Open Source

RhoHub: GPL and Dual Licensing

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:15:00 EST

Some people say “oh, you’re dual licensing like MySQL. So does that mean that I get to use it and not pay as I don’t with my MySQL based website?” Companies such as Google have thousands of MySQL servers running without paying license fees for it, due to a loophole in the GPL (in both GPLv2 and GPLv3) known as the “Google exception” or “ASP exception”. Specifically that access to your derivative work over http does not count as redistribution (or “conveyance” in GPLv3 parlance). It is for this reason that there Affero General Public License was created. Unfortunately for software vendors that have chosen to use the AGPL, it isn’t really accepted much as a widespread license. The Rhodes framework however is not subject to this loophole. So even with our status under a popular license such as GPLv3 closed source customers must purchase a commercial license for it.

Seven Observations On Software Maintenance and FOSS

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:00:00 EST

The November 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM) has a very interesting article by Paul Stachour and David Collier-Brown entitled “You Don’t Know Jack About Software Maintenance”. The authors argue energetically for using versioned data structures and “continuous upgrading” to improve the state of the art of software maintenance. The piece got me thinking about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and “continuous upgrading”. Here are seven observations on FOSS software maintenance that occurred to me as I reflected on the CACM article:

Accessing Spring Beans from the BIRT Designer

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Recently I have described methods that can be used to access Spring Beans from the BIRT Engine. These examples are intended to be illustrative and not comprehensive. In both of these examples I used the BIRT engine to retrieve Spring objects within the scripting environment. In this post I am supplying an example that illustrates how to implement your own menu in the expression builder, so Spring objects can be called within the BIRT Designer. This will allow you to test your report prior to deployment.

Drupal Tip to Enable Clean URLs on Mac OS

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:15:00 EDT

Here's a little Drupal Tip O' the Day for our readers. As many of you know, we're platform agnostic here at Orchestra (meaning we run Macs, Linux, Windows and more), so we often end up discovering little tricks and tips about our different OSes. For those of you building a Drupal website from a Mac, this a handy bit of info.

Opinion: The Real Cost of Acquisitions - the Zimbra Story

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

There are reports that Yahoo has put Zimbra on the block. Honestly, this came as no surprise at all to us at Zoho. I remember scratching my head when the acquisition was made; I didn't see how an enterprise/business focused open source offering like Zimbra fit with Yahoo, as a technology, as a business or strategically. Zimbra is an open source installable product offering primarily intended to be installed within medium to large organizations. Yahoo has never made an installed product in its history and is mainly focused on consumers, with an occasional foray to sell those consumer-focused applications to small businesses. Zimbra's service provider offerings made no strategic sense to Yahoo either, because Yahoo, being a service provider itself, has no interest in selling technology to other service providers like Comcast. Finally, we have been on both sides of the product vs. web-service divide, and I can assert with confidence that it is not easy to take a product and make it into a scalable web service; in fact, the main reason Zoho Mail got delayed was that it was originally written as an installable product, much like Zimbra, and we essentially rewrote it to be a web service.

Is Microsoft as Free as Open Source?

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open source you get the full-powered editions. For example, Linux (e.g., CentOs), Xen (for virtualization), PostgreSQL/MySQL, Apache, Java, Tomcat, AspectJ, Lucene, Hibernate, and Eclipse are all robust, full-featured, and powerful technologies available for free to developers. The variety and the quality of product available from the open source community are just astonishing.

Orchestra Featured on SAP Ulitzer Site

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Wow, look at me, I'm famous. Oh wait, what have I done. Are people going to follow me to the grocery store with cameras now? Probably not, unless the world turns it's attention from Jon and Kate to SAP Business One. But in our little world, this is pretty cool. Orchestra and myself are featured on the SAP site at SYS-CON. Check us out on the front page.

Nokia’s Qt and the Open Road to Code

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:00:00 EDT

With the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle and speculation over whether a new stream of monetization is about to tarnish and dishonor the good name of open source, industry eyes are watching the open code zone more keenly than ever to try and gauge whether a new playing field is about to surface.

Linux Recovery - Tips & Tricks

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Partitions created in the hard drive enable you to install different operating systems. A partition table is positioned at the first sector (cylinder 0, head 0 and sector 1, Master Boot Record) of every hard drive. This table contains the information about locations and sizes on the hard drive. Corruption in a partition table can occur due to improper system shutdown, file system corruption, software bugs and more. Once the partition table is corrupted, the user may not be able to boot a particular operating system.

Open Source Toolkit for Job Hunters

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:15:00 EDT

Unemployment is rising and competition for the few jobs that are available is becoming tougher than ever. With each open job requisition, hiring managers are receiving hundreds of résumés. How do you stand out of the crowd? What can you do to get noticed? How can you start an interesting conversation?

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz Scopes Out Future for Sun's Cloud

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:15:00 EST

"At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud." That, in no uncertain terms, is Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's vision for Java and stresses the new role that Cloud Computing is beginning to play at Sun.

Bluenog Has Rolled Out ICE 4.0

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Bluenog – a nog being a peg that holds a structure together – has rolled out ICE 4.0, or Integrated Collaborative Environment, calling it the industry’s first pre-integrated suite of enterprise content management, RIA portal development environment and business intelligence reportedly suited to non-technical users.

Greenplum Combines SQL & MapReduce

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:15:00 EDT

Greenplum, the grandest of the open source-based databases, whose massively parallel shared-nothing architecture supports petabyte data warehousing on cost-effective general-purpose hardware and promises linear scalability on thousands of processors, has pushed out its latest cut, rev 3.2, making it the first commercial database, the company says, to include MapReduce, the parallel computing technique pioneered by Goggle and copied by Yahoo’s Hadoop for analyzing the web.

Upstart Seeks To Overthrow OpenOffice

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:30:00 EDT

Softmaker Software GmbH, a German Office wannabe, has taken out after open source darling OpenOffice, saying it’s not good enough to score against Microsoft and proposing its own widgetry as a substitute. The company has just put out a public beta of its Software Office 2008 for Linux, which includes what it calls a Word-compatible word processor, TextMaker, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet, PlanMaker, and a new PowerPoint alternative, Presentations.

Bluenog Introduces Integrated Suite of Enterprise CMS, Portal, and BI Software

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:35:00 EDT

Bluenog announced the availability of Bluenog ICE 4.0, the integrated suite of content management (ECM or CMS), portal, and business intelligence (BI) software. Bluenog ICE is an “Integrated Collaborative Environment” that leverages Web 2.0 technologies. The suite’s tight integration eliminates application silos, reduces total cost of ownership, and accelerates application development. Ready integration with third-party software, including other vendors’ ECM, portal, and BI offerings, further reduces cost and increases deployment flexibility. Bluenog ICE is based on open source software, and customers receive the suite’s source code.

Using Spring as an Object Container

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:15:00 EDT

When you work with open source ESBs, you can use other tools and frameworks to help you solve common problems. Spring is one of the tools that extends the basic functionality of the ESBs Mule and ServiceMix and makes solving integration problems a lot easier. Spring is a component framework that makes it easy to work with Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs).

Alfresco Provides First Draft CMIS Implementation via Alfresco Labs

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:45:00 EDT

Alfresco Software announced the availability of the first Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft implementation. As a contributing member of the draft technical specification, Alfresco is able to offer a draft implementation of CMIS for developers who wish to explore the draft specification.

Black Duck Joins The Linux Foundation

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:40:00 EDT

The Linux Foundation announced that Black Duck Software has joined as a Foundation member. Black Duck provides solutions for software development teams and legal counsel to manage the hybrid software development process, which involves the assembly of internal software, open source software and other third-party code.

Alfresco Selected to Power Acrobat.com Content Services

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:45:00 EDT

Alfresco Software announced that Adobe has implemented Alfresco’s document sharing and collaboration capabilities as part of the file sharing features in Acrobat.com. Adobe chose Alfresco as its content repository for its clustered high-availability, security, and highly capable technical support. By working with Alfresco, Acrobat.com will be able to deliver content services that support millions of documents and terabytes of data.

Open Source RIA Framework qooxdoo 0.8 Released

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:36:00 EDT

qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative AJAX application framework. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is needed. It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

Exploring Governance in the World of Open Source

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:10:00 EDT

I was shocked. We were in the brainstorming phase of developing a new collaboration portal and the possibilities were flying. It was exciting to see people from many disciplines enthusiastic about working together more effectively through improved communication, document management, and tools for capturing business processes.

OS Hot Trends: Collaboration, SaaS and Overseas Expansion

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:00 EDT

In our first annual survey of our membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) found much optimism despite a murky economy, and a surprisingly high level of collaboration by open source software and services companies.

Cloud Computing Expo - Talend Moves into the Data Clean-Up Biz

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:07:00 EDT

Talend, the open source company with the SaaS data integration software, is now moving into the data clean-up business with a software module that identifies stuff like duplicated records and incorrect street addresses by comparing them against reference data from places like the US Postal Service.

ELASTRA Delivers Cloud Portability With Support for Open Source Eucalyptus Platform

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:44:00 EDT

ELASTRA announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform. ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering.

Appeals Court Overturns Injunction-Denying Open Source Ruling

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:00:00 EDT

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Wednesday overturned a year-old San Francisco district court decision that deprived the aggrieved plaintiff in a dispute over open source software governed by the Artistic License of the right to sue for copyright infringement and get an injunction against the defendant.

Google’s Now in the Encryption Business

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:11:00 EDT

Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that’s supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and authentication with both symmetric and asymmetric keys as well as Java and Python implementations, promising C++ soon.

Grid.org Open Source Community Surpasses 5,000 Software Downloads

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Grid.org, the online community for open-source cluster and grid software, announced that their open source cluster software stack, UniCluster, has exceeded 5,000 downloads by the HPC community. Grid.org, launched in November 2007, was developed to provide a single aggregation point for information and interaction by the community of grid and cluster users, developers and administrators.

O3SIS and Open-Xchange to Deliver Mobile Open Source Collaboration Technology

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Open-Xchange announced an agreement with O3SIS. The companies expect to release in the third quarter software that will enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telcos and web hosting companies to offer their customers a mobile extension of the Open-Xchange Hosting Edition.

Open Source News: Aster Data Systems and Pentaho Establish Partnership

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Aster Data Systems announced a strategic partnership with Pentaho that combines product integration, certification, and services. The two companies will also partner on joint sales and marketing efforts. Aster will provide its Aster nCluster analytic database to work in conjunction with Pentaho open source business intelligence (BI) products, to enable customers to collect and analyze large volumes of data for deep analysis and reporting.

XAware Enhances Open Source Data Integration Software

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:45:00 EDT

XAware announced the general availability of XAware 5.1, the open source data integration solution for creating and managing composite data services for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The product enhancements included in this release have been greatly influenced by the rapidly growing XAware community, which has downloaded more than 150,000 copies of the solution in the five months since its general release. XAware has also been listed as one of the top 100 projects on Sourceforge.net, an Open Source software development web site, hosting more than 100,000 projects and with over 1,000,000 registered users.

Mozy Claims 100% Growth in Six Months

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:24:00 EDT

Mozy, EMC’s online backup property, says it doubled the size of its enterprise and SMB customer base in the first half and now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage system.

Mozilla Deploys Pentaho, Vertica

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:55:00 EDT

Having outgrown its homemade log analysis scripts, Mozilla has deployed Pentaho’s commercial open source business intelligence (BI) Data Integration widgetry and Vertica Systems’ high-performance analytic database to analyze large volumes of log file information in a data warehouse and business intelligence system.

Microsoft’s Appeasement Party Strikes Again

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:48:00 EDT

Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is now suddenly a platinum sponsor of that open source touchstone, the Apache Software Foundation, and has pledged its $100,000 check. The move was announced Friday at the Open Source Convention in a speech by Microsoft senior director of platform strategy Sam Ramji, who described it as an endorsement of the “Apache Way.”

Alfresco Looks To Oust SharePoint

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Alfresco pounced on that SharePoint protocol that the European Commission forced Microsoft to disgorge and turned up Thursday with what it claims is the first fully compatible open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the fastest-growing and stickiest products in the Microsoft arsenal.

Cloud Computing - SnapLogic-SugarCRM an Item

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:00:00 EDT

SnapLogic, the outfit that calls itself the really simple integration company and leverages RESTful web technology, has announced a SugarCRM Solution Pack, an extension to its open source data integration framework. SnapLogic enables enterprises to integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and create custom integration solutions, including application integrations, enterprise mashups and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Black Duck Software Partners with E-Soft to Expand Open Source Presence in Taiwan

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Black Duck Software announced the addition of a new partner in Taiwan, E-Soft Technologies, further expanding the company's substantial presence in East Asia. Taiwanese companies increasingly utilize open source software to cut development costs and accelerate time-to-market of software. Black Duck products and solutions help software organizations realize these benefits while managing licensing, security and other risks and issues associated with unmanaged open source code. E-Soft will promote Black Duck products and offer other Black Duck services to help organizations manage the use of software assets governed by open source licenses.

AJAX RIA News - Zimbra Revs Desktop

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:00:00 EDT

Zimbra, Yahoo's open source Microsoft-opposing e-mail and calendaring folks, bought last September for $350 million, have released rev 3 beta of their offline e-mail client, Zimbra Desktop, which competes with Outlook, Thunderbird and everybody else with a dog in this race. It's unclear what exactly Zimbra brings to the party other than its Yahoo connection.

Open Source - What is the Total Cost of Ownership?

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:15:00 EDT

In 2005, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems quipped that open source software was 'free like a puppy is free.' Just as you can pick out a puppy from the pound without paying expensive breeder fees, you can download and use open source software without buying a single license. But puppies become dogs, and dogs need food, toys, training and lots and lots of love. Even with all this attention, there?s no guarantee your cuddly puppy won?t develop a vicious streak. Will you need endless obedience classes and a chain and muzzle to control it? The same goes for open source software. As soon as you introduce open source into your organization, the real costs, commitments and risks become clear.

Extended Validation SSL Certificates

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Extended Validation (EV) is a new standard in SSL certificates. This guide explains the needs which drove the development of this standard and how it addresses contemporary security challenges. It also delves into the integration of EV certificates into new high security browsers such as Microsoft's IE7.

OrecX Debuts Open Source VoIP Recording Technology

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:15:00 EDT

OrecX announced the formal debut of its Oreka Total Recording (TR) software solution for customer service management professionals, leveraging the power of open source in bolstering efficient call-center operation. Oreka TR allows organizations to comply with regulatory requirements and improve customer service by recording and retrieving phone calls without disrupting operations, exhausting annual budgets, or paying for extra implementation services that never get used.