This partnership will enable developers

As part of this partnership, Azul Systems will build, certify and distribute a compliant OpenJDK-based distribution meeting the Java SE specification for use with Windows Server environments on Azure. The new OpenJDK-based offering will be freely distributed and licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) with the Classpath Exception.

Open source is now a key building block for enterprise IT strategies. Customers also require choice in where and how they deploy new and existing Java applications. Through this partnership the global community of Java developers gain access to open source Java on the Windows Azure cloud. It will also serve the growing number of Java applications that both small and medium businesses and global enterprises depend on to run their businesses.

Scott Sellers,Cheap Dedicated Server Azul Systems president and CEO, said, "This initiative is all about bringing Java to the masses in the cloud. We will be providing a fully open and unconstrained Java environment — with open choice of third-party stacks — for developers and essential applications deployed on Windows Azure."

Jean Paoli, president of MS Open Tech said, "Microsoft Open Technologies and our Azul Systems partner are motivated by a common goal to make the world of mixed IT environments work better together for customers. This partnership will enable developers and IT professionals to ensure their mission-critical apps deploy and run smoothly on Windows Azure, using the open source Java environment they prefer. With Azul Systems rich Java heritage and strong customer track record,  partnering was a natural decision."

A June 14, 2013, Forrester Research report, titled: "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms, Q2 2013," states "Microsoft's strategy for Windows Azure is very strong for two reasons ... creating a single platform spanning many clouds is achievable, valuable, and a natural act for Microsoft. ... Microsoft's openness to other platforms, languages, databases, development environments, and tools is genuine and virtually assures Windows Azure's relevance as technology evolves."

“Honestly, privacy wasn’t a motivation at all when I started the company,” Weinberg said in an interview from his Philadelphia-area headquarters. “But shortly after I launched DuckDuckGo, people in the tech community who used the site started asking me questions about privacy. So I stopped what I was doing and began a personal investigation into the history of search privacy.”

“If you think about it, a search engine is the first place you go if you have a serious problem, like a medical diagnosis. People type in their problems. It’s kind of creepy for a search engine to know so much about you.”

“I also found that users’ search histories were being handed over to government and law enforcement agencies. And beyond the government, there’s a commercial equivalent of mass surveillance that people find annoying. Think of all the ads following you around the Internet and targeting you all the time. There’s even stuff a lot of people don’t know about yet like companies charging you higher prices based on your data profile, which shows that you shop in higher end stores. If you can believe it, you can sit right next to someone, go to the same website and get a different quoted price for an item!”

As a result of what he learned, Weinberg’s search engine doesn’t keep any personally identifiable information. DuckDuckGo doesn’t identify users with cookies, and deletes user agents and IP addresses from its server logs. According to its privacy page, the site doesn’t attempt to generate a so-called anonymized identifier to tie searches together. In other words, DuckDuckGo has no way of even knowing whether two searches came from the same computer.

“My whole thing was, ‘How do you make a better search experience?’ My thought was you don’t need to track people to make money in web search. And you don’t need to track people to make better results. So why track people at all?”

Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo limped along for its first few years with a small but dedicated clientele. It was attracting less than one million searches a day until January 2012, when Google announced plans to aggregate user data across all of its services. Almost immediately, the site’s web traffic spiked. But DuckDuckGo’s popularity exploded earlier this summer in the aftermath of revelations about the US National Security Agency’s secret Prism surveillance program.
Read the full story at www.mileweb.com/services!