WE COMPLETELY lost track of the need to post Free/Open Source software news (especially in recent weeks), simply because there had been too much of it piling up and it takes a while to organise, categorise, etc.
HP is sticking to its storage management guns in the face of the Aperi open source consortium IBM launched last week.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company has released Storage Essentials 5.0, the latest version of its storage resource management (SRM) software, as an alternative to Aperi, a group formed to work on a common storage software management platform.
In 2013 we learned in detail how our digital freedoms were violated. That awareness holds promise for a brighter year ahead, and open source plays a crucial role
The solitary genius, closeted in a lab or garage, creating the next big thing is largely a myth. Important innovation almost always builds upon what came before it. The automobile would not exist if the horse-drawn carriage had not been invented first. We would not be using laser pointers now if early humans had not fashioned torches in experiments with fire.
What applications do you use every day? Your operating system and browser are almost definitely on the list. Maybe it also includes office productivity software, a music or video player, photo editor or certain games. Maybe you need accounting, security, POS and server software for your small business. Or maybe you have a larger business that needs ERP, CRM, ecommerce and content management tools.
What does one do when quality, quantity, and complexity collide? For that is the conundrum of large enterprises facing the vast resources available in the world of open source software (OSS). GitHub, the largest online code-hosting site, lists 10.2 million repositories, and Black Duck, the company for which I work, tracks 30 billion lines of open source code.
The biggest impact that open source software offers small business in 2014 takes place in the cloud. Open source software powers the cloud—where you can take advantage of both hosted software and services, and hosted IT infrastructure (e.g., servers). We're already used to hosted services such as Web and mail hosting. They're convenient and cheap, and they prevent headaches.
Amazon is one of the most technically influential companies operating today – but you wouldn't know it, thanks to a dearth of published research papers and negligible code contributions to the open-source projects it relies on.
Companies are beginning to move away from the ‘closed' or proprietary software model to an enterprise-ready open source model, where they acquire solutions that fulfil specific business needs, according to Linux Warehouse MD Jan-Jan van der Vyver.
OSS has reinvented itself with the Niazi 1.618 Middleware System, which allows organisations to shift to open source IT without losing their proprietary investments
When I founded my first startup in 2008, I was a programming newbie. A degree in economics from Oberlin College hadn’t prepared me for a career writing production-ready code. Despite my best efforts at slapping together crude HTML and CSS Django templates, my ability to contribute to our codebase was limited at best. So I started slowly teaching myself to code with online tutorials and lessons. After many disheartening starts and stops, I realized why I was having problems sticking with it: code lessons and videos felt like school to me, and I had no interest in returning to the classroom.
The creator of NPM has started a company called NPM, Inc. that he said will focus on offering products and services related to the popular package manager for Node.js.
When software is open, its strengths and weaknesses are visible to everyone.
The developers I work with now aren't so different from the bands I listened to back in my record store days. Linus Torvalds created and shared something catchy, which, with the help of countless other individuals, has grown into a philosophy with ripple effects well beyond the borders of Linux and open source technologies. If Linux is a song, a vast network of musicians, backup singers, producers, promoters, disc jockeys, graphic artists, record store clerks, and listeners help make it a hit.
I also started working on an open source web-based IRC client with some of my friends from IRC. I enjoyed doing that, but I wasn't as passionate as I am now about open source software although I loved using it. It wasn't until a few years later, in 2011, when I started being on freenode, an IRC network dedicated to open source, more actively and participating there that I got to really absolutely love open source and want to contribute more. I now contribute to both smaller projects, and bigger projects such as firefox, and to me it's a lot of fun and I constantly learn new things!
In March 2013, a Japanese student by the name of Daiyuu Nobori set up VPN Gate, a free VPN service that he hoped would be used by Internet users who wish to avoid their country's online content restrictions but don't have the necessary funds to use a paid VPN service.
The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.2.1 release of the CloudStack cloud orchestration platform. This is a minor release of the 4.2.0 branch which released on Oct 1, 2013. The 4.2.1 release contains more than 150 bug fixes. As a bug fix release, no new features are included in 4.2.1.
Linux and FOSS have a lot of energy going into great big projects: cloud, mainframe, supercomputing, and large-scale distributed computing. So bigtime projects like OpenShift, OpenStack, Hadoop, Xen, KVM, and enterprise offerings from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical are getting all the glory.
But there is a lot happening at the other end of the spectrum, in small-scale specialized projects that anyone can play with for cheap. After wading through endless Ubuntu and Backtrack re-spins I found these 7 interesting, useful, and unique projects that were launched in 2013.
Today Light Table is taking a huge step forward - every bit of its code is now on Github and along side of that, we're releasing Light Table 0.6.0, which includes all the infrastructure to write and use plugins. If you haven't been following the 0.5.* releases, this latest update also brings a tremendous amount of stability, performance, and clean up to the party. All of this together means that Light Table is now the open source developer tool platform that we've been working towards. Go download it and if you're new give our tutorial a shot!
Twill makes it easier to write programs that can take advantage of YARN. Twill uses a simple thread-based model that Java programmers will find familiar. YARN can be viewed as a compute fabric of a cluster, which means YARN applications like Twill will run on any Hadoop 2 cluster, including Cloudera's CDH 4, explained Tom White, an engineer at Cloudera.
The developers of the Rygel open source UPnP media server software have announced a new development version, 0.21.2, which adds several new features and fixes many bugs.
These are full-featured open source software products, free as in beer and speech that I started to use recently. Vivek Gite picks his best open source software of 2013.
Open computing has been steadily growing in enterprise acceptance and, in 2013, that trend accelerated sharply. Many factors contributed to the upward trajectory of open computing in the last year. However, there were three notable developments that, in retrospect, were the critical game-changers.
Here’s a look at the three key developments in open source in 2013...
A few weeks ago, we open sourced Flanker, our MIME parsing and email validation library.
Jack Wallen lists 10 reasons why he believes 2014 will be a banner year for Linux and open source.
Jack Wallen highlights 10 of the most disappointing developments for open source in 2013.
In an effort to expand open-source PDF conversion options, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2006 to encourage greater government openness and transparency, is hosting what it calls the PDF Liberation Hackathon, dedicated to improving open-source tools for PDF extraction. The Hackathon will run from January 17-19, 2014 at Sunlight offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and around the world.
For the fifth year in a row, Datamation is closing out the year with a big, big list of all the software we've featured on our monthly open source software guides. This year's list is the longest ever with 1,180 projects in 143 different categories from Accessibility to Wine and Beer.
Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen posits, but open-source software seems to be eating itself. And at a far faster clip. While the software world has grown used to products and their vendors dominating for long stretches (think: Microsoft in operating systems and Oracle in databases), the new world of open source is moving at an accelerated, Darwinian pace, leaving no project to rest on its laurels.
Open source software (OSS), unlike proprietary software, is software that keeps the code open so IT professionals can alter, improve, and distribute it. Although it has been around since relatively early in the history of computers, in the past several years OSS has truly taken off, in what some might see as a surprising example of a successful communal collaboration.
What is Forked? It’s a site that resurrects abandoned open source projects. And that’s a welcome thing.
In November, we gave you the ultimate open source gift guide for the holidays just in time to start preparing and brainstorming for a great gift for the tech and open source enthusiasts in your life.
Nowadays we see beautiful design everywhere in our daily life. The digital world is no exception. Many of the websites we visit and the desktop and mobile apps that we use started to be so beautifully designed, that user perceptions on design started to change. As a result, everybody is becoming more design savvy. Users who didn’t care about contrast, button color or responsiveness in the past now critique companies whenever they make a user interface or experience update.
Basing your new project on open source comes with a host of benefits, and a few risks. The risks are rarely, if ever, technical, but can often be political. When you choose to start a project based on open source tools, as opposed to proprietary solutions that come with a phone number to call when there is trouble, you are telling the company that you are competent enough to be the only support they need. Of course, with open source, you have the support of thousands behind you, but that can be difficult to convince senior management of. You will run into some road blocks, here's how to avoid them and keep the project moving.
Software development is a huge and growing industry, and there are likely to be far more jobs in the future than there are folks to do them. But today, there's a paucity of blacks and Latinos in software development positions.
Open source is different things to different people: software licensing scheme, business model, development model or community model. However we choose to think about it, though, across the board clever people are using open source to disrupt or change how markets behave.
INDUSTRY STALWART and Skype co-founder David Gurle has told The INQUIRER that his new venture Perzo will be released as open source software.
Gurle explained that is the only way to prove his software product's secure credentials.
Security Innovation, a company that specializes in application and crypto security, has announced availability of its NTRU public key cryptography system for free use in the open-source software community.
No, as I see it, open source led to more innovation and took over the data center because of the basic ground rules that were laid down from the beginning with the intent of creating an ecosystem that espoused the four freedoms as enumerated by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
One sometimes unrealistic expectation is that software should be free. All of it.
Epic Systems Corp. will build two laboratory installations of its EpicCare electronic health record at Oregon Health & Science University for medical informatics education and research purposes. On the research side, the school will have access to Epic's source code.
This is Epic's first partnership with an academic informatics program and possibly an important turning point for the company. While Epic does release its source code to commercial customers, it historically has conducted research and development almost exclusively on its sprawling campus in Verona, Wis., where all of its employees are based.
Petition to save Winamp or its source code initiated by software developers.
MenuetOS – the open source, GUI-equipped operating system written entirely in assembly language – may be as little as a year away from hitting 1.0. And while 12 months may still seem like a long time, it's taken some 13 years of work by the Menuet team to get to this point.
Open-source software can be an effective technology solution for the intrepid IT €professional in search of a customizable product. This type of software, which allows users to modify its source code free of charge, can be used to manage websites, email, desktop productivity—you name it. And because it’s less structured than many proprietary or commercial software programs, open source provides IT professionals with a chance to play and experiment. “It’s very much an adventure,” says Moira Edwards, CAE, president, Ellipsis Partners.
Capital market institutions are stepping up their adoption of open-source software, as cost pressures force an increasingly collaborative approach to IT operations.
As an alternative to the standard Java API the Cascading open source project has been steadily gaining momentum among developers of Big Data applications largely because Cascading makes it easier to isolate the data processing and data integration elements of an application.
How often have you thought of a way to improve a piece of software or hardware? How many times have you wondered why companies invest millions of dollars to produce a product that is obviously lacking from the moment it launches? Have you ever wished you were in a position, or had the skills, to change that?
Chances are if you've typed 'open source' into your search engine then you've heard about SourceForge and OpenHatch. If you're not familiar with these sites, I'd absolutely recommend checking them out. They present an amazing platform where you can get involved with a variety of high-quality, open source projects.
First, I must say how honored, humbled and excited I am to join the OSI community in our mission, to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source, and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community. While the OSI is recognized around the globe as the stewards of the Open Source Definition and the authority on open source licenses, it is the open source community—all of you—that truly drives development, promotes adoption and encourages participation. It is my sincere desire, and my highest priority, to meaningfully contribute to and promote your efforts in my new role as GM.
What started as an uphill battle in Burlington, Vermont on the National Day of Civic Hacking in June 2013, transversed into an understanding between local government, non-profits, the media, and the community four months later. What they came to understand was that we can grow stronger when we work together. When we partner. When we work on stuff that matters.
This year, the Libresoft research group encourages anyone involved in a FLOSS project (not only developers) to participate in the survey. As open source and free software communities have changed and grown to to be more diverse—in project types as well as to include people of various skillsets and backgrounds—a survey to reflect today's community must include all of these unique responsibilities and contributions to open source and free software projects.
After many years of using traditional desktop environments like Gnome 2 and KDE and XFCE, I recently spent a few months with Ubuntu 13.04. Overall, my experience with the Unity desktop was fairly positive after I tweaked and configured it to my liking. Since then, I’m using a different non-Ubuntu based distribution, so I’m currently using Mate 1.6. Probably the feature that I most miss from Unity is the launcher. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Unity launcher was so useful and intuitive for me, since I have never been particularly fond of keyboard navigation. Although I still don’t use the keyboard much for window management or within the applications, now that I’m back on Mate I find myself really missing the convenience of searching and launching both apps and files from one unified interface with just a few keywords. With the online results all disabled, Unity’s launcher learns from the user’s habits and quickly becomes uncannily accurate at suggesting relevant local files and applications based on a few letters of input. It really did significantly add to my productivity. The only problem is that the Unity desktop environment, apart from its launcher, is not what everyone wants in a desktop. Additionally, despite a few efforts to port it to other distributions with varying degrees of success, Unity continues to be an option almost exclusively for Ubuntu based systems. So, what other options are available for users who want a launcher like Unity’s, but in a different desktop environment and/or distribution? That’s what I set to find out.