VIA’s commitment to the open-source community has been everything but stellar. VIA Technologies has taken advantage of the open-source community before, and many are saying VIA is doing another open-source bluff…
For most areas of enterprise open source, there is one clear leader. The business intelligence (BI) space is unusual in that there are two strong players: JasperSoft and Pentaho.
Here Doug Moran, one of Pentaho’s founders, offers a fascinating description of how the company was created in part by bringing on board the chief architects of several other open source projects, offers not one but two explanations of the Pentaho name, says more on the recent adoption of the GNU GPLv2 for its BI platform, and explains why – of course – he thinks Pentaho’s solutions are the best.
A recent report claims that one of the fundamental benefits of open-source development, the co-called Law of Many Eyes is wrong. The idea behind the law is that since anyone can read the source code and find problems with it, they can then either fix them or report them back to the community. The end result is that you get better software.
The study, by Fortify Software, a company that makes development tools for checking security, found that many popular open source software programs contain significant security holes. I can’t take this study too seriously. After all, what else is Fortify going to say? “Open-source’s Law of Many Eyes works great. You don’t need our products?” I don’t think so.
Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the brackets): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project. Here is why.
Respect earned by the BDFL
The first reason is probably the most important one: respect. The benevolent dictator for life (BDFL from now on) needs to make decisions — in fact, a lot of decisions — and at the same time maintain other people’s respect. Decisions are not always popular, and are not always right (especially in other people’s eyes).
Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine
Where most computer science departments emphasize theory and mention free and open source software (FOSS) only indirectly, Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, offers a different approach: a hands-on introduction to the community in partnership with the Mozilla and Fedora projects. Now in its third year, the program is expanding rapidly and receiving attention from other academic institutions that hope to imitate it.
Open source software is a significant security risk for corporations that use it because in many cases, the open source community fails to adhere to minimal security best practices, according a study released Monday.
The study, carried out by Fortify Software with help from consultant Larry Suto, evaluated 11 open source software packages and each community’s response to security issues over the course of about three months. The goal was to find out if the community for each open source software package was responsive to security questions or vulnerability findings, published security guidelines and maintained a secure development process, for example.
One security outfit which conducted a study into the use of open source software in the enterprise, the results of which are published today, seems to think so. It states that “Open Source Software (OSS) development communities have yet to adopt a secure development process and often leave dangerous vulnerabilities unaddressed.”
New data from Fortify Software suggests that the rising adoption of open source software within the enterprise is putting the average business at far greater risk than it should.
The Open Source Security Study has just been published and reveals that some of the most widely-used open source software used within the business environment are leaving users exposed to a “significant and unnecessary business risk.”
Read more at iTWire
The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.
The 2008 Award will continue to support a range of open source Content Management Systems with four main categories offering prize money of $5,000 for the overall winner and $2,000 for the winners of the remaining categories.
* Overall Winner
* Most Promising Open Source CMS
* Best Open Source PHP CMS
* Best Other Open Source CMS
I’m always interested in the offbeat ways that the benefits of the open source model–lots of eyeballs, community efforts–can be applied to new types of ideas. We posted about several non-software focused efforts in this area recently. Now, as The Guardian is reporting, the band Radiohead has a new spin on this concept. Its new single “House of Cards” has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here–better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.
ActiveState has put together a free white paper on “10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business”. It’s a fair look at open source for the manager level.
They don’t come out as open source zealots. There are certainly some myths that come from both sides. The top three myths they address are:
I like the last myth the best:
Don’t Be Left Out. OSCON 2008 Is the Place To Be July 21-25–Five Days
that Will Open Your Mind about Open Source
Thought-provoking keynotes, two days of in-depth tutorials, and fourteen
tracks with hundreds of sessions are just the beginning. Add to that some
very special events, an evening extravaganza, and an extensive Expo Hall.
If you haven’t yet made plans to be in Portland, Oregon, for the 10th
Anniversary meeting of O’Reilly’s OSCON, what are you waiting for?
Register now at:
https://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/register
OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent “squatters and phishers” from snapping them up. He’s keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson’s past practices, it’s not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.
Open source companies are finally getting on their feet in the IT channel, The VAR Guy believes. In fact, companies like Digium, GroundWork Open Source, Openbravo and Untangle are following Red Hat and Novell into the IT channel — on a global basis. Here’s a look at their progress.
First, some background: During their early days, many open source companies didn’t want or need channel partners. Instead, they depending on direct sales as well as “community” members who assisted open source code development and product evangelism. That’s wonderful for a start-up. But growing up — and going global with localized support — requires VARs, integrators and managed service providers (MSPs).
Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects. It’s not a shareware with limited tools, or time constraints; you can use it freely. In the past few years, the Blender user base has grown significantly. One of the positive aspects of Blender is its size—it is only 10 MB and we can even run it directly from a portable drive. Another great aspect of Blender is that we can use various Operating Systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, leaving us the choice of which one to use.
Packt spokesperson Meeba Abraham approached Allan Brito at the heart of this movement to understand his take on the future of Blender.
We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 percent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren’t necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 percent said their policies are very effective.
“Somewhat effective” policies are like “somewhat effective” security; clearly, there’s more to be learned. CIO.com asked CIOs and other people in the trenches about what’s working—and what’s not working—with their open-source usage policies.
Steve Ballmer is at least willing to talk with the open-source crowd now, as his comments at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 demonstrate. He’s just not willing to actually engage in open source as an appreciable part of his company’s business. Fair enough.
Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could open-source code and still make a lot of money (He’s apparently not heard of “Google.”):
No. 1, are our products likely to be open-sourced? No. We do provide our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.)
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. And it will be participating at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland this July 23-25, 2008. Meet OSI’s team and listen to what OSI speakers have to say at the following OSCON sessions.
Just a few years ago, getting complex legal assistance from a lawyer you never met in person would have been unthinkable. Today, however, many people carry on relationships online; why not conduct business with your lawyer online as well? One Italian firm already works this way, using open source software as much as it can.
In 2005, Alfresco was the first open source software company in the UK to capture venture funding, for its collection of enterprise document management applications. John Powell, formerly the COO of Business Objects, and John Newton, founder of Documentum, got together to launch Alfresco because they wanted to create a business that would have “global reach,” according to Powell. Right from the start, Powell and Newton knew that the best way to do that was to create and market an open source product.
Powell says he knew that building a company that reaches to the four corners of the Earth would be difficult “when you’ve got big heavyweight US companies like EMC and Oracle out there to squash any little startup.” But with a core team of experienced developers and a solid plan to improve on an already popular idea, Powell was confident it could be done. “We figured if we used an open source business model it would enable us to get the software into global distribution and overcome the challenge of competing with these very big monopolist players. It turned out to be a good choice.”
In a free market, over time, competition in the production of a commodity product will eliminate all profits. Bread-makers can sell their bread for enough money to cover the cost of the capital invested in the bakery, the cost of the flour, yeast, sugar, and water, the fuel needed for firing, and the salary of the baker. They can earn no more money than that. If they did, then another bakery would be established which would price its products lower, splitting that profit between the customer and the owner of the new bakery.