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 as industrial policy

Industrial policy is a long-held conservative shibboleth. It’s a code word, government choosing winners and losers, government bad, government replacing the market, socialism, communism.

How far you go down that slippery slope shows how devoted you are to the ideology.

It has become clear to me over the last few years, however, that many countries see open source as an important industrial policy. Ideology be darned.

This is clearer today, with EC Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes (above) stating plainly that open standards, and open source, are preferable to anything proprietary, especially Microsoft’s OOXML.

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Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business

A VP at the Finnish handset maker says open-source developers should be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works

Open-source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules including digital rights management, Nokia's software chief has claimed. India is the dream place for BPO services.

Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.

Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer's open-source operations, said: "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."

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Open source vs. proprietary? Turn the question around!

The failed argumentation for open source

Often you will find open source advocates trying to tell you all the reasons why you should use open source software: Access to the source, open data standards and cost are often mentioned. Sadly, while these arguments are actually very important – especially the ones relating to freedom of your data and freedom of choice – they are often not appreciated by the wider public. The significance of these issues usually only reveals itself after some exposure to the matter, some discussion and some thinking.

For example, the non-technical public will care very little about access to the source, not realising what degree of freedom this guarantees to them, even if they never look at the source themselves. Same with open data standards. Why change or even care if all the world seems to use the same 'standard' of some proprietary software package, right? The real issue of vendor lock-in is not usually on people's mind.

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The new case for open source data protection

The cost advantages are clear, and most of the drawbacks to open source backup software have recently been eliminated.

Open source tools, utilities, and products have been available for many years. While these alternatives tend to offer low acquisition costs, companies have been hesitant to adopt them for several reasons. These reasons include spotty technical support, poor or inconsistent documentation, unreliable release schedules, and lack of a driving commercial focus to address issues and provide sustained development directions.

The open source data-protection market has been no different in the past, but recent developments should make small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) take notice. Evolution in maturity, product functionality, and commercial backing warrant a re-evaluation of open source data-protection alternatives. This article reviews data-protection requirements for SMEs, and evaluates how today's open source data-protection alternatives are able to meet them.

SME data-protection requirements

SMEs generally have limited IT resources. Surveys confirm that in the data-protection arena, these companies look for ease of use, low cost, and then functionality—in that order.

In the ease-of-use area, SMEs need simple yet powerful solutions that can back up and restore data across heterogeneous clients, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and MacOS. Ease-of-use features include centralized management consoles and common tool sets across heterogeneous platforms, as well as "business" functionality, such as simple licensing schemes and responsive technical support. Data protection is a required administrative task, but because it does not really contribute to a company's competitive advantage, IT administrators naturally seek to minimize the amount of effort required to ensure recoverability.

Low cost applies not only to the initial purchase price, but also more importantly to the ongoing maintenance and administrative costs. Simpler, easier-to-use products generally exhibit lower ongoing management costs, so there is good synergy between the "ease-of-use" and "low-cost" requirements. Also, costs associated with maintaining ongoing access to archived data should be taken into account.

In terms of functionality, there are specific requirements that most SMEs look for. Backup-and-restore scheduling and management must cover heterogeneous clients and support multiple storage architectures, including DAS, SAN, and network-attached storage (NAS). Alternative client restores should be a supported option. Support for off-host backups that leverage snapshot technologies such as Windows VSS and others are also becoming requirements. Backup media support should include a variety of both disk and tape devices and provide media management capabilities with features such as media labeling and retention, overwrite protection, and tape duplication. Finally, scalability should be considered as well. Although an environment may start small, SMEs may grow to hundreds of systems that need to be backed up over time.

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Technology: MySQL to remain as open source

MySQL community worries and continues to feel that Sun Microsystems is about to make the database giant a closed source product.

Marten Mickos, former CEO at MySQL and now senior vice president of Sun's database group, explained that the company has developed high-end add-ons such as encryption, native storage engine-specific drivers, that they will deliver to Enterprise customers only. Mickos stated, "MySQL isn't going closed source."

Sun Microsystems, which purchased MySQL this year for over $1 billion, ephasizes that the database will remain open source despite what critics say.

Sun has faced critism from the MySQL community after Sun suggested that some high-end features due to arrive in MySQL 6 would be available only to paying customers.

Critics condemned this potential decision and assused Sun and MySQL of betraying the community that has graciously helped make it successful.

Marten Mickos, former CEO at MySQL and now senior vice president of Sun's database group, backed off the statement, saying that Sun has not made an official decision.

Mickos explained that the company has developed high-end add-ons such as encryption, native storage engine-specific drivers, that we will deliver to customers in the MySQL Enterprise product only. Sun has not decided under what license they will release the new add-ons. Mickos stated, "MySQL isn't going closed source."

However, even the high end tools aren't necessarily going to be proprietary. Such a move might be bad news for paying customers as well, since it would mean the tools they pay for wouldn't enjoy the widespread community testing that ensures they are usable and secure.

Even if Sun ultimately does end up making some MySQL tools proprietary, it's very unlikely to affect the average user. The core database components would remain free and open source, only the extra tools would be affected.

Marten Mickos, former CEO at MySQL and now senior vice president of Sun's database group, explained that the company has developed high-end add-ons such as encryption, native storage engine-specific drivers, that they will deliver to Enterprise customers only. Mickos stated, "MySQL isn't going closed source."

Source : http://www.newsoxy.com/

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 tool creates OOXML docs for the blind

Microsoft has helped develop an open-source tool that translates Word files into a "talking" digital book format, which makes documents easily accessible for the 160 million people worldwide with impaired vision.

The tool was developed in an open-source project with Sonata software and the Digital Accessible Information System (Daisy) consortium. It translates OOXML files into the Daisy format, which can be used in software such as Book Wizard Producer and the Daisy pipeline, to create a talking book.

Listening to a Daisy audio file is different from an MP3. With an MP3, the listener can only navigate between tracks. But someone listening to a Daisy format file can do things a sighted person would do when reading a document, such as skip to specific page numbers, hear a table of contents and look up references in an index.

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