Links 26/7/2010: Last Catch-up With Free/Open Source Software News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-26 09:06:35 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-26 09:06:35 UTC
What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.
“We have reduced their bills and given them what they needed,” says McGrattan. “We’ve also moved them from proprietary systems to open source so all they have to pay is a support bill. So they are quite happy. They have recommended us to other customers and governments and told them what we have done.”
One of Southern California's successful, serial entrepreneurs is Winston Damarillo, who founded Gluecode, which he sold to IBM in 2005. Earlier this month, his latest startup, El Segundo-based Morphlabs announced it had raised a Series B funding worth $5.5M. We thought we'd catch back up with Winston to hear about the Morphlabs.
[...]
[Winston Damarillo:] All of your startups have been centered around open source projects. What's the open source connection here?
Winston Damarillo: Sixty to seventy percent of our ingredients are based on open source. I always mention that anything I do has an open core, which is, the core of what we do comes from open source. In our case, the workload manager comes from Eucalyptus, the configuration management from Puppet, and a third systems management tool. All three are open source building blocks.
[...]
Winston Damarillo: One of the things I've learned, is that open source is now an accepted ingredient for any enterprise user. People are not scared anymore of using that. On what you need to know, from the business model side, is that we realized that open source support, by itself, is a declining and diminishing return on revenue generation. The more mature the open source product or project, the less the opportunity to make money. A good example of that is the Apache web server, where no one pays for support--they just download it and use it. What a successful company does, is implement what we call an open core--the idea is, you use open source, which you expect will mature over time, but later a product on top of that commercially, which allow you to make open source more scalable. That makes it more sustainable as a product, and not just as a support service.
Gurock Software announced an offer to provide free licenses of their web-based test management software TestRail to open source projects and teams.
-
Security
Mention 'open source security tools' and the first words that come to mind are Nmap and Nessus. Of course, Nessus is no longer open source. Its open source offshoot OpenVAS, has failed to acquire the same levels of popularity. Apart from Nmap and Nessus, Metasploit is probably one of the more popular offerings available on the open source security block.
Unfortunately, the flame wars stirred pent up frustrations among the projects' leaders. SourceFire's Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) continued the debate through performance tests posted on its blog, contending that "Suricata's performance isn't just bad; it's hideously, unforgivably bad." The article goes on to state that Suricata's capabilities are inherently limited by its choice of the Snort rule language, and that despite a million dollars in development, the OISF has "failed, utterly, to deliver on their promises."
The latest version of Truecrypt has many new features, including partitions with larger sector sizes, a volume organiser and automatic mounting of volumes.
-
Graphics
While working on some combat animations, I decided that the current Phoenix animation editor is too hard to use, and there are too many bottlenecks in the route to making it better. So, for now, I am looking into alternative approaches to editing animations.
As I mentioned before, here in the studio I use a Linux computer. Well, calling it a Linux computer is a bit inaccurate. I have a computer and it runs Linux. PCLinuxOS, to be specific. PCLinuxOS, like all Linux distributions, is freely available for download at many different websites. If you want to try Linux, I strongly suggest PCLinuxOS. if you want to explore a bit more, then visit DistroWatch.com. There, you can download and test drive (via a Live CD) any flavor of Linux being distributed today.
-
Symbian
Only companies can become Symbian Foundation members and therfore play a role in decision-making over future developments in the open source mobile operating system. The Symbian Developer Cooperative (DevCo) has now been founded to ensure that the voices of individual programmers are not ignored.
The Symbian Foundation and Nitobi team up in an effort to make it easier for mobile application developers to create mobile apps for any device.
-
Going Free
The former leaders of IBM's Visual Communications Lab have been hard at work on a "summer project" -- desktop software that will display large amounts of information in a number of visual formats.
Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Many Eyes fame will be releasing a new data visualization tool they call ‘Time Flow’ soon on the website of their current company ‘Flowing Media’.
-
Mozilla
Beta 2 was actually slated for release today, but the download page is still serving up b1. When it's ready, you'll find Firefox 4 beta 2 at getfirefox.com/beta/.
-
SaaS
Heroku Add-on System will make it possible for the Ruby developers to make use of Apache's open source CouchDB and offer systems capable of storing the unstructured data generated by web applications.
Rackspace's OpenStack could signal a new race to open up cloud computing technology
Open Source integration provider WSO2 is shipping a business rules server aimed at letting companies quickly and easily create, access, and manage business rules within an SOA framework. WSO2 Business Rules Server (BRS) delivers a tool for separating business logic from underlying infrastructure code.
Consider Facebook. Like its web peers, Facebook uses a ton of open-source software. While ostensibly free, to make projects like Linux work for its purposes, Facebook heavily customizes them. While the company may not buy as much software, it ends up writing or customizing quite a bit of code.
-
CMS
This past March we saw a hint of what was coming from the open source Web CMS project called MODx (news, site). Now their latest release, MODx Revolution v2.0, has officially arrived. This is the future of the MODx project. Let's take a peek.
If open source still makes you think of feature-bare products, command lines and dense nerd-level manuals, then you need to get with the times. TeamLabs is a fine example of open source Enterprise 2.0 at work. No more complicated than shopping on Amazon, it allows users to communicate, collaborate and project manage in a clear, stress-free style.
Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit.
Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPressWordPressWordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.
-
Joomla!
The project lead team behind open source content management system, Joomla!, is looking for greater contribution from the wider community on which features make the cut, and which are left for the future.
With an estimated 10 to 50 million public websites running under Joomal and with 750,000 downloads per month it is an important open source project. Computerworld Australia caught up with co-founder and core developer, Andrew Eddie, about his own history as well as that of Joomla's, and where the content management system is headed in the future.
-
Education
IT directors interested in open source software have an ever increasing number of resources available for learning more about options, best practices, and pitfalls. Online communities, conferences, blogs, and Webinars all provide perspective.
After a dozen interviews and review of even more online sources, THE Journal put together a list of tips for IT directors considering open source software (OSS) in their districts. The main take-away? Focus on what is needed and what will be accepted in any given situation--and the cost savings aren't so bad either.
-
Healthcare
David Riley, head of the CONNECT initiative for the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) Program. Riley is responsible for creating the product direction and overseeing product development for CONNECT.
I think the collective awe of health care aficionados at the Open Source Convention came to a focal point during our evening Birds of a Feather session, when open source advocate Fred Trotter, informally stepping in as session leader, pointed out that the leaders of key open source projects in the health care field were in the room, including two VistA implementors (Medsphere and WorldVistA), Tolven, and openEMR--and not to forget two other leading health care software initiatives from the U.S. government, CONNECT and NHIN Direct.
-
Semi-Open Source
Clearly, individual OSI directors have been less than thrilled with the open core business model. Simon Phipps, in particular, made a pretty strong argument that open core was just plain bad for business. But, though Phipps is an OSI director, he wasn't speaking in any official capacity on behalf of the OSI with these statements.
This weekend, Russ Nelson, another OSI director and License Approval Chair posted an entry on the OSI Board Blog sharply criticizing open core. This falls under my definition of official response.
Ihaka learned about the open source movement during his time at MIT. “That is really where free software came from, that is were Richard Stallman was and the free software foundation is still based in Cambridge I think. Those ideas were sort of hanging around in the air.”
-
BSD
Putting out new releases of OS software isn't always about adding major new features -- sometimes it's just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that's certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.
-
Project Releases
The Open Information Security FoundatThe Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), a group funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several security vendors, this week released an open source engine built to detect and prevent network intrusions.ion (OISF), a group funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several security vendors, this week released an open source engine built to detect and prevent network intrusions.
The main feature of the new version is a completely re-write of TimeLive with fully integrated set of tools for managing every aspects of projects.
-
Government
The Australian Greens will use any gain in political influence to push for more open source software procurement by Government, according to its spokesperson, Senator Scott Ludlam.
-
Standards/Consortia
It was just back in May that Google opened up the VP8 video format that they got their hands on through the acquisition of On2 and at the same time they created the WebM container format. VP8 has already received a lot of love by the open-source community -- both developers and end-users -- and support for it has already worked its way into FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other multimedia projects. Google released the libvpx library as their official VP8 decoder library, but now the FFmpeg developers have created their own decoder and it's shockingly faster than that of Google's own open-source library.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Microsoft-Connected Sites Trying to Shift Attention Away From Microsoft's Megabreach Only Days Before Important If Not Unprecedented Grilling by the US Government?
- Why does the mainstream media not entertain the possibility a lot of these talking points are directed out of Redmond?
- [Video] Microsoft's Attack on Education
- Microsoft's cult-like activities and overt entryism
- Microsoft Windows Used to Have Nearly 100% in China and Now Google Has 50% (With Android)
- Will China bring about a faster "fall" for Microsoft?
- GNU/Linux Growing Worldwide (the Story So Far!)
- Microsoft is unable to stop GNU/Linux
-
- Czech Republic: Windows Down From 98% to 43%, GNU/Linux Rises to Over 3%
- modest gains for GNU/Linux
- Links 22/05/2024: Pixar Layoffs and More Speculation About Microsoft Shutdowns/Layoffs (Ninja Theory)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/05/2024: Caesar II for MS-DOS and Reinventing the Assertion Wheel
- Links for the day
- Internal Memos/Communications Hinting at "a New, But Masked, Round of Layoffs" at Red Hat
- A negative outlook heads of a long weekend
- Nigeria: Windows Down to 6%, Android at All-Time High of 77%
- Google is becoming the "new monopoly" in some places
- [Meme] Money In, No Money Out (Granting Loads of Invalid European Patents)
- EPO production?
- Staff Representation at the EPO Has Just Explained to Heads of Delegations (National Delegates) Why the EPO's Financial Study is Another Hoax
- Here we are again 5 years later
- Canonical and Red Hat Are Not Competing With Microsoft Anymore
- What a shame they hired so many people from Microsoft...
- Links 21/05/2024: "Hating Apple Goes Mainstream", Lots of Coverage About Julian Assange Ruling
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/05/2024: Losing Fats and Modern XMPP
- Links for the day
- Pursuing a Case With No Prospects (Because It's "Funny")
- the perpetrators are taking a firm that's considered notorious
- GNU/Linux in Honduras: From 0.28% to 6%
- Honduras remains somewhat of a hotspot
- Good News From Manchester and London, Plus High Productivity in Techrights
- what has happened and what's coming
- [Video] The 'Linux' Foundation Cannot be Repaired Anymore (It Sold Out)
- We might need to accept that the Linux Foundation lost its way
- Links 21/05/2024: Tesla Layoffs and Further Free Speech Perils Online
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/05/2024: New Gemini Reader and Gemini Games
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 20, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, May 20, 2024
- Red Hat Loves Microsoft Monopoly (and Proprietary Surveillance With Back Doors)
- full posting history in RedHat.com
- [Video] Just Let Julian Assange Go Back to Australia
- Assange needs to be freed
- The WWW declares the end of Google
- Reprinted with permission from Cyber|Show
- Gemini Links 20/05/2024: CMSs and Lua "Post to midnight.pub" Script Alternative
- Links for the day
- Windows Has Fallen Below 5% in Iraq, GNU/Linux Surged Beyond 7% Based on statCounter's Stats
- Must be something going on!
- Brodie Robertson - Never Criticise The Linux Foundation Expenses (With Transcript)
- Transcript included
- Links 20/05/2024: Protests and Aggression by Beijing
- Links for the day
- Can an election campaign succeed without social media accounts?
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Read "Google Is Not What It Seems" by Julian Assange
- In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks' publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department -- and what that means for the future of the internet
- Fact check: relation to Julian Assange, founded Wikileaks at University of Melbourne and Arjen Kamphuis
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Julian Assange: Factual Timeline From an Online Friend
- a friend's account
- Breaking News: Assange Wins Right to Challenge Extradition to the US
- This is great news, but maybe the full legal text will reveal some caveat
- Gambia: Windows Down to 5% Overall, 50% on Desktops/Laptops
- Windows was measured at 94% in 2015
- Links 20/05/2024: Microsoft Layoffs and Shutdowns, RTO as Silent Layoffs
- Links for the day
- The Issue With Junk Traffic in Geminispace (Gemini Protocol)
- Some people have openly complained that their capsule was getting hammered by bot
- Peter Eckersley, Laura Smyth & the rushed closure of dial-up Internet in Australian universities
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Brittany Day, Plagiarist in Chief (Chatbot Slinger)
- 3 articles in the front page of LXer.com right now are chatbot spew
- Guardian Digital, Inc (linuxsecurity.com) Has Resorted to Plagiarism by Chatbots, Flooding the World Wide Web With Fake 'Articles' Wrongly Attributed to Brittany Day
- busted
- [Meme] Bullying the Victims
- IBM: crybully of the year 2024
- Ian.Community Should be Safer From Trademark Censorship
- We wish to discuss this matter very quickly
- Microsoft and Its Vicious Attack Dogs (Attacking Women or Wives in Particular)
- Sad, pathetic, destructive people
- Upcoming Series About the Campaign to 'Disappear' the Father of GNU/Linux
- Today we have Julian Assange's fate to focus on
- A Month From Now Gemini Protocol Turns 5
- June 20
- Colombia: From Less Than 0.5% to Nearly 4% for GNU/Linux
- it's not limited to this one country
- Rumour: Well Overdue Red Hat Layoffs to be Announced in About 3 Days
- we know they've planned the layoffs for a while
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 19, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, May 19, 2024
- Gemini Links 20/05/2024: Updated Noto Fontpacks and gemfeed2atom
- Links for the day