Open Source Technology

Microsoft launches open source .Net package manager

2010-10-06T22:43:00.000-07:00

Microsoft began offering on Wednesday an early version of NuPack, an open source package manager for its .Net software development platform.

Also, Microsoft is providing a beta version of its ASP.MVC (Model View Controller) 3 technology and a second beta release of its WebMatrix Web site-building tool. [ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog and Developer World newsletter. ]

The company's NuPack technology works with .Net project types, including ASP.Net WebForms, ASP.Net MVC, and others. "NuPack is a free open source package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use .Net libraries in your projects," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog post. A developer preview is available at the Codeplex website.

"Our goal with NuPack is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .Net projects. It will be supported in all versions of Visual Studio," said Guthrie. Microsoft anticipates NuPack serving as a fundamental component of the .Net stack and that it will encourage more .Net developers to use open source libraries.

Developers maintaining open source projects, such as Moq and NHibernate, can use NuPack to package up libraries and register them with an online gallery, or catalog, that is searchable, Guthrie said. Dependency management between libraries is handled.

"The client-side NuPack tools, which include full Visual Studio integration, make it trivial for any .Net developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on," Guthrie said.

NuPack has been accepted as an addition to the Outercurve Foundation's ASP.Net Open Source Gallery. Outercurve is an open source projects organization formerly known as CodePlex and launched by Microsoft.

Microsoft on Wednesday also launched a beta release of ASP.Net MVC 3, which is an update to the ASP.Net MVC 3 Preview that shipped two months ago. The beta release includes enhancements to the Razor view engine option, including cleaner MVC integration. New view helper methods are supported as well.

The beta release is accessible at Microsoft's website. AJAX and Validation helpers in the package use an unobtrusive JavaScript approach by default. NuPack integration also is supported as well as extended dependency injection. Helpers and classes are featured to improve "everyday coding," Guthrie said.

Microsoft's WebMatrix Beta 2 offers Web page enhancements as well as improved templates and NuPack integration. WebMatrix is a tool for building Windows Web sites. The release is available at the WebMatrix website.

"Today's releases further evolve and enhance the Microsoft Web Stack," Guthrie said. "All of the above capabilities work with .Net 4 and [Visual Studio] 2010 and do not modify any existing files that ship with it -- they are all additive and safe to install on your machine."

This article, "Microsoft launches open source .Net package manager," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter.

Read more about developer world in InfoWorld's Developer World Channel.

Open Source: No one is working for free

2010-09-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

People continue to wonder how to make money in the free and open source software world. It’s dressed up in discussions of how one makes money when you give away the software for free, or why developers are working for free. It can likewise lead to a management backlash of not contributing to FOSS projects because some think their developers are working on FOSS instead of their own work.

Here’s a different way to think about it. Everyone is familiar with the idea of a normal "bell curve" distribution representing R&D investment over time. As a technology is better understood and a product succeeds in the marketplace R&D investment increases, and over time as new technologies advance the R&D investment in the original technology and product wanes. The function can also represent the "knowledge" gained or the increase in the intellectual asset base. Taking the integral of the normal distribution gives us the total investment and is the “S”-curve that is familiar to many when discussing technology innovation over time.

Good companies develop and invest in new successive waves of sustaining technologies. Microsoft’s success in PC operating systems started with DOS, then Windows, and finally enormous investment in Windows NT. Strong companies are good at sustaining innovations and know how to jump from technology to technology along the sustained innovation path. This is easily seen when looking at a single company’s R&D investment. These observations come from Clayton Christensen’s work as described in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

The R&D investment curves for projects like Linux and Apache still look like bell curves despite lots of individual and corporate contributors. These contributions, however, might best be viewed as a stacked bar chart. Individual contributors invest to meet their specific needs. As a project gains wider use, more contributors get involved. Because there is enormous overlap in their common needs, the sum of the investments remains the same but everyone is sharing the costs.

Individual contributors get enormous return on their investment. (One gives a few bug fixes to the Apache httpd team, but gets an entire HTTP server in return.) Organizational contributors give for the same ROI. They get enormous return in the technology they use as a complement to their products and services or as a component in their overall solution to the customer when compared to the investment in their contributions.

One can see this with the continued growth in the Linux community as it is adopted by more and more embedded device and mobile handset manufacturers. One only need read the Linux Foundation report charting the growth statistics in the Linux kernel to understand the enormous shared value generation happening release-on-release, four times a year.

The economics of open source works. The value gained by each contributor is enormous when compared to the cost of contributing. Nobody is working for free.
Source: http://www.networkworld.com

Open source could be a success story, too: Red Hat CEO

2010-07-03T01:45:00.000-07:00

MUMBAI: From airlines to open source software, Red Hat’s global CEO Jim Whitehurst has made a smooth transition. Mr Whitehurst, who was the chief operating officer(COO) of Delta Airlines in his earlier stint, and helped the bankrupt airline return to profits, is now at the helm of open source software vendor Red Hat, which competes with firms several times its size such as Microsoft and Oracle.

Mr Whitehurst’s focus has been to change Red Hat from what he calls a one-trip pony selling, supporting open source operating system Linux to an enterprise infrastructure software firm, competing on technologies like cloud. “If you look at how we are positioned now with our customers and how analysts view us, we’re an enterprise infrastructure company.

That’s been a great transition. One of our biggest contributions to open source is our growth in profitability. It demonstrates you can have a successful model around open source,” Mr Whitehurst told ET in an exclusive interview.

Coming from an airline, the 42-year-old Mr Whitehurst is an unlikely CEO for a technology company, and more so, a company that makes profits from selling free software.

When he left Delta, he was approached to do a lot of additional turnarounds, but Mr Whitehurst said rather than trying to fix something, he wanted to build something, where there was a buoyant canvas to be painted, and Red Hat fit that bill. Red Hat was also looking for someone from a non-tech background and Mr Whitehurst’s profile, with his interest in geeky stuff, matched it well.

Other than expanding Red Hat’s portfolio, Mr Whitehurst worked on diversifying its customer base to include more than just banks (NYSE Euronext is one of its customers) and telecom firms, that are typically early adopters of technology.

“When I joined, our top customer list was great — all major banks and telcos. But where’s everybody else? Where are the big mainstream users of IT? That’s one of the key things that we worked on,” said Mr Whitehurst. Red Hat today has railroads, utilities, airlines and petro chemical firms on its top 25 customer list.

“The most powerful force in technology is not Moore’s law, its inertia,” said Mr Whitehurst, who beefed up support from systems integration partners and independent software vendors to extend its presence among customers.

“People want to feel confident they can deliver what they promised. And we generally feel more confident doing something we’ve done before. So if you are a systems integrator and you want to deliver for your customer, you feel more confident using things you’ve delivered before. So there is an inertia out there that we’ve to just overcome,” he added.

Even as Microsoft and Google get more aggressive in the consumer space, Mr Whitehurst is clear that Red Hat will not dabble in the consumer business.

“We’re an enterprise software company and we will stay focused there at least for the medium term... Look at Apple, they’re a consumer company. Look at Oracle, they’re an enterprise company. Very few companies have been able to do both well, and not just in technology but in business in general.” Red Hat is participating in India’s ambitious Unique ID project through its partners.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/

Facebook has problems, Diaspora isn't one of them

2010-05-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

The bigger a company becomes on the Web, the more likely it is to be accused of privacy violations. Google has been fending off privacy concerns for years, but it's now Facebook's time in the limelight.

An increasing number of people are concerned about Facebook's privacy policies. And while some are reportedly looking to jump off the Facebook train, most continue to complain...on Facebook.

Enter the Diaspora project, an open-source social network that eliminates the midddleman, the "anti-Facebook."

Diaspora attempts to solve Facebook's privacy problems at the infrastructure layer, using a decentralized, peer-to-peer approach. Unfortunately, this approach has the potential to limit the service's appeal by introducing complexity, as ReadWriteWeb explains:

Because not everyone will be technically capable of (or interested in) setting up their computer to function as a "seed," there are plans to offer a paid turn-key service too, similar to Wordpress.com, the blogging platform. Wordpress itself is software you can install and configure on your own server, if you're inclined to do so, but if you're less technically-savvy, you can opt to quickly start a blog via Wordpress.com instead. Diaspora would function in a similar way.

In other words, if you care deeply about a decentralized social-networking service and have the technical chops to set it up, Diaspora provides a way to do that. For everyone else, there's a somewhat centralized Web site.

This is progress?

Let's be clear: one of the primary reasons for Facebook's success is that it disintermediates the complexity that makes it hard for 400 million (and counting) people to connect to each other. For Diaspora to compete, it needs to be more than merely open: it actually needs to be better at connecting hordes of people simply, casually, easily.

As Identi.ca, the open-source Twitter clone, has shown, there's a niche market for those who prize openness over other considerations. But it's niche. The mainstream doesn't have time to set up seeds or otherwise follow openness for openness' sake.

I don't foresee Diaspora ever breaking into that mainstream because it's starting from the wrong premise: it treats privacy and decentralization as its primary goals. This isn't how users see it, though. For most people, privacy is a secondary concern (though it is a concern). The primary concern is connecting with friends and family.

So long as network effects favor Facebook, Diaspora users will remain few and far between.

If anything, the best Diaspora can hope for is to help prod Facebook to improve its privacy policies and communication about them. This is an area that Facebook recognizes it needs to improve, as Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, notes in a recent interview:

It's clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we're making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That's not acceptable or sustainable. But it's certainly fixable. You're pointing out things we need to fix...

I sincerely hope that Diaspora can help motivate Facebook to improve how it handles users' privacy. I just don't think that it provides compelling competition for mainstream Facebook users who need ease of use before they need to be worrying about "seeds" and such.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/

Steps to adopt open source technology standards draw flak

2010-05-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

India’s open source software lobbyists allege that the country’s proposed draft recommendations for adopting open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions, favours popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft.

According to people familiar with the draft recommendations, a meeting of the apex body on Standards for eGovernance was held last week, and the policy is close to being approved. ET was shown a copy of the proposed recommendations by one of the persons who requested anonymity.

“The modifications made to the suggestions given by an expert committee recommendations would make the policy very weak and not favour open standards,” says Dr G Nagarajan, chairman of the Free Software Foundation of India, which advocates that the software should be free and open for all. The draft is also not clear on whether it will also impact existing e-governance projects or only new tenders.

The policy is intended to guide the billion dollar e-governance purchases and tenders across government departments for software and hardware over next few years. The government has already allocated about $6 billion for various projects under the national e-governance plan. The new draft policy in its preamble recommends that standards which are ‘mature and have a large proliferation’ will be considered. This is being contended by the open source software community which says that it will favour proprietary standards which have large proliferation amongst masses. Last year, an expert committee comprising of many IIT professors had given suggestions to the Department of IT on the policy.

The most contentious point of the policy is that it includes standards which may be royalty free and non discriminatory (RAND) as compared to fair royalty free and non discriminatory (FRAND), which many experts had recommended. “The entire standard should be royalty-free and not just the “essential” parts of it. In other words, All patent claims necessary to implement the standard should be royaltyfree . Also, royalty free on FRAND/RAND is self-contradictory . If a Standard is Royalty Free (RF) then it cannot be RAND,” says Venkatesh Hariharan , a blogger and expert on open source affairs.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

TCS, Infosys betting big on Cloud computing

2010-03-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

Till a few years ago, the IT industry had three categories of companies - hardware companies, software product companies and IT services companies. If an organisation wanted to computerise a certain function such as payroll, it first bought the hardware, then the licences for the software, and finally hired the services of a third company to customise and implement the application according to its specifications. Naturally, it was an expensive and time-consuming process and managements debated on whether they had the budgets for it before embarking on such an exercise.

Smaller companies were the hardest hit because most of them didn't have the budgets for expensive hardware and even more expensive software licences. Many of them were forced to choose between postponing automation, building their own in-house applications or investing a huge amount money, which could have otherwise been invested elsewhere.

Now imagine if there was a choice of outsourcing all these requirements to a single provider and there were no investments in hardware, licences, or implementation to be made but just a single fee based on the usage of the application, wouldn't it be much more simpler and less expensive? That is the flexibility that cloud computing offers.

Cloud computing is an evolving technology that brings together all the elements of hardware, software and services in a single package. But despite being in popular use for last couple of years, there is still no standard definition for the term 'cloud computing'. Unlike terms like open source software (which indicates the source code software is open to all) or free software (which means it is free for users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve) which have specific definitions, cloud computing is a more loosely defined term that can refer either to infrastructure, services or applications.

"Many market observers have offered up definitions of cloud and cloud computing - to no avail. Every party wants to adapt the definition to their own needs," pointed out technology research firm, Forrester, in one of its reports on this hot new technology.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/

Open source slowly gaining momentum in India

2010-03-02T21:57:00.000-08:00

Open Source software in not much in use in India compared to other countries primarily because of the lack of awareness among the developer communities

Developers in India are not much aware about open source technologies and there aren't much good development tools and support for them, says Joydip Kanjilal, ASP.NET professional at Microsoft, in conversation with CIOL.

How do you see software developer community in India?

The software developer community in India is at par with the west and is touted to rise in the coming years. There is plenty of scope and talent in the software developer community in India.

Where do you see the usage of open source software as against proprietary software from the developer community?

Open Source software in not much in use in India compared to other countries primarily because of the lack of awareness among the developer communities in the country.

However, with the state governments in India making open source an integral part of the state's IT policy, things might change over time. Usage of proprietary software has reduced over time and open source software is slowly getting popular.

How do you see the developer community involved with the Linux OS as against Windows based OS?

The developer community in India would continue to be more involved with Windows based OS than Linux OS.

There is a lot of user communities supporting Windows based development as against Linux based development. There isn't much good development tools and support for Linux based development yet, but, yes, it is picking up these days.

Being an independent software consultant and author of many books, which technology / platform will be used by most of the developers in 2010? and why?

I feel WCF and Rest would be the most sought after technologies in 2010 as far as .NET and its related technologies are concerned. Also, cloud computing would be very popular over time.

According to you, what's the best way to motivate developer community?

The developer community can be motivated best with seminars, conferences, etc, where they can participate.

How do you feel to be part of SPARK IT 2010 and what message you would like to give for aspiring engineers/developers?

I am excited to be a part of SPARK IT 2010 and would look forward to the event with keen interest. I feel great to be selected as a speaker among so many reputed international speakers.

The aspiring engineers/developers should develop their basics to the best possible standards. The need of the hour for them is to devote more and more time developing their basics and they should also participate in events, conferences and seminars so as to develop their skills and awareness.

Source: http://www.ciol.com

Update: Gmail gets social with Google Buzz

2010-02-09T21:28:00.000-08:00

Google has given Gmail a social networking component with its introduction of Buzz, a service built inside of the Web mail product that lets users post and share content in similar ways as they do in sites like Facebook and Twitter.

How successful Google will be in convincing Gmail users to shift their social networking tasks over to Buzz remains to be seen. Google believes Buzz offers enough improvements over existing social networks.

Specifically, Buzz has been designed to help users deal with the often massive amount of information they receive through their social-networking sites.

"Increasingly, it's becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise," said Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president of product management, at a press conference on Tuesday.

The problem is only going to get worse, as people continue to find value in and embrace social media, he said. "We all feel this bombardment, this fatigue of having to go manually through and try to make sense of the torrent of information that's washing over us," he said. "This has become a large-scale problem, the kind we're good at [solving at] Google."

However, as Google officials acknowledged, Buzz right now has no links into Facebook, the world's largest social-networking site with more than 400 million members. This means that Buzz, at least for the moment, exists in parallel with Facebook, without the two of them intersecting, thus offering no help for users of that site, a major gap in Buzz's coverage.

As for Twitter, users can't post to Twitter from Buzz right now, but they can direct their Twitter posts to Buzz, as well as other content they post on public sites, like the Flickr and Picasa photo sharing sites from Yahoo and Google, respectively.

Google opted to build Buzz into Gmail because Gmail contacts lists are an underlying, existing social graph for users, officials said.

"Today, with Google Buzz, we're introducing a new way to share and communicate inside of Gmail. Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail," said Todd Jackson, Google Buzz product manager.

source: http://www.computerworld.com/

Open-source acquisitions: What's the holdup?

2010-01-08T01:11:00.000-08:00

Trying to figure out a company's acquisition strategy is often complex. Some companies have very purposeful approaches to scoping out companies, products, and market segments, while others' approaches are much more scattershot.

Acquisitions of open-source companies have been a big topic of conversation ever since Red Hat acquired JBoss in April 2006. Many of us in the software industry thought that one or two large companies would snap up and consolidate several open-source companies in attempt to offer a complete open-source stack. But an open-source consolidator has yet to materialize.

In recent conversations with a number of open-source executives, it's come to light that many potential acquirers are less attracted to open-source companies that require more investment before generating revenue.

Considering that there are few private open-source companies generating beyond $15 million in annual revenue, an acquisition of an open-source company could certainly be tough for a public company to explain to Wall Street.

read more.....

The future of open source

2010-01-01T01:13:00.000-08:00

There's no question that the open source community is a passionate one -- and one with significant influence on technology directions and options. We're way past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe to depend on in business. Open source is now a mainstream part of the technology fabric.

Yet it remains connected to its roots around a passionate community working together to solve problems and share the fruits of their labors with others. Any endeavor based in community is bound to spark passionate debate. After all, without contention, how else to determine the best way forward?

Since its emergence, open source has embodied this spirit. Part defiant, part self-reliant, and often outspoken and opinionated, those immersed in the community have worked both in tandem and at odds, all with the intention of pushing the movement in as many worthwhile directions at once.

read more.....

Google's Open-Source Manifesto Tells the Truth

2009-12-26T01:19:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice-president of product management at Google (GOOG), put up on Dec. 21 what was more of a tome than a mere post on the company's blog. Entitled "The Meaning of Open," it was originally sent to Google employees as an e-mail, but it reads like a manifesto.

Arguments have raged for years about exactly what is entailed by an open-technology strategy, as opposed to a closed one. In the open-source community, the free software definition explicitly states that truly free software means "free as in speech, not free as in beer." It further explicitly states that freeware—software applications that you or I can use without paying—differs from true open-source software, whose source code we can view and change.

Rosenberg's open manifesto goes well beyond the concept of open-source software, however, in that he goes on to tackle open standards, the value of an open Internet, and the overall concept of open information. He writes: "To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counterintuitive to the traditionally trained MBA, who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors…Open systems are just the opposite."

read more......

Open Source, SaaS to drive future of microfinance IT: Grameen Technology Center

2009-11-27T22:52:00.000-08:00

Open Source software and SaaS are emerging as the key Management Information Systems (MIS) software for MFIs, according to Craig Chelius from the Grameen Technology Center (GTC). These products, he argues, can offer MFIs fully customisable, secure software that they can own without the need to pay expensive licensing fee.

Mr. Chelius is the Global Sales Advisor for MIFOS — an open source, web-based “SaaS” system developed by GTC which MFIs can download and modify for free. Work on MIFOS began in 2006, and GTC has worked Grameen Koota in Bangalore, India, since 2007 to develop and implement the software. MIFOS is now used by 20 MFIs in India, Nepal, the Philippines, Kenya, Senegal, Tunisia and Ghana.

MIS are the systems MFIs use to record and track financial information. It is here that loan officers record money given to clients for loans services as well as cash received from repayments. This information is then available to management and the back office for accounting and compliance purposes. As an essential part of MFI operations, MIS is an important factor to the operational efficiency of MFIs.

According to the Grameen Technology Center, the lack of flexible and cost-effective MIS infrastructure is limiting the ability of MFIs to grow. MIX/CGAP study on MIS in microfinance found that 41% of MFIs use a manual MIS — either Excel-spreadsheets or paper-based systems to track payments. These methods are time-consuming and vulnerable to data loss, limiting the ability of MFIs to grow their client base.

read more.....

Open source software needs marketing

2009-11-15T22:59:00.000-08:00

PUNE: There is a need for greater promotion of the use of open source software for information and communication technology (ICT)-based teaching and learning.

Professor Kannan M Moudgalya of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), highlighted this on Monday. Moudgalya, who heads the Centre for Distance Engineering Education Programme (CDEEP) at the IIT, was delivering the keynote address at the launch of kPoint, a software solution for interactive learning and training.

kPoint, developed by city-based Great Software Laboratory (GSL), was launched by noted computer expert Vijay Bhatkar, creator of India's Param series of supercomputers. Heads and professionals from leading IT companies as well as principals of engineering institutions were present at the occasion. Open source software refers to computer software provided under a license that is in the public domain.

"Open source software has a distinct cost advantage over the expensive commercial software packages. However, a considerable marketing effort is required to secure a greater and wider audience of students for courses transmitted live using ICT tools based on open source software," Moudgalya said.

"Open source software is often sufficient in most distance education programmes, except for some niche academic segments. However, academic institutions don't train students in using good open source software," he further stated.

`Technology has a banana's shelf life'

2009-10-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

MUMBAI: Scott McNealy, the 52-year-old co-founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems, is known to be colourful and controversial. And he didn’t disappoint. On his second visit to India on Thursday, Mr McNealy outlined Sun’s vision to bridge the digital divide through open source technologies and rubbished the usefulness of proprietary technology.

“Technology has the shelf life of a banana. By the time you buy it, implement it and train people on it, it’s obsolete. The right thing to do is to share IP. Rather than litigate and protect our IP, we’ve decide to innovate and share it,” Mr McNealy said in a not-so-veiled reference to Microsoft.

Enterprises, he said, should look not just at acquisition cost and operating costs associated with a software but also the buried exit clause. The cost of getting out a proprietary system and moving to another environment was enormous, and companies needed to factor in this cost as well. “The buried exit cost could be 10 times the cost A (acquisition cost) plus cost B (operating costs),” he said, using heroin addiction as an analogy. Even if heroin was given for free, it had to be paid for later.

And nor was Microsoft the only corporation at the receiving end. IBM’s DB2 database, Novell’s directory, storage system vendors, and other open source vendors got their fair share of ridicule and fun. Sun, Mr McNealy said, could provide everything from servers to storage technology, and operating systems to chips. Sun’s newest foray is into microelectronics or chips. The design of its Ultrasparc T2 chip that will roll out in the summer of this year is available for free download and McNealy said companies in China were downloading it and building variants of it.

Mr McNealy positioned Sun as a provider of entire systems rather than piece-meal components. “I’m building an airplane in my garage. I’ve got the wings from Boeing, the interiors from Airbus, other spare from makers of aircraft parts.. now I’ll let you fly in it. I’ll let you drive it. Suddenly, the food on United Airlies looks good,” he joked, prompting guffaws from the audience.

read more....

Cos switch to open source technologies to cut costs

2009-10-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: Indian enterprises, private and public, are opening up to saving costs by using free for use technologies. Governments, institutionsand companies are increasingly turning to open source technologies to turn frugal as these softwares, hardwares and applications
are often free but also to avoid falling into the trap of a proprietary IT environment.

While commercial software vendors disagree with open source providers, support is often cheaper in the open source environment.Take for instance, the Rs 550-crore Sheela Foam, that makes Sleepwell brand of mattresses. After implementing open source, Pertish Mankotia, IT head at Sheela Foam, seems to be enjoying a nice sleep, despite the economic downturn.

“Our maintenance costs have dropped to one-sixth as we migrated to an open source based system in April, this year,” he said. Sheela Foam has about 3,000 dealers, 1,000 employees and 70 distributors connected via IT systems across the country.

“We invested only about Rs 8 lakh (Rs 4 lakh for a Dell server). We will incur a saving of Rs 50 lakh, because of a migration from a proprietary software to an open ERP solution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Dell X86 servers,” says Mankotia.

read more....

Paragent, LLC. Announces Hosted Model Open Source IT Management

2009-10-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

Muncie, Indiana, United States

Paragent, LLC, a high quality software company specializing in open source IT desktop management software has announced the availability of its hosted model open source IT management software.

Paragent, LLC offers one of the most highly regarded open source web-based desktop management service available today. This software as a service product (SaaS) is perfect for almost any size organization in managing hardware and software inventory, software license auditing, alerting and remote control processes.

Paragent’s hosted model open source IT management software is quite easy to implement due to the use of a small agent running on each monitored computer. This agent keeps track of and reports on a variety of functions, data and commands.

It should be noted that Paragent’s agent-based solution provides its customers with a truly flexible, scalable and secure experience. In fact, by being a hosted model, Paragent can offer and provide a truly robust and flexible suite of IT management tools.

Read More....

On the future of Open Source thought leadership

2009-10-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

After over a decade of being in the shadow of the Free Software movement and 30 years of its inflexible dogmatic principles, disruptive new Open Source thought leadership is emerging that is truly able to compromise with the realistic needs of business and end-users without carrying the baggage of strict adherence to an ideology that is by definition a culture of exclusion. (artwork by Spidermonkey, Inc.)

My last article on Richard M. Stallman’s verbal attack on Miguel de Icaza and his continuing crusade against anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of the Free Software community seems to have struck a chord with those who sympathize with that movement’s ideals to the point of driving them to utter histrionics, unjustified hero worship and irrational thought.

Read More Article...

Palm launch Open Source Developer Program

2009-10-08T22:08:00.000-07:00

Palm has announced a programme for open source developers wishing to write for Palm's Linux based WebOS. For closed source applications the Palm developer programme requires an upfront fee of $99 (£62) from developers, with a $50 (£31) fee for each app that is published through Palm's App Catalogue. For open source developers both the up front fee and the per app fee is waived. Palm's WebOS currently only runs on Palm's Pre and Pixi phones; the Pre is due to be available in the UK from the 16th of October from O2.

Read More Article...

IDC: Organisations adopt open source to reduce expenses

2009-10-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

Recent studies from IDC show that organisations in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) looking to reduce their operational expenses have begun to see open source software as a viable alternative.

Recent studies from IDC show that organisations in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) looking to reduce their operational expenses have begun to see open source software as a viable alternative.

Many Indonesian companies (34.5 per cent) intend to deploy new open source customer relationship management (CRM) applications over the next 18 months.

IDC provides market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. Their recent studies include 'Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoption in 2009', and 'Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoptions: Customer Case Study'.

Increased deployment in the coming months

The first report indicates that CRM applications, database management and virtualisation software are the most popular solutions. IDC said these three categories boast the highest percentage of respondents from each primary market that intend to use open source over the next 18 months.

Read More Article...

UK Needs To Be More Open To Open Source

2009-09-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

During a discussion in Whitehall, industry experts concluded that the government needs to embrace open source more.

The UK is laging behind Europe and the US when it comes to the adoption of open source in government.

That's the conclusion reached today by a senior Ovum analyst during a roundtable discussion on the government’s use of open source software.

Laurent Lachal, Ovum's open source research director, said that, from the start, Europe has been interested in the adoption of open source but has since dragged its heels.

“In the US there was some sort of prejudice against open source but in effect they used it from the start, just didn’t talk about it. Now they are out," he said. "The UK started out like the US but didn’t really warm up to it until recently.”

Read More Article...

Study: Open Source Software Is Improving

2009-09-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source Report[icon:pdf]. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software. The results are based on an analysis of 11 billion lines of code from 280 open source projects including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba over three years. The analysis was carried out using Coverity's Scan service.

One of the study's conclusions is that the integrity, quality and security levels of open source code are improving. Since 2006, Coverity's Scan service has exposed more than 11,200 flaws in 180 submitted programs, allowing programmers to fix the detected flaws. The vendor has found that the number of flaws detected by static analysis has decreased by 16 per cent overall.

Read More Article...

Microsoft's Open Source Strategist Is Leaving

2009-09-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

IT MAY COME AS A SURPRISE to learn that Microsoft has any kind of open sauce software strategy aside from stomping on any bunch of commie hippies daring to offer free alternatives to its market-monopolising software, but it seems that one respected member of the Redmond braintrust has been working tirelessly for the last three years in an effort to make the software behemoth play nice with the other slightly grubby children in the playground.

Sam Ramji, who is currently the vocal spokesvole for all things open sourcery at Microsoft, is moving on to pastures new at the end of this month and he leaves behind an interesting legacy. More importantly his departure will leave a gap that might prove difficult to fill.

Sam's official brief was to create a strategy that enabled Micrososft to 'co-exist and thrive in a heterogeneous IT world' but his legacy goes way beyond that. The company originally had a single department that dealt with free open source (FOSS) software but, according to one Microsoft insider, it is now an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company.

Ramji's job was never going to be easy. The biggest software company on the planet had a nasty reputation for making life difficult for any upstart that tried to muscle in on its turf. There was never any real evidence that Microsoft would use strong-arm tactics to undermine fledgling companies, but when you have unlimited access to some of the world's most tenacious and ruthless lawyers and a bottomless pit of cash to throw at patent disputes, someone is gonna cry 'bully' sooner or later.

Read More Article...

Open Source guru Sam Ramji quits Microsoft

2009-09-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ramji, who was till date senior director of Platform Strategy of Microsoft, had joined the company about five years ago

BANGALORE, INDIA: Open Source Guru, Sam Ramji, has announced to leave Microsoft to join a cloud computing startup, CodePlex Foundation.

Ramji, who was till date senior director of Platform Strategy of Microsoft, had joined the company about five years ago. In his blog on typepad.com (http://samus.typepad.com/what/2009/09/moving-on-and-the-codeplex-foundation.html), he said, "After 5 great years at Microsoft I am moving on. I'll be joining a cloud computing startup later this month in Silicon Valley. It was a hard decision, as the time I've spent at that company has been both challenging and rewarding."

Explaining the reasons for parting ways, he said that it was all for personal reasons; wife and family. "I have decided to move our family back to California. I decided that I could not do justice to a corporate/worldwide position from afar, and that I could not bear to live away from my family and commute to Seattle five days a week."

Sharing his viewpoint about the open source, he said that, "I was certain that open source was an industry wave that Microsoft would not be able to ignore, and that it was getting closer to an inflection point.

Read More Article...

Open source software can save India $2 bn

2009-09-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

As Indian consumers and enterprises evaluate the option of upgrading to Microsoft’s much-touted operating system (OS) Windows 7, to be officially launched on October 22, the free and open source software (FOSS) community has fired yet another salvo at proprietary software.

In the year 2010, if FOSS is adopted at 50 per cent levels across the economy, India can save around $2 billion (around Rs 9,800 crore), suggests a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. Even a very conservative estimate, notes the study, pegs the cost savings for use of FOSS on servers as an operating system or as an application at Rs 138 crore in 2010.

Moreover, anti-virus software sales in 2010 is likely to touch Rs 2,000 crore. This entire amount is a cost that can be avoided if FOSS products are adopted.

For instance, based on the projected sales of personal computers (desktops and notebooks), the study indicates that even if 50 per cent desktops are fitted with a FOSS operating system, the savings will be Rs 985 crore; if 70 per cent have FOSS, the savings will rise to around Rs 1,380 crore. The study, done with help from professors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, covered 20 organisations that have adopted FOSS.

Examples of cost savings with FOSS abound in the Indian context, asserts Prof Rahul De of the IIM-Bangalore who conducted the study. For instance, the Life Corporation of India, which — with an IT infrastructure of 3,500 servers and 30,000 desktops — saved about Rs 42 crore by adopting FOSS.

Read More Article...

Free Open Source Software: Bliss for Windows Users

2009-09-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

Windows and Open Source seem to be mutually exclusive to each other. To most of the people, these are two different spectrums that can not overlap and intermingle.

If we talk of them simultaneously, we may invite conntroversies but this is not the scenario anymore. The landscape for free open source software that Windows users can really vouch on is increasing day by day.

The article will walk you through the various open source software that are available for free and really useful on Windows interface:

Filezilla: Filezilla is a full featured free Windows FTP solution that Windows users can use to upload their files. It is a full featured service that Windows users can use free of charges for a productive process. Filezila offers you the ability to handle the batch transfers and most operations are drag and drop affair. With this FTP Solution, you can sync files from a distant location.

The FTP Solution is the most powerful FTP clients available but its not so friendly interface is the bottleneck for the product.

Open Office: Get going with word processing tools anywhere and anytime with the open source office productivity suite. Open Office.org offers full office suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database tools. It gives tough competition to proprietary documenting tools from Microsoft and other SaaS offerings from Zoho and Google. The service is accessible from everywhere but unreliable import/export capabilities serve as the block. It is a powerful business productivity tool to save costs.

Firefox: It is the most sought web browser after Internet Explorer. This is one service that synonyms free open source. To people who are not so tech savvy, Internet Explorer is the best choice but to the generation who needs speed and faster access, Firefox is the best choice. The service is available for free downloads and is a good tool for use on Windows, if someone is looking for alternatives. Its customization abilities make it the most looked up browser.

TrueCrypt: The free encryption tool is at par with Microsoft BitLocker and in fact offers the same set of encryption utilities that users look for. It provides full disk encryption with key based recovery. On a broader note, it surpasses the security offerings of BitLocker with its support for many encryption protocols and more flexibility.

With its flexibility and compatibility with many protocols, the tool is a good free contender against Microsoft BitLocker.

7-Zip: The free open source compression software is at par with other paid compression tools like RAR and ACE. The package decompresses quickly and reliably. It offers everything that a user hunts in basic compression solution and is faster.

If you still confuse, Firefox and Linux for free open source, then you must try your hands on these free open source software for Windows; they are worthy enough for continual usage.

Source: http://www.itvoir.com/

Red Hat Launches Distribution Effort With Open-Source ISVs

2009-09-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

Red Hat is combining its portfolio of open-source software with applications from third-party ISVs and selling the bundles to customers through the channel under a program unveiled this week.

The move is designed to broaden the market for Red Hat software by developing more complete solutions for midsize companies, said Roger Egan, vice president of channel sales in North America, in an interview.

Red Hat launched the Catalyst Program at the Red Hat Summit & JBoss World conference in Chicago this week. The effort will include development of a social networking and collaboration Web portal to help build a community around the vendor's entire ecosystem, Egan said.

"The way we increase the sale of Red Hat products is to sell solutions," Egan said. "For us to really penetrate the midmarket, we really have to talk about solutions."

The Catalyst Program is in addition to Red Hat's main channel partner program. Two weeks ago, the company revamped that program, adding a new "premier business partner" designation to the existing Advanced and Ready partner tiers. The company wants to increase the amount of sales it makes through the channel from about 55 percent today to more than 70 percent.

Read More Article...

Open Source Is Our Next Level: Microsoft

2009-09-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

As open source is adopted on a range of platforms, understanding, engaging and supporting open source development will continue to be fundamental to enabling more customer choice, says Sam Ramji

BANGALORE, INDIA: Recently, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

Sam Ramji, sr. director, Platform Strategy, MicrosoftSam Ramji, sr. director, Platform Strategy is responsible for developing sustainable partnerships with open source communities as part of his role as senior director of Platform Strategy in Microsoft's Server and Tools organization. This includes overseeing the operation of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center (OSTC), which serves as a landing point for open source communities and companies interested in working with Microsoft, as well as a resource for Microsoft product groups interested in open source technology.

Tom Hanrahan, who also plays a critical role in Microsoft's day-to-day open source interoperability efforts, is the director of the OSTC. His team played a key role in the development of the drivers, and will manage their ongoing enhancement.

Sam Ramji and Tom Hanrahan talk about releasing Linux device driver code to the Linux community in an interview with CIOL. Excerpts:

Read More Article...

Using Open Source for IT

2009-08-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

K P Perumal, D.G.M (MIS), TIIC maintained that most e-governance projects in the country do not meet expectations and that there is a long way to go before these initiatives truly benefit the common citizenry

The Tamil Nadu Industrial Investment Corporation Limited (TIIC) is a State Financial Corporation engaged in industrializing the state of Tamil Nadu through various financial schemes, including term lending. We commenced computerization in 1987 and have completed the IT enablement of our core operations such as loan disbursement, financial accounting and MIS, HRM, etc. However, these areas are not integrated with other business functions. Therefore, during 2008-09, the corporation took up integration of these functions on a centralized database concept similar to core-banking solution on an open source platform. The project is expected to be completed in 2010-11.

Implementation issues

The biggest challenges that TIIC faced with regard to IT projects was manpower planning and the availability of manpower on continual basis. Inconsistency in the management—in terms of deciding the scope of IT projects and frequent changes in management created a problem in maintaining the continuity of projects. Finally, data migration from one DBMS format to other DBMS format was yet another factor that was a challenge.

Read More Article...

Why Do Linux And Open Source Lovers Give Apple A Free Ride?

2009-08-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

In its "Windows 7 Sins" campaign, the Free Software Foundation has labeled Windows 7 as "treacherous computing," and accuses Microsoft of such acts as "poisoning education." This is just the latest in a long line of attacks by open source lovers against Microsoft. But Apple is arguably even more closed than Microsoft, yet always gets a free ride from vociferous open source proponents. Can anyone explain this hypocrisy?

Computerworld reports that the group has

launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it "treacherous computing" that stealthily takes away rights from users.

At the Web site Windows7Sins.org, the Boston-based FSF lists the seven "sins" that proprietary software such as Windows 7 commits against computer users.

Nowhere does the group mention Apple. Yet in important ways, Apple is more closed than Microsoft. Apple controls not just software, like Microsoft does, but its hardware as well. Try to sell a non-Apple computer with Apple's OS on it, and you'll get hauled into court by Apple lawyers. Apple has also taken legal action against bloggers who report on upcoming hardware and software releases. There's a long list of ways in which Apple is far more closed than Microsoft.

Yet the Free Software Foundation, and many other open source proponents, conveniently ignore these facts, and regularly attack Microsoft, while giving Apple a free ride. Apple, after all, has the "coolness" factor in its favor, and it's fashionable and easy to attack Microsoft.

Read More Article...

Microsoft offers open source link for PHP, .Net

2009-08-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Interoperability team is introducing on Friday an open source project to bridge PHP and Microsoft's .Net programming model, Microsoft representatives said.

The company's PHP Toolkit for ADO.Net Data Services uses REST as a bridge between Microsoft's software platform and the popular PHP scripting language, said Peter Galli, Microsoft open source community manager, in a blog entry. With the kit, developed by Persistent Systems, PHP developers can more easily take advantage of ADO.Net Data Services, which are a set of features in the .Net Framework for building and consuming data services from the Web. The services previously were referred to as Project Astoria.

Read More Article...

Five Reasons to Hire Open Source Developers

2009-08-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

Afraid an open source developer will be a liability to your organization? TechRepublic's Jack Wallen offers some reasons to think otherwise.

Open source has infiltrated many levels of IT over the past decade.

It has been a slow process; however, little by little, it has become a normality. And even though many companies are adopting open source software, they are hesitant to bring open source developers into the fold. Why is this?

Many larger companies do not place any value on open source applications, therefore they do not place any value in those who code the applications. Some companies are afraid that hiring an open source developer would be a liability--possibly reverse engineering their proprietary software and then releasing forked versions into the community.

Although these may sound like justifiable fears, they overlook some very important benefits that come with hiring open source developers.

Let's take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

You can see more than their resumes. Because the applications they work on are open, you can get a first-hand look at the code they write even before you do that first interview. Try to do that with a developer for a proprietary software developer.

This will give you a fairly instant grasp of your interviewee's understanding of programming. You will know right away how well they write their code, if they use comments well, what tools they use, etc.
Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken. Think about the Samba team. For the longest time they would take a step forward and Microsoft would change something that would push them a couple of steps back.

The Samba team had to be on their toes all the time to make changes so their software would continue to work with the latest version of Windows.
Although this is not a universal truth, open source developers are very passionate about what they do. They have to be, otherwise why would they do it?

If you hire an open source developer that has a passion for their work on open source projects, it might very well spill over into the work they do for you. Now I understand that many developers are passionate about their work (I've read Microserfs), but passion in the open source community runs a bit hotter than it does in the non-open source communities.
Along with an open source developer you will enjoy open source support. This is a tricky one for sure. You can't hire a developer and then expect that developer not only to code but also serve as support for end users. But it is always nice when there is someone there to help support the IT department.

That Apache server that someone installed a long time ago and has been running non-stop without upgrades because everyone is afraid to touch it? It could be given the attention it so deserves now.
And like adopting any open source project, you will save money. Along with hiring a single open source developer, you now have the "support" of the entire open source community, should you need it. If you are working on an-in house project that ends up going to open source that project has the opportunity to scale in proportion to the size of the community supporting said project.

If that project catches the eye of the open source community, who knows, it may wind up being the next Samba or Apache.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that I think open source developers are better than closed source developers. But they do have different ideologies and they do go about things differently. For a long time companies avoided hiring open source developers for one reason or another, but I have and will always stand by my claim that open source developers make great additions to your IT staff.

Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/

Google Open Source Strategy Not Just A Patent Dodge

2009-08-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

Matt Asay, whose views have become increasingly corporate as the recession has ground on, wrote yesterday that Google may be investing in open source as a patent dodge.

Of course, it wasn’t his opinion he was stating. He was just quoting the speculation of a Gartner analyst, Brian Prentice.

A politician couldn’t do that better. “I’m not saying my esteemed opponent is a duck. I’m just quoting an analyst who claims to have heard a quack.”

Fact is Google has been a long-time advocate of patent reform. And on this issue it is also, like the rest of the computer industry, a long-time loser.

Nothing Machiavellian is going on here. Google has been very honest about its views, and in its advocacy.

Google has lost this battle before because the pharmaceutical and medical device makers refuse to go along. Software patents are routinely issued that cover a wide range of programs. Drug and device patents cover specific compounds or devices. Their reach is more limited, and their protection more important in those industries.

Read More Article...

The Best Free Open Source Software for Windows

2009-08-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

InfoWorld - To many, free open source software and Microsoft Windows seem to be mutually exclusive. After all, the open source development model is most closely associated with the Linux OS and, to a lesser degree, various Unix derivatives. So when you mention the two together, you often get some rather strange looks. This is a shame because there exists a growing landscape of compelling free and open source solutions just waiting for the intrepid Windows user.

You probably already know one of them well. Firefox has long stood as a prime example of how the open source development process can work to deliver a first-class solution that rivals, and in many ways surpasses, the best that the commercial side has to offer. However, it would be a mistake to make that arduous (for novices) trek to Mozilla.com and stop there. Over the horizon are many more FOSS-on-Windows treasures waiting to be discovered, including tools that can improve your productivity, expand your lines of communication, and help keep you safe from threats along the way.

Read More Article...

Why Choose Open Source?

2009-07-31T21:33:00.000-07:00

re you thinking of creating a new online store or upgrading an existing one? Chances are you have already considered Open Source Software (OSS) or you already using it. If not then its time to get educated on the benefits of such an approach. This is the first in a series of blog posts on how to develop a comprehensive strategy for incorporating open source into your business. Here are a few benefits of following such a strategy.

Cost

Cost is probably the first reason that jumps to mind when you hear the term "open source." There are no license fees to worry about with OSS and there are typically only minor restrictions on how the software is used (depending on the license.) In many cases, the cost of the license is a pretty compelling reason to use an open source product, especially for companies on a budget.

Support

Most commercial software vendors like to brag about the great support they offer. Support is one of those areas where companies make their money so you should be somewhat skeptical of what they are promising you. Many open source projects have very strong communities associated with them. They are filled with developers (and developer shops) that can help you with custom features, installation, etc. Its true that not all contractors are going to do a good job for you but the same can be said for the paid support staff of a commercial vendor.

Read More Article...

Google Open Sources Parts of Google Wave's Code

2009-07-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

In May, at the Google I/O developer conference, the search engine giant unveiled Google Wave -- a Web platform that integrates e-mail with IM, document sharing, for near real-time interaction and collaboration. Now, Google intends to open source the platform's protocol and a significant portion of its code. Google has also made the Operational Transform (OT) code open source to all.

The Operational Transform (OT) code supports the Google Wave platform, while the underlying protocol is supposedly a simple client/server prototype that uses the Wave protocol. Google Wave is based on the operational transformation architecture introduced by the Jupiter Collaboration System developed at Xerox PARC. What is does is it puts all shared content on the server. A client cannot edit content without sending an operation to the server. The operation cannot be sent unless the server allows the client to send one. According to Google, this method does require the server to keep multiple copies of content for each client.

Read More Article...

Was Microsoft's Open Source Hand Forced?

2009-07-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

The saga of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s contributions to the kernel just took another curious step. A key engineer with open source network-infrastructure company Vyatta indicated that Microsoft had no choice but to post the drivers as GPL. The implication is that they wouldn't have if no one had pointed it out to them.

The blog post, by "Linux Network Plumber" Stephen Hemminger, indicates that the original drivers were not GPL-compatible. They linked to statically-compiled, closed-source binaries through a kernel interface that was tagged in such a way that they should only be used by GPL-compatible (open source) modules. Dismayed, Stephen passed word back to Greg Kroah-Hartmann of Novell (NSDQ: NOVL), who in turn passed word on to Microsoft. The source code for the whole driver set was released four months later.

This has sparked a whole slew of speculation on whether or not Microsoft was testing the water to see what they could get away with. If nobody asked them to release the Hyper-V drivers as GPL, the thinking goes, would they have done so? Greg thought so, and said as much elsewhere. But when confronted with the fact that there are indeed many eyes on the situation, they did the right thing -- or, at the very least, the smart thing.

Perhaps they had always intended to release the whole thing as an open package, and were simply trying to get the timing right. The announcement was made more or less on top of OSCON this week -- along with some other open source related announcements from Microsoft, so perhaps once the ball got rolling internally to do this, they decided to simply talk about all of it at once. This sounds like a very Microsoftian thing to do, since it presents more of a feeling that the company is working in a single unified fashion (something they clearly pride themselves on).

Read More Article...

Ten Reasons Open-Source Smart Phones Will Not Win Out

2009-07-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

Apple gave the mobile industry a good kick in the pants when it announced the iPhone. Many mocked. We got Ed Colligan from Palm saying that the computer people weren't going to just step in and take this market - he is now in retirement having been replaced by ex-Apple employee Jon Rubinstein - who ironically can be described as a computer person. Steve Ballmer of course chimed in - he really SHOULD keep his mouth shut occasionally to say that the iPhone had "no chance of getting any significant market share" - WinMo is currently in a holding pattern waiting for the release of 6.5 while they have made the mistake of pre announcing 7 which is still a ways off. And finally 18 months into the iPhone release we have Elevation Partners Roger MacNamee declaring that "June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it—if you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy." Well Roger I think most of them lined up to buy the iPhone 3Gs. Apple shipped something like a million and a half of 'em in the first weekend while the pre managed around 50,000 for their launch.

Read More Article...

Chrome OS to Bring More Linux IT Jobs?

2009-07-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

The news has been abuzz about Google's upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here's another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

With the worldwide recession, people in just about every industry are feeling or at least witnessing the effects in some way. According to CV Screen, a recruitment agency, the IT industry overall has lost 55% of its jobs in the last twelve months. On the other hand, open source jobs have been able to weather the storm a little easier; Linux IT jobs have only dropped by about 30% in that same twelve months, meaning that Linux IT seems to be the better way to go if one intends on keeping his or her occupation.

Read More Article...

How to Bring Open-Source Software into the Enterprise

2009-07-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

Open-source software has gained growing acceptance in the enterprise. Once enterprises put in place the same governance, policy and support processes around open-source software as they do with proprietary software, there is no limit to how much open-source software they can bring into their organization. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Carol J. Rizzo offers five tips on how to bring open-source software into your organization in a way that maps to your corporate risk factors, making open-source software no more or less of a risk than proprietary software.

Over the past decade, I've served as CTO of three different Fortune 500 companies. In each of those companies, one of my primary responsibilities was to mitigate risks associated with technology. During the same period, open-source software has gained growing acceptance in the enterprise. Properly sourced, open-source software can bring so much to the table: lower cost solutions, high-quality software and all the other benefits that come from active and altruistic developer and user communities.

However, there is a long-established, risk-averse mindset within many large companies. Companies have established software procurement practices which depend upon an interaction and relationship with a vendor. This has slowed the adoption of open-source software which, similar to commercial software, still has to be adopted under certain guidelines.

Read More Article...

Chrome OS Could Offend the Open Source Community

2009-07-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

The announcement a few days ago of Google's new Chrome OS was simultaneously shocking and expected. It's a typically understated and quietly ambitious move on behalf of Google. It's also proof -- if it were needed -- that Google people are supremely smart. They have their sights firmly set on the future as well as the here and now.

Chrome OS is initially targeted at netbook computers but it's anticipated it will spread to more mainstream computing devices as time goes on. Like Intel's Moblin OS, Chrome OS is a proof of concept that will use the hothouse environment of netbook computing to grow and mature.

I'm reasonably sure that Chrome OS will offend the open source community. There may even be a major reaction against it. You might not see open source luminaries picketing the Googleplex (although I wouldn't be surprised), but there will almost certainly be a handful of inflammatory blog postings, and some very hot collars.

Read More Article...

How Open Source Is Growing Up

2009-07-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that free technologies, mainly open source software, are proving more popular both inside and outside the computer industry.

Behind this growing acceptance is a non-commercial movement of independent developers that are putting together the open source software that anyone can use.

Paul Allen, editor of ComputerActive magazine, said the defining feature of open source software was that the set of tools and systems were developed by enthusiasts rather than big companies.

But he added it should be treated as "free thinking rather than a free lunch" because it is not always free of charge.

Out of this movement have come fully-fledged programs, such as Open Office for e-mail, spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, and VLC for video, that were put together for free by a community of people.

"The entire source code for the software is made available to the community and anyone can modify it," said Phil Andrews from open source software provider Red Hat.

Read More Article...

Microsoft Weighs Next-Phase In Open-Source Support

2009-07-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's, shall we say, cautious engagement with open-source could mean frameworks like Spring and Hibernate are the next projects tuned to Windows.

Sam Ramji, director of the open-source development lab, in a recent interview pointed to the rise in what he called "micro frameworks" and their importance.

"It's something we have to be a lot closer to," Ramji told The Reg, noting Microsoft had held talks with the SpringSource company and "a couple of their other folks."

Ramji also hinted at deeper work in areas already visited by Microsoft, specifically in the realms of Apache and on PHP.

"There's a lot more work to do with Apache for sure. There are open-source communities like SpringSource we have to do a lot more work with - they have really rich Java and .NET sides. There's a lot more work to do with the PHP community. A lot of what we are into now is we've built up some great opportunities we can now cont to get deeper in," he said.

Ramji did not get into details.

Spring founder and SpringSource chief executive Rod Johnson separately pointed to areas for improvement between the ubiquitous Spring and Windows.

Read More Article...

223 Million Smartphones with Open Source by 2014

2009-07-02T21:03:00.001-07:00

According to a recently published report coming from telecom consultants Juniper Research, the number of mobile phones that will be shipped on the market running under an open-source platform is expected to more than double by 2014, reaching 223 million units, up from the 106 million shipped this year.

The firm also says that open-source operating systems, coupled with the applications they carry, are playing an important role in the process of differentiation between new smartphones. At the same time, it seems that the platform present on the mobile phones is a key factor that determines the customers' options when choosing a new device.

As many of you might already know, Symbian has started its move towards becoming open source, which marks an important shift in the mobile operating system market. Moreover, another important step in the area has been made by Apple with the release of its App Store, an innovative move that started a trend in the market and also attracted a lot of users.

The research firm also says that the migration towards open source in the OS area is also an encouraging factor for developers, which come to display attractive applications. At the same time, the fact that more than 60 percent of the OS market is open source can be seen as a means to open new doors for innovation.

Read More Article...

Ten Reasons Open-Source Smartphones Will Win Out

2009-06-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

Open source brings far more benefits to the mobile market than just cost savings, says Jack Wallen.

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition.

When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold — they are all outstanding entries into this market.

But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason — open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Read More Article

'Open source is more stable and better supported'

2009-06-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

The CPM has long supported the free software movement and launched a poll website based on such software. The BJP's L K Advani recently threw his weight behind open source technologies. Jonathan Schwartz , CEO of Sun Microsystems, tells Sujit John that open source indeed is the future:

Is the rate of adoption of open source technologies growing?

It's accelerating rapidly. And with economic pressures mounting, free enterprise software is looking more and more compelling. Open office, our free office productivity suite, is now downloaded 1,00,000 times a day. A year ago, it was half that. Downloads of Glassfish, our open source application server, has also doubled in the last one year, and that of MySQL, the open source database, has increased 30 per cent. This is partly because of our awareness campaigns, but more because of the IT budget cuts, which push you to look for the best free software available to run your business systems.

Where do you see the fastest adoptions?

The fastest adoptions are in places where there's rapid economic expansion, good bandwidth and large student populations. We have seen some of the highest adoptions in India because of the first and third reasons. Universities are major seeding grounds for open source innovations. And when these students join the workforce or start their own companies, they disproportionately tend to select free software. We did a poll of 2,000 university students and found that less than 6 per cent knew Oracle database, but more than 90 per cent knew MySQL.

Read More Article...

At what stage of life is the open source industry?

2009-06-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

Every industry goes through life stages, just like people.

At what stage is open source at, now, in the middle of 2009?

Matt Asay says we’re at the growth stage. He is cheered by Red Hat’s latest earnings. So am I.

But there is another way to look at this news. Is it possible we have already reached the consolidation phase?

Industry life stages are a little like the old joke about fame. Applied to me, they would be who is Dana, get me Dana, get me someone like Dana, get me a young Dana, and who is Dana? At age 54, I admit some may be looking for a young Dana. As to Matt, I think we want more people just like him.

Applied to industries, these stages would be the industry’s birth, its entrepreneurial period, its growth, consolidation, and the maturation of the market in the few strong hands left.

Or to put it more bluntly, what’s open source, get me open source, get me anything that sounds like open source, get me the big gun in open source, and who cares about open source.

Read More Article...

10 reasons why open source makes sense on smart phones

2009-06-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

Open source brings a host of benefits to the mobile market, starting with cost savings. But as Jack Wallen explains, the advantages go much further - from better security to more customization options to more prolific application development.

The mobile industry is getting really interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smart phone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from its usage. How did this come about? In a word: Competition.

When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on Apple’s sexy gadget, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It’s taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, Blackberry Bold — they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason — open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? I have 10 reasons why.

Open standards
With the iPhone, you do what Apple says, you follow Apple standards, and you use only Apple-approved apps (unless you jailbreak your phone). With both the Android-based phones and the Palm Pre, open standards are not just a bullet point or buzz phrase — open standards will be adhered to. And this appearance will have lasting effects. Software will be easier to develop, Web sites will load as expected (and will be easier to develop for the mobile device), and hardware accessories will be more readily available.
More applications
As it stands, the iPhone is the king of the app. It seems for just about everything, Apple has an “app for that.” But as the Android phones and the Pre begin to be more widely used, apps for those phones will multiply exponentially. Why? First, the application development process won’t be crippled by the same acceptance process Apple has. Anytime you want to develop an application for something, Apple will strike you down if it is something already native to the iPhone. You want a different browser on your iPhone? No luck. I look for mobile versions of Firefox and Chrome to both appear on the Pre and the Android-based phones. This will continue until one (or both) app stores surpass the Apple app store.
Security

Sooner or later, security is going to become a big issue with mobile computing. Apple has already shown that it can be painfully slow at releasing updates for the iPhone. Because of the open source nature of the competition, updates will not be so slow to arrive. So when a security hole or flaw is found, the update will find its way to the end user much faster. Of course, it’s not really just about the updates. The very foundation of the Pre and the Android phone is Linux based, so it’s going to enjoy a more fundamental security than, say, any of the Windows Mobile phones available. And although mobile phone security has yet to really become a widespread issue, with smart phones becoming the norm, it will be soon enough.

How open source is beating the status quo

2009-06-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest problems with open source is understanding what it means out in the real world. I'm not talking about understanding the actual technology. I'm talking about the impact of open source, how it is actually useful. What's clear to me is that open source is not an end in itself. Open source is an enabler. It's a catalyst. It allows other things to happen. It's the fulcrum upon which can be rested the lever that will move the world. But it isn't the lever itself.

Open source cannot change the status quo on its own. This has become entirely clear now, after 10 years of hype leading to effectively the exact same situation as when we started. No, open source needs to be combined with something else, and that's usually a technology. That technology can be the Web, in the case of Mozilla, or a hardware platform, in the case of the recent netbook revolution.

Below I look at some of the biggest challenges to the current computing status quo. In each case, open source is playing a part. It's only now, around 10 years after the open-source revolution was supposed to have begun, that we're actually seeing things really begin to happen.

In the examples below, it isn't the case that people make a choice to use open source. It's more the case that open source is the only choice because only open source offers what's needed.

Read More Article...

Vancouver becomes role model for open source

2009-06-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

Open source activists are praising the Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source motion passed by the City of Vancouver last month. City Councillor Andrea Reimer provides an update on what to expect next.

Open source activists are praising the Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source motion passed by the City of Vancouver last month.

Proposed by City Councillor Andrea Reimer, the motion encourages the adoption of open standards, promotes distribution of open data and places open source on equal footing with commercial software during procurement cycles.

Vancouver is the first municipality in Canada to pass a motion that embraces the "open" city concept. But "we took some of our lead from Toronto, who did a 1.0 version of a motion last fall and is looking at rolling some stuff out," said Reimer

Read More Article...

Open Source sensing initiative launched

2009-06-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

PALO ALTO, USA: A new open source-style project to promote Open Source Sensing has been started, with the goal of bringing the benefits of a bottom-up, decentralized approach to sensing for security and environmental purposes.

"The intent of the project is to take advantage of advances in sensing to improve both security and the environment, while preserving, even strengthening, privacy, freedom, and civil liberties," said Christine Peterson, coiner of the term 'open source software'."

He added, "We have a unique opportunity to steer today's emerging sensing/surveillance technologies in positive directions, before they become widespread."

"Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down," said Brad Templeton, a futurist and civil rights activist who chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"No easy solution stands out, but the quest for an answer to these problems, by learning from the bottom-up approaches of the open source community, may provide some water in the desert," added Templeton.

Read More Article...

OpenSource World Offering Free Admission

2009-06-11T20:41:00.001-07:00

Organizers of the upcoming OpenSource World conference broadened the event program and are offering free admission, hoping to attract more attendees in a time of slashed travel budgets and increased competition from similar shows.

The conference was previously known as LinuxWorld. This year's event is scheduled for Aug. 11-13 in San Francisco's Moscone Center.

Key topics will include Drizzle, a database project based on the MySQL codebase, mobile development and security, said event chairman Don Marti. The CloudWorld and Next Generation Data Center events will run concurrently with OpenSource World.

But perhaps the most telling change is the decision to drop admission charges for qualified IT professionals and to instead gain revenue solely from sponsorships.

Organizers have implemented a qualifying process in order to weed out marketing staffers from vendors that aren't exhibiting at the show, but might be interested in attending to check out the competition, Marti said.

Read More Article...

Winning the war won't secure peace for open source

2009-06-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

Open source may have won the argument, but that does not mean the world will now change, says Mark Taylor.

According to Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"*. So by that reckoning, it must be pretty much 'job done' for free software.

Over the past few months I have experienced the eerie sensation that no-one is fighting us any more. Not only are audiences polite, enthusiastic and well informed at conferences, they are almost all using free software already.

What happened to the critics? Even the neo-proprietarists, Microsoft and — most surprising of all — the government go out of their way to pay lip service to free software these days.

And therein lies the problem. What Gandhi failed to mention is that it is not inevitable that you win as soon as they stop fighting you. Put another way, advocacy needs to evolve once the argument is won.

Read More Article...

Open Source Tool to Simplify Mobile Programmes

2009-06-04T20:48:00.000-07:00

Sun Microsystems has partnered with Orange, the Vodafone Group and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications in an endeavour to enable software developers deliver Java programmes on a mobile phone.

The vendor launched the open-source testing tool at its annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco.

A software developer has to test the programme many times before it reaches the consumer. These tests are very expensive, and a single test can cost about $ 200. The price may escalate depending on the programme.

The tool is a part of Sun's initiative to simplify the process and reduce the number of tests. The company simultaneously enhanced the five year old Java Verified programme used to certify Java ME programmes on mobile devices.

Emergence of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android has eclipsed the use of Java on mobile phones. With this new initiative unveiled for the developers, Sun hopes to reclaim lost ground.

Source : http://www.channeltimes.com/

Why invest in open source management apps now?

2009-05-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Open source management technology has advanced to handle enterprise environments

Cost isn’t the only reason IT managers should consider open source IT management applications, industry watchers say, as developers and communities continue to crank out enterprise-scale features, security and support for the free tools.

Software maturity, support packages and customization capabilities are driving more enterprise and SMB IT organizations to consider open source as a viable alternative to a commercial network management platform, according to Forrester Research.

“With shrinking IT budgets and a continued need to control IT environments, the use of open source solutions to manage infrastructure and operations is no longer just an interesting experience but a viable alternative for enterprises of all sizes,” writes Evelyn Hubbert, senior analyst at Forrester Research in a recent report. “Typically open source solutions are more lightweight and can be a real alternative for managing your IT environment. End users in both midsize and enterprise markets are looking at these tools as a way to save operational expenses.”

Read More Article...

New Open Source Mobile Phone Targets Business Users: Report

2009-05-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Even with the huge market disruption that the iPhone 3G created when Apple (News - Alert) unveiled it last summer, creating a virtual store that’s spawned mimics from other device vendors (including Nokia), more and more smartphone makers appear to be targeting the business users specifically as they roll out new models.

We’ve heard reports about how some companies are planning to introduce the iPhone (News - Alert) as a business device – yet RIM’s BlackBerry Curve outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of this year (and BlackBerry models generally are associated with business users).

And officials with Sprint (News - Alert) – rival of iPhone carrier AT&T – said in no uncertain terms earlier this month that the Palm Pre (pictured below) will signal the end of the so-called “smartphone sandwich” – a phenomenon that leads users to keep an iPhone for personal use and BlackBerry for business.

“People have made compromises,” Sprint Chief Executive Dan Hesse said at an industry event. “(The Pre) is truly both a consumer and business device.”

Read More Article...

Should Microsoft's CEO summit have been 'open source'?

2009-05-22T21:11:00.000-07:00

The biggest business story in Seattle this week occurred on the Microsoft campus -- and the media barely covered it. They weren't allowed to.

The Microsoft CEO Summit drew more than 105 CEOs representing 25 countries. Altogether, these titans represent about $2.9 trillion in annual sales and 8.9 million employees.

Among the names released were Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. The three-day meeting began May 19 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

If these leaders were elected officeholders meeting as a public body, their gathering would have probably been subject to open meetings laws. There's no such sunshine law for the meetings of leaders of private companies.

Microsoft has been hosting these summits for 13 years, and they've become a world-class forum.

The event was news in itself even though no news was announced. They discussed the convergence of technology, business issues, economic trends and making the world a better place. The exact agenda was private.

Read More Article...

Linux development platform takes on license compliance

2009-05-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

Embedded Alley has upgraded its "Development System for Linux" with tools to create software Bills of Materials, track open source components, trace binary sources, and help OEMs comply with open source license obligations. The new platform also adds support for the Freescale i.MX31 PDK (pictured).

EA's tracking system for open source licensing compliance is claimed to be a first for a Linux development platform. The tracking tools reflect the growing cost of license compliance for OEMs, as well as the frustration developers have with hunting down sources and licensing different components used in open source projects.

"Device manufacturers are using more and more open source packages, and with the number of stacks proliferating, each with different licensing, it becomes more challenging to track," said EA's COO, Matthew Locke, in an interview, "There's a need for a greater level of sophistication of these compliance tools, helping people through production and beyond, and helping OEMs comply with licensing obligations. We're combining development tools with best practices."

The focus on component tracking and licensing appears to be part of a trend in Linux development platforms. With key technological components now in place, the platforms are increasingly focusing on procedural and supply chain issues aimed at reducing development time. For example, the upcoming MontaVista Linux 6 will offer different versions based on various semiconductor distributions, and it provides a new build platform and content server for keeping track of open source components. Timesys has also focused on tracking issues with its DIY-oriented LinuxLink 3.0 subscription service. (See farther below for more on the new license compliance features, as well as additional comments from Locke.)

Read More Article...

Open Source Alternatives to Popular Software

2009-05-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Before you pay another cent to Microsoft or another software publisher, read this article by Eric Geier to discover whether you can use a free open source application instead. Just about every commercial app you use on a daily basis will have an open source alternative, whether you use Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

Whether you are looking out for your small business or personal computing needs, the open source community delivers robust applications that are completely free. Not only can you typically use these applications on Linux, the open source operating system, but many are also available to run on Windows and Mac OS X. Using these software programs can save you loads of money. You'll soon be on your way to a free and open computing experience.

Office and Productivity Software

One of the first things you are probably wondering about is the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. No worry needed here—OpenOffice.org (OOo) has been around for many years as a feasible substitution for just about any operating system. It includes Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for illustrating, and Base for databases.

OOo is pretty much a copy of MS Office 2003, with a few exceptions. Though separately available, OOo doesn't include an email client or other misc office-type applications that you might see from one of Microsoft's premium office suites. Plus some features are lacking, such as templates, clip art, and grammar checking. However with some searching on Google or browsing through my writings, you'll find some workarounds.

Read More Article...

Microsoft preps for open-source cloud apps

2009-05-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has unveiled a toolkit for PHP developers building open-source applications that help fluff its planned Azure cloud.

PHPAzure is a software development kit (SDK) for programming to both Windows Azure and the underlying SQL-like Windows Azure Storage service's blobs, tables, and queues. PHPAzure is an open-source project developed with RealDolmen and hosted on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

The PHPAzure community technology preview (CTP) was unveiled by Microsoft India and is due for completion on August 21. Azure is itself currently in CTP and has been promised for delivery by the end of this year.

PHP is one of the web's most popular programming languages, running more than 20 million sites. It's also used in conjunction with Apache, Linux, and MySQL - a web server, operating system, and database combo that Microsoft is in competition with.

Microsoft's recognized the importance of winning over PHP developers and has worked with Zend Technologies to fine-tune PHP to Windows until now. The risk was developers would otherwise build their PHP applications on Windows and deploy on Linux instead.

With PHP being a default web-programming environment, Microsoft has accepted it must embrace the language as a way to populate Azure with applications, moving it from a standing stop.

Read More Article...

Open Source Group Challenges Microsoft Patents

2009-05-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Open Invention Network, an industry organization that protects Linux by acquiring and licensing open-source patents, is taking Microsoft to task over three patents related to its now-settled lawsuit against in car GPS device maker TomTom.

Microsoft sued TomTom in February for allegedly infringing on eight of its patents, three of which pertained to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. At the time, Microsoft officials said the suit wasn't the start of a patent enforcement campaign against Linux, but didn't rule out further lawsuits.

OIN this week posted details on the three patents -- U.S. patents 5579517, 5758352 and 6256642 -- to a section of its Linux Defenders website in an attempt to get community members searching for prior art that could prevent Microsoft from wielding them in future lawsuits.

Microsoft has been known to get defendants to sign non-disclosure agreements and then coerce them into settlements. Since Microsoft refuses to offer specifics on which of its patents Linux specifically violates, industry experts have speculated that the software giant's claims might not hold up in court.

TomTom ended up paying Microsoft an unspecified amount for coverage related to the patents. As has been the case with past Microsoft lawsuit targets, TomTom decided to pay up rather than fight a lengthly legal battle.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has a different view of what transpired. Microsoft says it has only used legal means to enforce its patents on two other occasions: In an August 2006 suit against Belkin, and in a July 2008 suit against Taiwan-based Primax Electronics.

Read More Article...

Apache better than GPL for open-source business?

2009-04-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have spent years advocating the GNU General Public License as the optimal open-source license for commercial open source.

Roughly nine years after I first became a fan of the GPL, I think I've been wrong.

My admiration for the GPL mostly stemmed from its ability to mimic, but then invert, proprietary licensing. The GPL is like opening a cannister of radioactive waste: while your competitors can touch it, you're dead certain that they won't.

Given that openness is increasingly a winning business model--if not the winning business model, as Red Hat executive Michael Tiemann argues--one has to wonder if pretending to be open through the GPL accomplishes as much as fully opening up through Apache-style licensing would.

Open-source luminary Eric Raymond is pretty clear on this point:

Read More Article...

Just how strong is Red Hat's open-source business?

2009-04-24T20:45:00.000-07:00

Red Hat stands alone as the only significant public open-source company. Is this a testament to its execution, or is it a hint that open source is not well-suited to big business?

While I believe that open source will increasingly be the heart of many big technology businesses, it will almost certainly feed new entrants to markets, not incumbent vendors.

Looking at Red Hat's report on its most recent fiscal year (FY 2009), however, suggests that for these new entrants, open source can be a very profitable business indeed. I've already reported on the high-level financial results.

What is particularly intriguing is the data behind those results:

Red Hat is forecasting $720 million to $735 million in FY 2010, an annual growth rate of 10 percent to 13 percent over 2009.
40,000 new Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers in FY 2009, the "vast majority of which are...customers that are starting off small." Lots of room to grow, in other words.
Nearly half of Red Hat's top-100 renewal customers upgraded to or increased the number of RHEL advanced platform servers in their Data Centers. (In its fiscal Q4 2009, Red Hat renewed each of its top-25 contracts up for renewal at 132 percent of the prior year's value.)
30 percent of Red Hat's largest 30 deals included a Middleware (JBoss, usually) component.
Average contract lasts 23 to 24 months, with pricing remaining "consistent for the last several years."
Channel bookings grew 23 percent in FY 2009, while Red Hat more than doubled its number of partners to 4,500.
In fiscal Q4 2009, Red Hat closed two large deals, one of which was a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal that represented its largest conversion from free-to-paid (a key initiative for FY 2010) as well as a six-figure conversion deal with another customer.
57 percent of bookings came from the Americas, 28 percent from EMEA, and 15 percent from APAC.
The recession has not "changed the length of [Red Hat's] sales cycle in any meaningful way."
Subscription gross margin improved 60 basis points over the year to approximately 94 percent while training and services gross margin improved approximately 280 basis points from Q4 last year, driven mainly by better utilization and higher gross margins from the Amentra business.
Red Hat ended its fiscal year with $846 million in cash and investments and is now debt free.

One of Red Hat's big initiatives for FY 2010 is to increase the rate of adoption of its for-fee products from prospects still using for-free versions of its software (Fedora, CentOS, etc.), a process it only started in late 2008. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst notes in the earnings call, enterprises often find it "very expensive" to support themselves. As the data above suggests, Red Hat is getting better at convincing them to move to Red Hat's subscription offerings.

Read More Article...

Oracle faces culture shock in Sun's open source world

2009-04-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

Larry Ellison is a famously activist exponent of competitive strategy. An avowed student of Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Oracle chief executive has long followed an approach that sets Oracle's interests against those of its main rivals, with Microsoft, IBM and SAP cast as the enemy.

With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, however, he is about to walk on to new terrain where some of the methods that defined Oracle's traditional approach to strategy no longer apply.

Sun's main software assets - and the jewels for which Mr Ellison said this week that he had agreed to pay $7.4bn for the company - are all closely tied to the open source world: the Java programming language and development tools, which are partly open source, as well as the Solaris operating system and MySQL database.

That makes them unlike the roughly 200 software properties that Mr Ellison has acquired in the past. They are made freely available, and rely partly on the efforts of a wider group of developers to extend and support them. Their future success, in fact, relies on a technology community that stretches well beyond Oracle - and includes companies such as IBM, which also relies on Java as a core technology

Read More Article...

Red Hat, Synnex Enlist Open-Source ISVs for Midmarket Channel Push

2009-04-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

Red Hat wants a bigger piece of the midmarket, and it's enlisting the channel expertise of Synnex (NYSE:SNX) to help open-source software to gain more traction in this lucrative market segment.

On Tuesday, Red Hat introduced the Open Source Channel Alliance, a group of 9 open-source ISVs that have signed distribution deals with Synnex to bring a wide range of applications to market through the distributor's network of VARs and integrators.

Roger Egan, vice president of North American Channels for Red Hat, said the goal of the alliance is to extend the flexibility and cost savings of open-source software to a broader audience, as well as to move from a point-product focus to one more attuned with what he defined as "solution stacks."

Founding members of the Open Source Channel Alliance include: Alfresco (content management), EnterpriseDB (database), Ingres (database), Jaspersoft (business intelligence), Likewise (identity management), Pentaho (business intelligence), Zmanda (backup and recovery), Zenoss (network and systems monitoring) and Zimbra (e-mail and calendar groupware).

"We've come to learn that we have jewels in the relationships we've nurtured with open-source ISVs," Egan said. "We're trying to take our relationships and knowledge of channel and extend that to them."

Read More Article...

wikiHow Launches Open Source iPhone App

2009-04-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

From the folks at wikihow.com and Keishi Hattori comes a new application for the iPhone. wikiHow is ‘the world’s how-to manual’, and thanks to this new free app, you can load up a plethora of helpful articles and how-to’s no matter where you might be. Search, browse or store more than 50,000 how-to articles for online or offline viewing. There’s a ‘how-to of the day’, a bookmarking feature, and the app will even let you view YouTube videos that accompany some articles.

wikiHow comes complete with a bonus ‘wikiHow Survival Kit’, to get you through some of life’s most difficult situations… Including life saving techniques, medical treatment tips and how-to’s, how to build a fire, how to navigate without a compass, and my personal favorite… How to regain control of a spooked Camel. You never know when you might need such info, and heck, it’s just solid info everyone should know anyway!

Read More Article...

Reaping the benefits of Open Source

2009-04-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, mentioned: “By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use Open Source in direct or embedded forms.” The report added: “Open Source is a phenomenon with a broad impact. Chances are, if you do not think you use it, then you use it; and if you think you do use it, then you use lots more of it than you know.”

Why is Open Source becoming so pervasive? The reason is that we are now entering an era of Collaborative Innovation. Open Source Software (OSS) is the leading example of this trend, but the Open Source development model based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge is rapidly expanding to other areas like content (Wikipedia), medicine (Open Source Drug Discovery), scientific publishing (Public Library of Science) and other areas of society.

With 1.5 billion people online, the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform that mankind has ever seen, has enabled OSS like Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox, Open Office and others to flourish. In the next couple of years another 600 million people will join the Internet. Thus the trend towards increasing collaboration is only set to grow and this is reflected in the explosive growth of Open Source projects on websites like sourceforge.net and other collaborative websites.

Read More Article...

CIOs committing more to Red Hat, open source

2009-04-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

Like begets like, and in the software world, open-source purchasing begets even more open-source purchases.

At least, that's the lesson I take from a recent Piper Jaffray report that suggests JBoss customers plan to invest heavily in Red Hat technology.

Not only are JBoss customers more likely to buy deeply into Red Hat, which is not surprising (though for Red Hat, it must be gratifying), but they're also more likely to buy MySQL and less likely to buy from Microsoft.

This can't be good news for Microsoft, and it probably is one reason the company has become so aggressive with its intellectual-property portfolio.

The data also underscores IT's natural inclination to buy into open source in ever-increasing degrees. Once an enterprise has one good experience with open source, it wants to have many more, as this chart from IDC suggests:

Read More Article...

The future of open source Java development under IBM

2009-04-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

If IBM owns Java ...

The Sun-IBM merger hasn't been finalized but there's little doubt this week that the deal is coming together. Many are looking for clues as to how open source, Java-based development will change -- and change it will -- under the Big Blue Sun.

In the last few years, Sun Microsystems has warmed up to open-sourcing its software. In 2006, Sun opened up Java, and in 2007 it open-sourced most of Solaris under the GPLv3. Smaller, side projects, like NetBeans, the Java-based IDE were open-sourced as early as 2001. Sun has also long allowed developers at least some say in the progress of Java, through the Java Community Process. Historically, though, Sun has had a well-documented love/hate relationship with open source.

IBM has had a closer relationship with open source, but it wasn't always that way. In December of 1998, IBM realized that it needed to take a closer look at open source thanks to its customers beginning to pick up Linux. Before that, according to Peter G. Capek of IBM Research, IBM handled open source on a case-by-case basis.

Read More Article...

Microsoft Open to Open Source?

2009-04-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

That's what one Redmond exec says. Plus, Microsoft hits Apple on its price tag, certification as a game, and more.

When it comes to open source, Microsoft has a balancing act that would be tough for Philippe Petite. Redmond must pacify shareholders by hanging onto commercial licensing, but it can't totally irritate open source-friendly IT pros. If Microsoft is too much of an open source enemy, IT can turn their backs and move to Linux, MySQL and Apache in droves.

Microsoft argues that it's on the right open source track. It believes that open sourcers should respect Microsoft patents, and conversely Microsoft should interoperate with key open tools.

Recently, Microsoft exec Robert Youngjohns took to the podium at the Open Source Business Conference to argue Redmond's case. Youngjohns pointed to support of open file formats and PHP on Windows as examples of the new open source détente.

Mac Attack
I am a fan of the Mac for its stability, elegance and sheer fun factor. But there's one thing I hate: the price. I can buy an Acer netbook for around 300 bills -- less than a third of the price of the cheapest mobile Mac.

This reality is not lost on Microsoft, which recently launched an ad attacking the economics of Apple ownership. I haven't seen the commercial yet, but apparently Lauren, a young woman, wants a laptop with a 17-inch screen. She goes to the Apple store and quickly finds the only screen she can afford is four inches too small. Instead of uttering the words I might ("$6%%8&!!!!") she deadpans that she's "just not cool enough" for the Mac. Instead, she buys an HP for $700.

My daughter is a young woman named Lauren. She had an HP but ditched it for a MacBook, and so far my Lauren has never looked back. Somehow, I just couldn't talk her into that $300 Acer netbook!

Read More Article...

ASP.Net MVC 1.0 now open source

2009-04-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

Rails-like .Net Web system can now be used on Linux with Mono

According to Scott Guthrie, ASP.Net MVC 1.0 has now been released as open source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). Whoo-hoo!

For those of you who may be baffled by my enthusiasm, it is twofold. First, ASP.Net MVC brings much of the spirit of Ruby on Rails development to ASP.Net. Second, open-sourcing ASP.Net MVC means that it can easily be used on Linux with Mono.

Read More Article...

Sun's McNealy touts open source, bashes Oracle and IBM

2009-03-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

BOSTON -- With rumors of a takeover by IBM swirling around him, Sun Microsytems' chairman Scott McNealy tried to pitch a room of customers this week on the idea that Sun is a wily innovator whose software and hardware are far less costly than proprietary solutions from Oracle and IBM. But McNealy had little to offer loyal customers with Sun's legacy Sparc hardware.

McNealy touted Sun's vision of cloud computing and the folly of "best of breed" to about 200 customers and partners. "Frankenstein was best of breed, and every time he keels over, IBM comes in with $100,000 shock paddles," McNealy said. Sun's goal "is to get you out of the kitchen. We build data centers; you do whatever you do," adding that "building a data center out of 40 different parts is last year's strategy."

Open source gets a plug

Like the man who succeeded him at the job of CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, McNealy also loudly beat the open source drum, but in his own inimitable style. Open source code is less buggy and more stable than proprietary code and insulates companies from the "shelf-life-of-a-banana problem" in which technology becomes obsolete 18 months after it was released.

And because the code is available for all to see, open source software such as Sun's MySQL offers a "low barrier to exit." Compare that with Oracle's database and applications. "We all know the first hit of heroin is free -- in fact, Oracle will probably pay you to roll up your sleeve," McNealy said. But sooner rather than later, your data is trapped in proprietary Oracle databases, and "contract negotiations become contract explanations."

Read More Article...

Open-source firms urged to go on legal offensive

2009-03-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

Open-source software companies are missing out on a relatively inexpensive way to fight concerns about patent liability, according to an attorney who spoke at an open-source conference in San Francisco this week.

More open-source companies should be asking the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine patents that may pose a threat to them, as a cheaper, sometimes more suitable alternative to waging a patent lawsuit, said Van Lindberg, an attorney with Haynes and Boone LLP, who spoke at Infoworld's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

Fears about patent litigation have plagued both open-source companies and their customers, and stem from patent trolls as well as competitors. Microsoft, for example, has claimed that Linux may violate hundreds of its patents. It is currently suing GPS maker TomTom, partly over TomTom's use of the Linux kernel in its products.

Filing a re-examination request involves arguing to the USPTO that a patent should not have been granted in the first place, often because the technology was too obvious or because prior art, or previous examples of the technology, existed. Some open-source groups are using this method already, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation with its Patent Busting Project. But the strategy is underutilized by the open-source community, Lindberg said.

Read More Article...

Sun CTO Details Progress of Open-source Java

2009-03-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Sun Microsystems Inc. last week unveiled a portal that will detail its efforts to make its Java programming language available as open-source code. After the announcement, Bob Brewin, Sun's chief technology officer for software, talked to Computerworld about the state of the company's effort to make Java SE (Standard Edition) code available to the open-source community.

What is the goal for the new portal? The goal for the portal is transparency. We want to make sure that this is not just open-source, but an open community. There have been open-source projects in the past industrywide where it is just, "Here is our source, do what you want." The only way we can do that is to really engage the existing open-source communities out there and ask them for their advice, guidance and opinions.

Where does the effort to open the source code of Java stand today? We are currently planning to release significant pieces of our functionality in the fall. A Java programming compiler and the HotSpot Virtual Machine are examples. As we make sure the source is ready to go ... we'll begin releasing code over a period of time until we get the entire body out there.

What types of problems have you encountered so far in this effort? Identifying the various intellectual property encumbrances that might exist. An example is, within the graphics library, there are font rasterizers which allow you to represent characters on the screen. We have licensed those from other companies. We may ship other parts of the platform as open-source, and [the rasterizer] will ship as a binary. Once Java is open-sourced, the ideal situation is the community can help us create a replacement technology for it by developing it in open-source.

Read More Article...

Recession Is Driving Open Source Uptake, Says Novell

2009-03-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

But some open source experts claim the software is about more than saving money

Companies are turning to community developed software in larger numbers as the recession continues to bite into IT budgets, according to open source specialist Novell.

More than half of IT managers plan to "accelerate Linux adoption" this year, according to a survey carried out by research firm IDC, and sponsored by Novell, the former proprietary software maker which acquired the Suse Linux distribution in November 2003.

More than 72 percent of respondents are planning or have already decided to increase use of Linux on servers, according to a report on the research, which surveyed 300 senior IT professionals from organisations with more than 100 staff.

Surprisingly, the survey also showed that around 68 percent of companies were also planning to increase their use of Linux on the desktop. However given that existing uptake of the open source OS on the desktop is extremely low, it is not clear what this would translate into in terms of market share - although the rise of netbooks has seen interest in open source notebooks increase.

Read More Article...

Microsoft Rubs Shoulders with Open Source

2009-03-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

Microsoft and the Creative Commons turned up at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and released an Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 so authors can add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers.

Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.

The Add-in is supposed to make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the web in what Microsoft called "a meaningful way."

Microsoft remarks that "the nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the web, or within databases that can't be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research."

Read More Article...

Microsoft Releases Open Tools for Scientific Research

2009-03-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

Information necessary for science to progress can be hard to find. Addressing this challenge for researchers, Microsoft and Creative Commons have announced the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.

This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a database of ontologies and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.

"The Web is broken for scientific researchers -- full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles, but it is nearly impossible for us to find what we need," said John Wilbanks, vice president for Science at Creative Commons. "The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing."

Read More Article...

Open source to help Android overtake iPhone by 2012

2009-03-06T18:56:00.000-08:00

Google’s Android mobile platform will overtake Apple’s iPhone OS X within three years, Informa has predicted.

The analyst group said Android’s open source nature will give it a boost over Apple’s darling, but Nokia’s Symbian will maintain its lead over Android as well as challengers Linux and Microsoft.

“The decision to move the Symbian platform to open source is crucial in maintaining its leadership over Android, Linux and Microsoft,” said Gavin Byrne, a research analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media, in a statement. This is largely because of the increasing importance of developers in the mobile industry, as the value in the market moves from handsets to software to now to applications.

Symbian’s fall in popularity from 65 per cent market share in 2007 to 49 per cent last year reflects a poor showing by Nokia’s smartphone lineup as well as the platforms of its rivals.

Read More Article...

Stretching 2009 Budgets Using Open Source

2009-03-05T19:17:00.000-08:00

Hybrid software development is producing results

With a global recession looming, software development managers are being asked to slash resource budgets in 2009 while maintaining schedules. When you need to deliver more features with fewer coding resources, there is only one answer: hybrid development. Hybrid software development involves the combination of internally developed code with external code from vendors, partners, and, especially, the open source community.

Stretching the Budget, Improving Productivity
In this new era of software development, companies will need to rely on development processes and procedures that institutionalize best practices around the integration of internal and external code. This core competency will become one of the ways that world-class software development teams attain competitive advantage. Excellence in managing hybrid development will flow straight to the bottom line, enabling development teams to deliver new applications and features with fewer resources.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would start a project in 2009 and plan to write it entirely from scratch. There are freely available open source databases, kernels, stacks, report generators, XML parsers, utilities, tools, platforms, and more. The list of available open source components, methods, classes, and algorithms is simply too numerous to mention. One customer that I recently spoke to reused open source components in 35% of a $3M software development project. This both reduced schedule risk and produced significant savings for that organization.

Managing Risk
The strategic reuse of open source software brings tremendous potential benefits, but also creates new risks and issues that must be managed: security vulnerabilities, conflicting license obligations, version control issues, code leakage, export regulations, and policy issues. These issues are only somewhat unique to the reuse of external software, but are especially challenging to manage for a code base in which there may be relatively less in-house expertise.

The introduction of an external component into a project needs to be managed as an integrated set of business processes involving software developers in partnership with purchasing, IT, security, legal, product management, the technology office, the open source review board, and any other internal groups that have a stake in the policy administration of software. This is important, because engineering can potentially produce functional code that is dysfunctional from a business and compliance perspective.

Read More Article...

What can government do for open source

2009-02-27T19:08:00.000-08:00

Sun chairman Scott McNealy, continuing his rising public role, is in Washington banging the drum for open source. Think of it as McNealy 2.0.

He’s not asking what Sun can do for government but what government can do for Sun. A commitment to open source would give Sun hardware a big leg-up on procurement. By the numbers Sun is still a hardware company and McNealy its chief salesman.

What’s interesting to me is that some in the White House already understand the power of open source. Dries Buytaert confirmed 10 days ago that the Recovery.Gov Web site is based on Drupal, the open source CMS. (The illustration is from that site.)

Read More Article...

UK government eyes open source for flexibility, cost savings

2009-02-26T19:37:00.000-08:00

The UK is seeking to boost adoption of open source software in government IT in order to save costs. The new procurement policies laid out in a government plan give preference to open source software in some cases and broadly mandates the use of open standards.

In an effort to cut costs and use taxpayer money more efficiently, the government of the UK intends to increase its adoption of open source software. A report issued Wednesday by the Chief Information Officer Council outlines the benefits of using open source in government IT and establishes a roadmap for improving procurement policies so that they are more conducive to open source adoption.

In the report, digital engagement minister Tom Watson says that the collaborative development model and the high potential for code reuse inherent in open source software deliver real value. Since the UK government's initial push for internal open source adoption in 2004, Linux and open source technology have become a critical part of the government's IT infrastructure.

"Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations," he wrote in the report. "It has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for reuse by others."

Read More Article...

Sun Releases Open Source Standard for Storage Encryption

2009-02-20T19:13:00.000-08:00

Claims world's first open source generic communication protocol between a Key Manager and encrypting device

Sun Microsystems has released what it claims is the world's first generic communication protocol between a Key Manager and an encrypting device into an open source community. The protocol is implemented as a complete toolkit and is downloadable from the OpenSolaris website.

Governments, finance, healthcare, retail and other vertical markets need to comply with current regulatory laws that create mandates to protect sensitive stored data. To support these requirements, this protocol is available to customers using the Sun StorageTek KMS 2.0 Key Manager and Sun StorageTek T9840D, T10000A, T10000B Enterprise Drives, as well as Sun StorageTek HP LTO4 drives shipped in Sun libraries. A number of additional partners are developing products based on this protocol, including EMC, whose RSA security division has talked about releasing it as an option on their RKM Key Manager.

"Open Storage solutions allows customers to break free from the chains of proprietary hardware and software and this new protocol extends this lifeline into the expensive and highly fragmented encryption market," said Sun's Jason Schaffer. "Open source equals customer value for encryption solutions and Sun now offers the only solution on the market that works across multiple vendors and suppliers."

By releasing the Sun protocol as open source, Sun says it is taking a step towards unifying the technology. Sun continues to work with partners in the industry and with appropriate standards bodies such as IEEE 1619.3 Working Group and OASIS to further develop and formalize the interface as an industry standard. RSA is currently developing a solution using this protocol to work with their RKM key manager. IBM drive division is working on supporting this protocol for their IBM LTO4 drive shipped in Sun Libraries. Additionally, Sun has shared this protocol with numerous other industry partners including computer OEMs, back up application providers, disk array and switch manufacturers.

Source : http://www.ddj.com/

Open source not innovative enough for Fast Company

2009-02-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

It's surprising that there isn't even a general mention about open source software or related vendors

Fast Company recently published a list of the "world's most innovative companies." Funny enough, the No. 1 company is really not a company; it's Team Obama. Bygones.

IT vendors like Google (No. 2), Apple (No. 4), Cisco (No. 5), Intel (No. 6), Amazon (No. 9), HP (No. 12), IBM (No. 19), and Microsoft (No. 34) are in the top 50. However, there isn't one open source vendor listed. The closest OSS vendor is Sun, which made the 2008 list and hence is included in the "33 companies from last year's Fast Company 50 that didn't make the list this time but deserve watching."

Read More Article...

Sun offers open-source encryption key management protocol

2009-02-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

It's working with standards committees to win acceptance of its protocol

Sun Microsystems Inc. announced today that it is throwing its hat into the standards arena, proposing that its open-source key management application programming interface (API) be used as a universal way to allow encrypting devices to communicate with key management systems.

Sun said its reseller partners can now adopt the open-source protocol to handle encryption keys without additional licensing. The protocol is implemented as a complete toolkit and can be downloaded from the Open Solaris Web site.

"This defines the way a key manager exchanges encryption keys with an encrypted device such as a tape drive or a disk drive," said Piotr Polanowski, Sun's encryption product manager. "The market has been pretty fractured when it comes to key management technology, and we just want to be able to offer widest availability of that. We believe it benefits our customers, and so it will ultimately benefit us as well." Sun said its API protocol is currently available to customers using the Sun StorageTek KMS 2.0 Key Manager and StorageTek T9840D, T10000A and T10000B tape drives, as well as Sun's HP LTO4 drives shipped in Sun libraries.

"Open Storage solutions allows customers to break free from the chains of proprietary hardware and software, and this new protocol extends this lifeline into the expensive and highly fragmented encryption market, Jason Schaffer, senior director of storage product management at Sun, said in a statement.

Earlier this month, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and EMC said they are also working on proposing a new standard, called the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) to make their encryption management software work together. The standard is being proposed through the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the consortium best known for its development of Web services standards.

Read More Article...

Open Source Desktop Publishing Software

2009-02-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

Collaboration to expand awareness and use of lower-cost computer applications

In a bid to promote the wider use of open-source software in Thailand, the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) has joined five local computer manufacturers to pre-install open-source software suites in personal computers.

The five companies are SVOA, D Com, Synnex (Thailand), IT Bakery and Powell Computer.

Nectec's director Pansak Siriruchatapong said Nectec was developing and customising open-source software suites for the local-brand PC companies, including the operating system Ubuntu Linux and applications such as Open Office, Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software.

"This is the first time that end-users will experience a set of ready-for-use open-source suites - not simply the operating system - pre-loaded into new computers they buy. It is very convenient for them to get all the necessary computer applications at lower cost," Pansak said.

The move is expected to increase the local adoption of open-source software from its present level of less than 1 per cent, and to build a greater awareness of open-source software among consumers.

He said that in the past, most open-source adoption was by "hard core" users, and more uses were in the server environment. This project aims to expand acceptance of open-source software among consumers in the personal-computer environment.

Read More Article...

Game up for desktop Linux?

2009-02-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

[Duncan McLeod Financial Mail] With Microsoft readying itself for the release of a fast, streamlined operating system in Windows 7, the Linux community needs to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat if the free and open-source operating system is to stay relevant on desktop computers.

Microsoft last month released a “beta” or test version of Windows 7, its newest operating system for desktop PCs. Unlike Vista, which was derided by consumers and the technology press for being bloated, slow and problematic for many users, Windows 7 is winning plaudits from those who have installed it.

Windows 7 runs faster than Vista and works well on the new generation of “netbooks”, the low-cost, low-power laptops from the likes of Acer, Toshiba and Asus. These lightweight, barebones machines typically sell for between R3 000 and R6 000, prompting many consumers who use their computers for Web browsing, e-mail and basic productivity tasks to shun more expensive notebooks.

Most netbooks are, however, unable to run Vista, causing a big headache for Microsoft — the company has been forced to continue selling and supporting the now eight-year-old Windows XP on these machines. Worse, the rise of netbooks has resulted in Linux, which is less demanding of system resources than Vista, gaining a toehold in a market that Microsoft had completely dominated.

The company is fighting back hard with Windows 7. The new operating system, due for release later this year, could spell the end for Linux on the desktop — before the free system, developed by enthusiast programmers around the world, has had a chance to establish a meaningful place for itself.

The problems for desktop Linux go beyond Windows 7, though. Ubuntu, the most popular version of Linux — its development is funded by SA-born billionaire Mark Shuttleworth — is looking increasingly dated.

Next to Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X, Ubuntu and other Linuxes are looking old fashioned. Other than some nifty 3D effects, Ubuntu has not had a significant refresh of its graphical user interface since it was launched more than four years ago.

Read More Article...

Microsoft's secret deals on open source

2009-02-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

It's a familiar story. Microsoft does a secret deal with a company over patent licences. Almost no details are provided about which patents, how much money has changed hands, or why, except for one vaguely worded press release that talks about how such secret deals benefit the customer through openness and innovation.

This time, the lucky donor of cash for secrets is Brother, which will now be allowed to use Microsoft patents to make printers. As Microsoft doesn't make printers – indeed, doesn't even make printer drivers – it is an interesting exercise to try and guess what's actually happened. It's fruitless to ask either of the companies – and we did try. In cases like this, as in the best gangster movies, nobody ain't sayin' nothin'.

Patents, you might remember, are designed to encourage innovation by the disclosure of information: when a $1.8bn company pays a $230bn company a secret amount for secret rights to a secret list of patents – something else is going on than the open promotion of innovation and "a healthy and vibrant IT ecosystem."

In this case, as so often, it involves Linux. Brother uses Linux in some of its printers. Microsoft claims that Linux infringes its patents. It won't say in public which ones, and it doesn't attempt to press such claims against companies – such as IBM – who would want to fight back and not care about the cost (Ask SCO how that business with AIX went). It doesn't go after people who have little to lose and plenty to gain by fighting back, such as individual high-profile developers or small open-source teams. And it has never gone to court on this matter.

Read More Article...

Canadian government eyes open source, asks for feedback

2009-02-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

The Canadian government is looking to shave costs wherever it can and is now eyeing open source software as one way to accomplish that goal.

The government of Canada has issued an official Request For Information (RFI) on open source software and is looking for feedback and public guidance to help shape procurement policies. This move could be a prelude to broader adoption of free and open source software in the Canadian government's IT infrastructure.

Although Canada has weathered the global financial crisis better than many other countries, its government is looking for ways to compensate for a recent glut of stimulus spending that has generated the country's first budget deficit in over a decade. To help keep the economic recovery plan on track, Canada's government is looking for ways to spend smarter.

The language used in the RFI makes it pretty clear that cost reduction is priority number one. It uses the broad term "NO CHARGE LICENSED SOFTWARE", which it defines as software that is open source or available at no cost. According to the RFI, Canada is exploring no-cost software options on the desktop as well as the server, in categories that include operating systems, office suites, and automation systems.

Read More Article...

If Microsoft Loved Open Source, Who Would It Buy?

2009-02-04T18:25:00.000-08:00

Could Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) take its cash reserves and buy an open source company? Why not? Who expected Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) and Citrix Systems (NSDQ: CTXS) to become such big investors in open source. Citrix' purchase of XenSource sure has worked out--for Microsoft, in my opinion. And that example might seed a desire for more open source code in Microsoft's camp.

Just because Microsoft bought an open source company doesn't mean it would have to add its code to Windows or some other product, then give it away. Oracle bought InnoDB and Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB as ways to expand its customer base and product line, and it did so without putting Oracle 11g under the GPL. Microsoft could do the same thing.

I don't want to carry this argument too far. Some people will say Microsoft is about as likely to buy an open source company as it is to make Windows open source. Ah, check my thoughts on that topic here.

I don't think any purchase is on the immediate horizon, but I don't rule out such a thing happening in the next two years. Microsoft, more slowly than most, has begun to discern the value of open source code functioning with Windows and the rest of its product line. When Citrix bought XenSource for $500 million, Microsoft spokesmen acknowledged they gained both Linux and virtualization expertise from its close ally through the purchase. That expertise speeded the delivery of its hypervisor, Hyper-V.

Read More Article...

The smallest threat to open source in 2009

2009-02-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

How much of a problem is security updating for open source software going to be in 2009?

On Jan. 1, Dana Blankenhorn published the sensationally titled The biggest threat to open source in 2009.

His thesis is simple: that, because open source software usually lacks any mechanisms for easily updating to the latest security patched version, the growing popularity of open source software will render it more vulnerable to problems than its closed source counterparts.

As a lead-in to his main point, he said:

There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged.

There seems to be a common malady amongst opinionated tech writers--that of never quite getting it when it comes to the fundamental principles of security. A particular favorite for being ignored is that of security through obscurity.

Many many moons ago, I wrote what I think is a decent treatment of the subject as it applies to open source software, Security through visibility. While it makes a pretty strong case for ignoring the bleatings of "popularity is insecurity" doomsayers, it's really only the first step toward full understanding of all the problems with the assumption that the only thing "secure" about open source software is obscurity.

Read More Article...

Microsoft's Web Sandbox is now open source

2009-02-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's Web Sandbox Live Labs project is now available under an open source license. Microsoft chose the Apache 2.0 license for the project, but pointed out that the project will not become an Apache project, although the vendor has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since July 2008.

The Sandbox technology aims at allowing developers to create secure mash-up solutions and page extensions, like ads, or web-based gadgets, by isolating the components. In addition, the project wants to provide interoperability with script frameworks.

The software giant presented Web Sandbox in a Community Technology Preview (CTP) at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in autumn 2008, but the project was slightly overlooked, as the media largely responded to other technologies, like Windows 7 and Azure. The project is based on Microsoft's experience with DHTML, web-based gadgets and the BrowserShield project.

Source : http://www.heise.de/

Linux and the Open Source Model: Does It Work?

2009-02-01T18:27:00.000-08:00

Does the Open Source Model work better than its commercial alternative? This post comes on the heels of one of my fellow Staff Writer's posting the story, "A Modest Idea: What If Microsoft Open Sourced Windows?" And I'm aiming this commentary at Microsoft too but it applies to any company who seeks profit over what is fundamentally correct behavior in the marketplace. I'm not against anyone making a profit. Profit is good. Forfeiting good business sense and sacrificing employees in the name of profit are bad.

Steve Ballmer announced the other day that Microsoft is joining the host of other companies by laying off thousands of workers. In his company-wide email, he blamed the poor economy for the layoffs.

"But it is also clear that we are not immune to the effects of the economy. Consumers and businesses have reined in spending, which is affecting PC shipments and IT expenditures."

Yes, it's true that the economy is not great right now but I don't suppose their layoffs have anything to do with the dismal performance of Microsoft's flagship desktop operating system, Vista, does it? Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that many are turning away from Microsoft in record numbers because of his poor performance as well.

Read More Article...

Why aren’t schools using open source software?

2009-01-30T19:07:00.000-08:00

The BBC asked a similar question as they covered the British Education Training and Technology show.

With Open Source Software (OSS) freely available, covering almost every requirement in the national curriculum, a question has to be asked why schools do not back it more fully, possibly saving millions of pounds…In the education sector, OSS is promoted and used by only a handful of self-motivated technologists looking to stretch their technology budget.

Critics say Becta - the government agency that oversees the procurement of all technology for schools - has not done enough to promote OSS.

In the States, the use of open source software often feels actively discouraged; it certainly wouldn’t be encouraged or promoted by a government agency. However, Europe as a whole generally tends to be more pro-open source than the US.

Read More Article...

Microsoft releases Web Sandbox under open source

2009-01-29T18:49:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's technology for securing Web content is being offered under Apache license

Microsoft has made source code for its Live Labs Web Sandbox project for securing Web content through isolation available via open source under the Apache License 2.0, according to a report this week on Microsoft's Port 25 site.

Web Sandbox features technology for mashing up code while maintaining process isolation, quality of service protection, and security. It is intended to address a problem in which Web gadgets, mash up components, advertisements, and other third-party content on Web sites either will run full trust alongside content or are isolated inside of IFrames. This results in many Web applications being intrinsically insecure with unpredictable service quality.

Since announcing the technology preview at Professional Developer Conference 2008 in Los Angeles in October, Microsoft has open-sourced the Web Sandbox framework and is partnering with industry leaders to evolve Web Sandbox into an industry-wide solution, Microsoft said.

Microsoft is looking for developers to experiment with Web Sandbox, even including samples so developers can try to break the Sandbox.

"Since the initial release of Web Sandbox we have received a great deal of feedback from the Web security community. We have also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners, and the standards communities that would like to adopt the technology when it is ready. Our goal is to achieve widespread adoption of Web Sandbox and to help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks," Microsoft Live Labs said on its Web Sandbox Web page.

Read More Article...

Mozilla gives £70k grant for open-source video

2009-01-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

The Mozilla Foundation, which oversees Firefox and other open-source projects, has given a $100,000 (£70,000) grant towards development of the Theora open video technology.

Theora is a lossy video compression layer used in Ogg, which is an open container format used for streaming and multimedia. The most popular audio layer used in Ogg is Vorbis. Theora's main proprietary competitors are Mpeg-4 and WMV, while Vorbis competes with MP3 and others.

In a blog post on Monday, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, said Theora was "the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the internet".

"We also believe that [Theora] can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the development of Theora software with a $100k grant," Shaver wrote. "Administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, this grant will be used to support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries."

Mozilla's director of evangelism, Christopher Blizzard, wrote in his blog on Monday: "Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the technology direction of the web", but said video remains an exception, as it is tied to proprietary formats.

"More often than not, [video formats] are subject to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats [is] often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded start-ups," Blizzard wrote.

Open Source Software Shines in Recession's Gloom

2009-01-27T19:05:00.000-08:00

With a tough economy forcing organizations to look for ways to cut costs—and with many open source projects reaching a maturity level that IT executives are comfortable with—the technology might be on the verge of making serious inroads into corporate IT environments

Not that long ago, open source software was regarded by many technology leaders as something to be used in a limited, even experimental way. Even today, some CIOs are skeptical about open source as a viable option for enterprise applications or to support critical business functions.

But interest in open source software is high, according to industry research. A report released by Stamford, Conn., research firm Gartner Inc. in November 2008 shows that the adoption of open source software is becoming pervasive. Of the 274 worldwide companies surveyed by Gartner, 85% said they were currently using open source in their enterprises and the remaining 15% said they expect to use it in the next 12 months. Only one-third of the 1,017 technology and business professionals surveyed by Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass., in December 2007 expressed no interest in open source products.

Read More Article...

Should federal government go open source?

2009-01-26T18:54:00.000-08:00

Could the federal government be going open source? The BBC reports that President Obama has asked former Sun CEO Scott McNealy to report on the relative benefits of open source software. Imagine that: a president who has heard of open source software.

And McNealy will report just how large those benefits are.

It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software. Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money.

And he wants open source mandates.

The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open software.

Coming from McNealy, the opinion is hardly a neutral analysis. Sun is a vigorous proposal of open source and Unix; cofounder Bill Joy was a primary author of BSD. During his tenure as CEO, McNealy’s hallmark was his constant attacks on Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Read More Article...

Open source survey: Mobile most lucrative

2009-01-23T18:13:00.000-08:00

Mobile application development projects bring in more money than other types of open source software development, a study found. The survey was based on "extensive interviews" of 380 developers involved in open source Linux projects, says Dublin, Ireland, based research firm Research and Markets.

Though generally focused on enterprise and desktop Linux development, the survey also explores mobile and embedded development. Topics include languages, distributions, type and number of applications released, major obstacles to Linux and open source, development tools, security concerns, preferred chipsets, and licensing issues. A partial table of contents is listed farther below, and a link to the full contents list is found at the end of the story.

Open source distribution channels by revenue. Source: Research and Markets

Research and Markets is keeping the bulk of its Linux survey results close to the vest for now (except to paying customers, of course), but it has released a few interesting tidbits, covering distribution channels, bug fix durations, and types of open source projects. Here are some snapshots:

Read More Article...

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy

2009-01-22T18:24:00.000-08:00

In an effort to reduce rising government IT costs, the Obama administration could turn to open source software. Sun cofounder and former CEO Scott McNealy says that the Obama administration has asked him to prepare a paper that will address this topic and provide guidance on potential open source adoption strategies.

There are many ways that state and federal governments can save money by adopting open source software; large-scale Linux deployments in public schools in the United States have been highly successful, for instance. Overseas, foreign governments are bringing down IT costs by migrating technical infrastructure in government facilities. In addition to helping cut costs, open technologies also increase interoperability and give IT departments more flexibility in how they use and manage software.

Right man for the job?

Although Obama's interest in open source looks like a promising sign that the incoming government is serious about reforming federal IT procurement policies, the decision to call on Sun's eccentric cofounder is an incomprehensible twist. McNealy's long history of bizarre and contradictory positions on open source software make him a less than ideal candidate for helping to shape national policy on the subject. Asking Scott McNealy to write a paper about open source software is a bit like asking Dick Cheney to write a paper about government transparency.

Read More Article...

Sun's open source Java move gets mixed reviews

2009-01-21T18:37:00.000-08:00

Two years later, availability is up, but Sun remains in charge of its future

In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change.

Some, including the chief executive at Eclipse Foundation and Sun's own James Gosling, considered the father of Java, have seen little impact. "That was mostly about community relations," says Gosling, who is CTO of the client software group at Sun. "So far, I think it hasn't had too much [effect]," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, which was spawned in an IBM-based effort to build Java tools.

But Sun's Jeet Kaul, senior vice president for the Java client group at Sun, sees it differently: "We have gotten a lot of people who have taken up the code and started building solutions with it. So the adoption that we have had, the adoption curve has grown dramatically ever since we did open source," he says. But he could not cite specific adoption figures.

"Sun's revenue for Java has increased ever since we did open source and has increased by double-digit numbers," Kaul says. Opportunities have increased in areas such as support, services, and solutions, and Java revenues will grow in 2009, he adds.

Read More Article...

Open source developers take to the cloud

2009-01-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

As many as 40 per cent of developers working on open source projects plan to offer their applications as web services hosted by cloud providers, according to the latest figures from Evans Data.

The market research firm said that its latest survey of over 360 developers proves that the cloud is becoming ever more popular, with 28 per cent of developers interviewed saying they plan to employ Google's App Engine, and 15 per cent Amazon's cloud computing services.

Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com cloud services were also mentioned, but were by no means as popular as Google or Amazon.

The increasing costs of labour, datacentre resources and power are purportedly the reasons pushing firms rapidly in the direction of cloud computing.

"Many companies are using this model to not only reduce infrastructure costs, but simultaneously increase their computational capabilities," said Evans Data president and chief executive John Andrews.

Evans Data estimates that 30 per cent of open source applications are actually distributed through open source software portals, more than by any other means. However, the report also points out that those distributing their applications on mobile app stores are more likely to make money from them.

Read More Article...