single one having any test cases associated with it.  That creates all sorts of problems for developers who have no assurance that the problem is actually fixed. Read more →