IBM has announced a new collaboration with Nvidia for an open source AI Machine Learning platform. As part of the alliance, IBM will benefit from the latter’s new data science toolkit, RAPIDS, thus enabling its clients to enhance the performance of machine learning and data analytics.

This includes planning to bring GPU-accelerated machine learning to IBM POWER9 with PowerAI in order to leverage RAPIDS to expand the options available to data scientists with new open source machine learning and analytics libraries. IBM Watson Studio and IBM Watson Machine Learning will also benefit from the power of NVIDIA GPUs so that data scientists and AI developers can build, deploy, and run faster models than CPU-only deployments in their AI applications in a multicloud environment with IBM Cloud Private for Data and IBM Cloud.

Source: IBM

Microsoft open sources Infer.NET. The software company continues to embrace open source with arms wide open. Microsoft recently open sourced model-based machine learning (ML) framework Infer.net, used in its products like Office, Azure and Xbox.

The ML engine is now available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license for free use in commercial applications.

Infer.NET initially was envisioned as a research tool and the company released it for academic use in 2008. Hundreds of papers have been published using the framework across a variety of fields, everything from information retrieval to healthcare. The Infer.NET team said that it is looking forward to engaging with the open-source community in developing and growing the framework further. Infer.NET will become a part of ML.NET – the machine learning framework for .NET developers.

Source: Microsoft Research Blog

MongoDB introduces a new software license, called Server Side Public License (SSPL), for MongoDB Community Server. The change is directed at cloud giants who have not “developed the software to capture all of the value while contributing little back to the community,” Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder, MongoDB said.

The license explicitly states the conditions of deploying MongoDB – or any other open source project licensed under the SSPL – as a service. All versions of MongoDB’s Community Server released thereafter will be licensed under the SSPL. These include patch fixes for prior versions as well.

The license doesn’t curb freedoms that the open source community had with MongoDB under the AGPL, that is freedom to use, review, modify and redistribute the software. The only substantive change is: any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service. The move will not impact customers who have purchased a commercial license from MongoDB, the company said.

Source: MongoDB