How Much Open Source Are You Using?

In CIO.com India this week, Bernard Golden touts the advantages of governance for your open source tools — especially at the enterprise level.

He starts with an anecdote that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz shared shortly after the company had acquired the MySQL open source database. It goes something like this: After the CIO of a large financial institution told Schwartz the organization didn’t use MySQL because it was a proprietary software shop, a sales associate accompanying Schwartz was able to share that the organization had downloaded the open source database 1,300 times in a six-month period.

The CIO was completely unaware that the application was popular among her staffers, let alone being used in the organization. Golden points out that in such cases, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance could, in such cases, prove risky — both in terms of meeting open source license requirements and because it means the CIO doesn’t have as much visibility into the organization’s infrastructure as she probably ought to have. That’s why, he says, companies should have policies in place to address downloading open source programs in an enterprise environment, and they should also implement controls with which to enforce those policies.

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Open-Source Reshaping the Software Industry

Volunteers drive Mozilla’s success; Microsoft concerned

The war for Web browser market share is kicking into high gear.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser. The browser is just extraordinarily strategic,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer and a director at the Mozilla Foundation, according to the NewsFactor Network.

A Web browser is a type of software that allows one to view information on the Internet. The most well known browsers are Microsoft Corporation’s Internet Explorer and Apple, Inc.’s Safari.

Mozilla, which holds a 28 percent market share, recently released the newest version of its open source browser, dubbed Firefox 3. Firefox was downloaded more than 8 million times on its first day of release.

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Is open source software insecure? An introduction to the issues

This briefing note is intended to answer questions that those new to open source software may have about its security. By definition, open source software is software for which the source code is available to anyone. Source code can be thought of as a kind of blueprint for the software, a form which is ideal for gaining understanding of how a program works or modifying its design. A program's source code is in many cases processed by another program called a 'compiler' to create the actual file that runs on an end-user's computer. This file is called the object code (or executable), and it is this that an end-user receives when buying traditional proprietary, closed-source software like, for example, Microsoft Word. In comparison to its source code, the object code of a program is very difficult for a human being to comprehend or modify. Thus, open source software can be said to invite and facilitate modification, while closed source software tends not to. These technical characteristics are also generally carried through into the accompanying licences; open source licences permit modification and redistribution by the user, while closed source end user licence agreements tend to contractually bind the user to refrain from modifying or redistributing the software that they cover.

In this document, the first section aims to identify the chief ways in which software can be insecure, the second section discusses general approaches to mitigating software insecurity, and the final section compares closed and open source development methodologies in the light of the information from the preceding sections.

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