Ksplice Awarded $100K from MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has awarded this year's annual Entrepreneurship Competition award (the so-called "Hundred K") to the makers of Ksplice on May 13 in Cambridge. The kernel patch software Ksplice won the main award and also in the Web/IT category.
This year marked the twentieth time the award has been given. With Ksplice, MIT also indirectly honors itself: the GPL software was developed over a year in MIT's labs. According to the story in MIT News, Ksplice evolved out of a master's degree thesis by Jeff Arnold '07, who came up with a solution three years ago in response to a security breach from having to put off installing an update until the weekend. His solution was installing updates without needing to reboot every time. Ksplice cofounder Waseem Daher '07 declared, "the need is ubiquitous" for those operating large server farms.
The prize monies for the Entrepreneurship Competition are intended for firms that spawn from MIT projects. The institute is proud of the 120 enterprizes it has already spawned. Started in 1989, the categorized "Hundred K" is supported by about 20 firms, albeit some not too well known worldwide, even though HP Labs, Philips and Microsoft are among them. A video of the prize-winning ceremony is available.
Linux Magazine included a four-page article on how to use KSplice in August 2008.
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