Sun Launches New Site for Hosting Open Source Projects

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?

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Government CIOs 'do not understand open source'

Government CIOs that dismiss open source software because of support issues, which is the case for the Australian Tax Office, Defence and Centrelink, simply do not understand the concept, according to Sun Microsystems.

In April, ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet Australia revealed that a number of high-profile government CIOs claimed their primary reason for not deploying open source software was a lack of support.

"For our really big core stuff, we really need the support we get. We buy the support, so we're not likely to see massive open source right through the place," said Centrelink CIO, John Wadeson.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems, argues that support for open source projects of any scale is available, and has suggested that reliance on proprietary vendors based solely on their ability to provide support is not a sound business case.

"CIOs who are thinking there's a lack of support are probably people who are thinking solely in terms of spreading the risk over their existing infrastructure," he said.

Phipps claimed that the "commercial strength support" available for open source is comparable with that provided by proprietary vendors. He also explained that administrators have the option of "hiring experts to train their staff".

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Free software helps Indian techies in many projects

BANGALORE: Free software and open source tools are helping a range of Indian entrepreneurs to build software solutions that enhance the potential of computing for millions.

With names like Hindawi, Zmanda and Dhvani or KDE Hindi, these products are helping an entire new generation of software developres.

Hindawi (hindawi.in) is a suite of BPO services & open source programming languages. It allows people to write computer programmes in languages other than English.

The Zmanda Recovery Manager (zmanda.com) is a perl-based utility used to automate backup and recovery of MySQL databases. Prominent on its management team are Indian names like Chander Kant, Paddy Sreenivasa, Ram 'TK' Krishnamurthy, and K.K. George.

Dhvani (dhvani.sourceforge.net) is a text-to-speech Indian-language initiative. It allows a Simputer to read what the user types. It was built to ensure that literacy and English skills were not essential to use the Simputer.

Using images in conjunction with voice output in local languages makes a computing device accessible to a larger section of the Indian population. Other winners are Fedora Spins, and KDE Hindi of indlinux.org.

MayaVi (mayavi.sourceforge.net) is an open source tool that allows easy and interactive three-dimensional visualisation of data.

In 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran, then a IIT Madras aerospace engineering student, started work on the MayaVi project with his colleagues to visualise computational fluid dynamics data.

"Popular tools available for the purpose at that time were proprietary and prohibitively expensive," noted the Linux For You magazine, published from Delhi, which has announced its FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) India Awards for those involved in a "saga of innovation".

Peter Thomas of Satyam here worked on JTrac (jtrac.info), a FOSS "issue-tracking web application". That is a computer software package which manages and maintains lists of issues, as needed by an organisation. It is used to create, update and resolve reported customer issues.

Abhas Abhinav's DeepRoot Linux team here has developed deepOfix (deeproot.in/deepofix), which "gives many proprietary mail servers a run for their money", commented Linux For You.

Another of the Indian winners was TuxType - into which five students of the Government Engineering College at Thrissur built Unicode Malayalam support.

This made TuxType (tuxtype.sourceforge.net) the first FOSS typing tutor to bundle Unicode support for Indian languages, at a time when Indian language solutions in computing is eagerly awaited, so that the potential across the country can be better tapped.

WANem (wanem.sourceforge.net) is a wide area network (WAN) emulator, coming from the Tata Consultancy Services. It was built to provide team-members WAN access. Other WAN emulators were hardware-based, expensive and available to only a select few in test labs.

Source : http://www.bpooutsourcingindia.com/

Open source code examined

Coverity finds improvements during project to examine more than 55 million lines of code

A code analysis of popular open source software projects has revealed that the quality and security of open source software continues to improve.

In its "Scan Report on Open Source Software 2008," Coverity analyzed more than 55 million lines of code on a recurring basis from more than 250 open source projects. Detailed Tuesday, the project utilized the Coverity Prevent static source code analyzer and was done during a two-year period. Some of the projects analyzed included the Apache Web server, Linux, Firefox, and the Samba file and printer sharing system. Scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby were examined as well.

"We run the source code through our static analysis tool, which identifies certain types of software defects for them and developers can look at the result," said David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity.

Coverity in its analysis found that open source developers are interested in code quality and making efforts to make it better and more secure, Maxwell said.

"We can see from the statistics many developers are quite passionate about writing good code," Maxwell said.

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