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● 07.26.10

● Links 26/7/2010: Last Catch-up With Free/Open Source Software News

Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzFree Software/Open Source

=> ↺ The Jargon of Freedom: 60 Words and Phrases with Context

• 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.

=> ↺ CASE STUDY: Revenue Commissioners

• “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.”

=> ↺ Interview with Winston Damarillo, Morphlabs

• 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.

=> ↺ Test Management for Open Source Teams

• Gurock Software announced an offer to provide free licenses of their web-based test management software TestRail to open source projects and teams.

=> ↺ SOS Open Source Goals and Customer Segments

Security

=> ↺ Open source security solutions: An attractive alternative

• 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.

=> ↺ Snort and Suricata Creators Exchange Heated Words

• 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.”

=> ↺ Intel accelerates open source encryption

• The latest version of Truecrypt has many new features, including partitions with larger sector sizes, a volume organiser and automatic mounting of volumes.

Graphics

=> ↺ Blender as an animation editor

• 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.

=> ↺ Scribus

• 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

=> ↺ Cooperative to represent Symbian developers

• 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.

=> ↺ Symbian and Nitobi Team to Ease Cross-Platform Mobile App Development

• 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

=> ↺ Impressive data visualization tool to be released as open source

• 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.

=> ↺ Network and routing software goes open source

=> ↺ Time Flow 0.5 To be Released Open Source

• 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

=> ↺ Firefox Friday — “Beta 2 is coming, and it’ll break stuff” edition

• 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/.

=> ↺ Firefox 3.6.8 now available for download

SaaS

=> ↺ Cloud For Ruby Apps Expands Services To NoSQL

• 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 bold move to open the cloud

• Rackspace’s OpenStack could signal a new race to open up cloud computing technology

=> ↺ OW2 Consortium will Support OpenStack with its Open Source Cloudware Initiative

=> ↺ WSO2 Launches WSO2 Business Rules Server

• 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.

=> ↺ Empires built on free code aren’t cheap

• 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

=> ↺ Web CMS: MODx Revolution Targets Drupal, Joomla Markets

• 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.

=> ↺ Open Source Enterprise Collaboration Tool TeamLab Offers New Modules

• 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.

=> ↺ Dolce&Gabbana Deploys Hippo CMS 7 for Its Blogzine Swide

=> ↺ WordPress Theme Thesis Maker Backs Down, Adopts GPL

• 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!

=> ↺ Public gain loudspeaker on future Joomla! features

• 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.

=> ↺ Joomla! 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.

=> ↺ The history of Joomla!: An in-depth chat with CMS core developer, Andrew Eddie

Education

=> ↺ 4 Tips for Adopting Open Source Software in K-12

• 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

=> ↺ How open source can improve health care

• 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.

=> ↺ Day one of the health care IT track at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention

• 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

=> ↺ Open Core Model Vulnerability Exposed?

• 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.

=> ↺ The story of R: a statistical tale with a twist

• 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

=> ↺ FreeBSD 8.1 Provides Evolutionary Open Source Software Upgrade

• 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

=> ↺ DHS, vendors unveil open source intrusion detection engine

• 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.

=> ↺ Livetecs Launches TimeLive 3.2.1 – An Open Source Time Tracking Software

• 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.

=> ↺ The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache FOP Version 1.0

Government

=> ↺ Greens to use political power in push for open source software

• 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

=> ↺ FFmpeg’s VP8 Decoder Blasts Google’s Decoder

• 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.

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