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Posts Tagged ‘ Open Source ’

Linux compliance program a response to surging open source use

By Fei Lumbania on August 13, 2010

By Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld (US)
August 13, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The Open Compliance Program announced by the Linux Foundation on Tuesday is a response to the surging growth in the use of open source technologies within enterprises, and by makers of consumer electronic and mobile devices, analysts say.

Much of the program appears to be directed at addressing what many analysts said is a continuing confusion among makers of embedded devices about open source licensing requirements. But enterprises can benefit from the program as well, they added.

The Linux Foundation, a non-profit group that is focused on fostering Linux growth, announced a set of open source tools, training materials and a self-assessment checklist , designed to help companies comply with open source license requirements.

The program is supported by several large vendors, including Google , Novell, IBM , HP and Intel . Also supporting the effort are organizations such as the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which provides free legal representation for developers of open source software, and gpl-violations.org which is focused on raising awareness of open source license violations.

The impetus for the initiative comes from the skyrocketing use of Linux as an embedded operating system in mobile, consumer electronic and numerous other products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the foundation.

The goal is to help companies fulfill their license obligations in as straightforward and low-cost a manner as possible, Zemlin said in a conversation with Computerworld today.

“Market adoption of open source software has reached a scale that is unprecedented,” Zemlin said. Companies ranging from embedded systems manufactures, to those with large super-computer clusters are all using open source software these days because of the cost and technology benefits, Zemlin said.

Many though appear not to understand or be fully-informed about their obligations to share their source code with the broad community as they are required to, he said.

“The Linux kernel alone has a $10 billion value, and that value comes from the fact that people are sharing it,” he said. The compliance program will ensure that all of the technical and cost benefits that companies are deriving from open source software “is matched by their ability to comply with the legal requirements of open source licenses,” Zemlin said.

Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and a law professor at Columbia Law School said the new effort is being driven largely by what’s happening in the embedded world.

Most of the violations that the SFLC has observed and pursued have occurred among manufactures of embedded devices, Moglen said. In most cases, the violations stemmed from a lack of experience in open source use. Enterprise use of open source software for the most part appears to be more mature and in line with open source license practices, he said.

What the Linux Foundation is doing is “to provide operations advice that should make it easier for device manufactures and distributors to comply with Free and Open Source Software license at minimum cost,” Moglen said.

But enterprises that are using open source technologies will also benefit from the Linux Foundation’s newly released tools for identifying and reporting source code components, and for ensuring that the code is safe and ready for public consumption.

“Companies wanting to use or contribute to the open source world are complex mixes of developers, business management, and operational management such as the internal legal team,” said Stephen Walli, technical director of CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit that facilitates exchange of code among software companies and open source communities.

The Open Compliance Program will increase corporate contribution and participation in the open source world, and alleviate some of the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that surrounds open source licensing, he said.

“I think the Open Compliance Program is an important next step in the industry as more and more companies use and contribute to the open source software ecosystem,” Walli said.

“There’s a growing maturity and understanding in the software industry around intellectual property practices over the past two decades, but that understanding isn’t uniformly present across all participants,” he said. “The OCP fills that gap providing tools and education for all to use.”

The Open Compliance Program comes at a time when there are indications that adoption of open source software may have reached a turning point. A survey by Accenture of 300 IT managers in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland showed 69% expected investments in open source tools to increase this year, while about 40% said they planned on migrating mission-critical software to open source in a year.

More than 75% of the survey respondents cited quality as a primary driver of open source adoption.

The Linux Foundation’s move highlights problems being raised by the continued broadening of Linux and open source use, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group.

While it has extended to new markets and devices, open source software and its licensing model … are still very new to many organizations and verticals, so this type of compliance and facilitation,” is needed for continued growth, Lyman said.

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Open-source telehealth initiative aims to improve healthcare in RP

By JM Tuazon on July 5, 2010

By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
July 5, 2010

A homegrown open-source system for encoding and transmitting electronic health records (EHR) has recently been piloted by several public and private sector groups in the province of Tarlac, aiming to improve healthcare in the country through the use of technology.

The Wireless Access for Health project works by allowing health workers to input relevant patient information through an open-source system, where data can be automatically transmitted to municipal and provincial health offices through 3G wireless broadband for safekeeping, among other purposes.

The project, part of wireless communications provider Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach initiative, is a collaborative effort between the provincial government of Tarlac, the University of the Philippines Manila – National Telehealth Center (NTC), RTI International, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and local telecommunications provider Smart Communications, Inc.

The project is an offshoot of the existing Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS), an open-source system developed by UP Manila – NTC at least five to six years ago. It is one of very few free and open-source EHR systems in the world, which, according to the project proponents, have seen adoption in other countries as well.

The new system solves the problem of inefficient reporting methods of rural health officers, who made do with logging patient information by hand because of the absence of an automated system.

“With the new system, the pushed data are already compliant with the format required by the Department of Health,” explained Dr. Ricardo Ramos, chief of Tarlac’s provincial health unit. “Doctors and health officers will now have more time to attend to their patients.”

In addition, the old system required the health officers to deliver the records to the municipal health offices by foot, taking their personal time off of them. “The new system doesn’t just capture data, it also helps workers do their work better,” said Mike McKay, technical advisor, RTI International.

On a governance standpoint, the electronic data can be used by the provincial government to see the pertinent cases in their jurisdiction, and the requirements of their health offices. “We can look at the data, log, see if insurance is needed by our constituents, all in accordance with our programs in government,” reiterated Victor Yap, governor of the province of Tarlac.

Project partner Smart Communications, Inc., said their company has been looking for applications of telecommunications technology to healthcare for so many years now. “Health resources in the Philippines are very scarce,” related Ramon Isberto, head of public affairs division, Smart.

Isberto said one way to maximize the country’s minimal resources is through ICT and telecommunications, which promises to deliver the maximum benefits to the people. “This project is the start of automating public health care in the country,” he added.

Other supporters of the project are the Department of Health, HealthGov, Tarlac State University and the rural health units of the municipalities of Victoria, Moncada, Paniqui and Gerona.

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Yahoo Adds Security And Workflow Management To Hadoop

By Fei Lumbania on July 1, 2010

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo, which has championed the open source Apache Hadoop distributed computing platform, is adding capabilities for Kerberos security and workflow management to the platform.

The company on Tuesday will unveil the open source additions at the Yahoo-sponsored Hadoop Summit 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. and donate them to the Apache Software Foundation.

[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill reported last week that Cloudera and Quest are linking Hadoop to Oracle databases. ]

Yahoo will integrate Hadoop with the Kerberos authentication standard, enabling more secure collaboration and sharing of authenticated data. Kerberos capabilities also allow for multi-tenancy, in which hardware can be used by multiple parties through authenticated access and processing of sensitive data, according to Yahoo, which developed and uses Hadoop.

“In the past, when we had data that had varying security requirements, we would isolate [the data] on different grids, and then we would control access to those clusters,” said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo. Kerberos, though, will make it easier to manage security access.

“This [provides] strong authentication and protection of the data, and now we can mix applications and data on the same grid,” said Shugar.

Hadoop has been used for data center and cloud computing.

We’re using [Hadoop] as our big data infrastructure,” Shugar said. The company collects almost 100 billion compute events each day, such as information about clicks and page views, and stores this data in Hadoop, Shugar said. Hadoop is used for customizing which content shows up for specific users based on indicated preferences, he said.

Yahoo’s Oozie workflow engine for Hadoop provides workflow management and a coordination engine to manage jobs running on Hadoop. These could include the Hadoop Distributed File System, the Pig data flow language and execution framework for parallel computation, and the MapReduce software framework for distributed processing of large data sets.

Oozie is event-driven and can manage complex jobs, Shugar said.

Yahoo with its Hadoop moves is pushing its company profile, which has been diminished in the wake of Google’s emergence, explained analyst Melanie Posey, of IDC.

“One of the reasons that Yahoo’s kind of taken the lead and run with a lot of the extensions to Hadoop is to reassert its position in the Internet space as an innovator,” Posey said.

The security and workflow technologies will be available at the Yahoo Developer Network.

Yahoo started using Hadoop in 2005. It has become popular with Internet companies and is spreading to other types of companies as well, he said.

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Open source gaining traction with the cloud, Linux vendor says

By JM Tuazon on June 11, 2010

By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
June 11 , 2010

The cloud poses no threat to open-source enterprise Linux vendors–who use the same subscription model as the cloud–because many providers actually rely on open-source platform for their services, a visiting Red Hat executive revealed Wednesday.

Josep Garcia, director of channel sales/inside sales for Asia Pacific/Japan, Red Hat, cited the cases of NTT Japan, IBM, and Amazon’s EC2–all current or potential public cloud players–who use Red Hat’s hypervisor offering to virtualize their servers.

Salesforce.com, a popular cloud CRM vendor, likewise migrated their databases from Sun Spark to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, thereby doubling their overall performance, according to Garcia.

Garcia said more and more businesses–users and providers alike–are seeing and reaping the benefits of migrating to open-source platforms, due mainly to cost.

“Open-source software eliminates the need for license fees, because we use a subscription model,” Garcia clarified, adding that support, upgrades and fixes are already included with every subscription. “By moving to open-source, [firms] reduce spending on capex.”

Community resource pool
But more than cost, Garcia claimed that companies are becoming dependent on open-source platforms because “software developed with open-source are more robust.”

This is because of the community of thousands of developers inherent within these platforms, Garcia said. “The [opportunity for] peer review makes the quality better and innovation much, much faster on open-source,” he added.

Patrick Reidenbach, general manager, UR Solutions, one of three advanced Red Hat partners in the Philippines, observed that even proprietary software vendors are going with the spirit of open-source. “Companies are seeing the value of consulting users. With open-source, it’s the people who decide which features they want included,” he related, adding that the development process is more democratic with open-source.

Specialized skills
One of the gripes about open-source software, however, is the fact that it needs highly specialized skills to maintain, a fact admitted by Garcia, but said that “skills in Linux are now highly pervasive in the country, and we are continually ramping up new administrators for open-source.”

Garcia said Red Hat is fully committed to the Philippine market, which has seen increased adoption of their offerings in the large enterprise and SMB sectors. “We have two of the major telcos using our products, as well as some government offices,” he divulged.

While prospects are good, Garcia said the market is not yet big enough for them to hold office in the country, but the possibilities are rife. “We’ll look into it, although there are no short-term plans as of late,” he added.

Red Hat will continue to sell through its partners, where at least 80% of their revenue from the Asia Pacific region is from. In the Philippines, UR Solutions is one of the handful of Linux distributors around, with at least four Red Hat-certified engineers and eight Red Hat-certified sales people.

Reidenbach said they started out selling their solutions to NGOs and SMBs, but later on realized that open-source has become pervasive in large enterprises. “We saw that there are a lot of companies using Enterprise Linux, so we shifted gears,” he added.

UR Solutions has been a Red Hat Advanced Partner since 2008, a distinction which entails a certain level of commitment from both parties, but earns them additional help and support in terms of promotion and development from the open-source software company.

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Is Open Source Safe?

By Fei Lumbania on June 9, 2010

By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
June 9, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The IT Department where Daniel Toth works won’t let him use open source software because they believe it’s a security risk. Is it?

No. If anything, open-source software has the potential to be safer. Not that it always is, of course.

An open-source program is one whose source code is open to anyone who wishes to study it–or improve upon it. Open-source software is usually free and often public domain. Popular open-source programs include Linux, OpenOffice, and a program you’re quite likely using to read this blog post: Mozilla Firefox.

I might also add that two of my favorite security programs, Password Safe and TrueCrypt, are open source. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive. If any hacker can read your code, why can’t they use that knowledge against you? Think of what the Rebel Alliance did with the Death Star plans in the original Star Wars.

Reality and Star Wars don’t always coincide. When everyone has access to the source code, a great many experts are able to examine that code thoroughly and determine if it really is secure. That’s prohibitively expensive if the only people with access to the code are on the payroll.

And it’s not as if closed-source programs are especially secure. People find exploits in Windows all the time.
Back in 1999, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “Public security is always more secure than proprietary security…For us, open source isn’t just a business model; it’s smart engineering practice.” (I checked with Schneier while researching this piece; he still stands by those words.)

But don’t be too hard on your IT department. They have to approve every program put on company computers, and checking out new programs is time-consuming. Open-source or not, they don’t want programs on their PCs that they haven’t vetted, and they don’t have time to research or test everything. Besides, they may have to answer to executives who think that k is an effective password.

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Open source innovation on the cutting edge

By Fei Lumbania on May 25, 2010

By Neil McAllister
InfoWorld (US)
May 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Open source doesn’t innovate — so goes the old saw. Proprietary software vendors, including Microsoft, would have you believe the open source movement has produced nothing but knockoffs of existing products and cast-off code that couldn’t cut it in the free market.

But while many open source projects, such as OpenOffice.org, do in fact represent well-established categories, to claim that open source has contributed nothing new to the software landscape is a gross exaggeration. For starters, much of the software in use on the Web today — from the Firefox and Chrome browsers to the Apache Web Server to scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby — began life as open source projects.

[ See our slideshow summary: "7 open source innovations on the cutting edge" | Looking for more great open source tools? Check out InfoWorld's "Top 10 open source apps for Windows" and "Top 10 open source apps for Mac OS X," as well as the most recent winners of InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Software Awards ]

The open source movement remains a font of innovation to this day, and not just in the commercial sector. Numerous projects founded by universities, loosely knit communities, and individuals are exploring areas yet to be taken on by mainstream, proprietary software products. Here are just seven examples of exciting new ideas in software that you may be able to buy from proprietary vendors someday, but that you can only get for free from the open source community today.

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Symantec encryption buyouts raise open source, overlap questions

By JM Tuazon on April 30, 2010

By Ellen Messmer
Network World (US)
April 30, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Symantec’s announced acquisitions Thursday of data encryption specialists PGP Corp. and GuardianEdge Technologies have industry watchers wondering which products will stay and go, and how open source PGP will fare in the wake of the buyouts.

Symantec has had analysts puzzling for years about why the company has only licensed rather than bought into encryption technology, but made a bold statement today with the $370 million worth of planned acquisitions in a bid to address customer needs related to regulatory requirements and growing mobile device usage.

Also see: 2010’s top tech M&A deals

The acquisition of both companies, however, raises questions about which products and brands will survive. Symantec simply says at this point it will support products from both vendors into the future.

“There’s definitely overlap with PGP on the desktop,” points out Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “Our bet is GuardianEdge survives in the long run.”

He notes Symantec has cultivated a very close relationship with GuardianEdge, a favorite of the financial and government sectors, through OEM relationships and has integrated its technology into the Symantec Altiris management framework.
One strength of PGP is its server-side encryption and security offerings, which compete with products from vendors such as nuBridges, Voltage, Vormetrics and RSA with its BSafe toolkit. Demand is growing for server-side encryption because of the Payment Card Industry data security requirements, Pescatore says.

Symantec says PGP counts 100,000 enterprise customers with more than 1,000 employees, and 1 million small-to-midsized customers with fewer than 1,000 employees.

For its part, Symantec says it sees PGP and its public-key encryption technology as its ticket to innovations making use of key management.

Symantec is a market leader in the data loss prevention (DLP) product arena, and “for complete use of DLP, encryption is an important part,” Symantec CEO Enrique Salem told financial-industry analysts earlier this morning on a conference call to announce the acquisitions.

The PGP platform for key-management will contribute to Symantec’s focus on creating a “policy-based approach” in security, Salem said. In addition, a start-up acquired by PGP, called ChosenSecurity, offers another path into identity management related to establishing trust among users and sites, he noted.

“We will standardize on the PGP key-management platform,” says Francis deSouza, senior vice president, Enterprise Strategy group, Symantec.

PGP’s key-management technology is expected to be used as a way to manage keys for GuardianEdge, as well, deSouza says. Symantec intends to support both the PGP and GuardianEdge product lines, though the reality is there is product overlap. The PGP key-management technology is also expected to play a big role in many Symantec endeavors in cloud computing and storage.

As far as maintaining the GuardianEdge and PGP names, deSouza indicated that PGP seems to have a particularly strong brand.

But will Symantec be a steward for open-source PGP?

“We like open source,” deSouza replied, but also noted the question of PGP open source is being reviewed. “We’re evaluating it.”

Pescatore says he hopes that if they continue to support open source, which he’s inclined to think they should do, they should do it in the spirit that Sourcefire has done with open-source intrusion detection, rather than what Tenable has done with the Nessus tool. It would backfire on Symantec “if they try to be heavy-handed or go after people,” he noted.

Although both PGP and GuardianEdge are privately-held companies, there are those in the financial community that have had a peek into their numbers. PGP is about a $75 million a year company, says Joel Fishbein, software analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, and GuardianEdge is closer to $20 million.

When it comes to obtaining core encryption technologies, “Symantec is playing a little bit of catch-up here,” says Fishbein, noting that competitors such as McAfee bought SafeBoot years ago, Check Point bought PointSec, and Sophos bought Utimaco.

However, Jon Oltsik, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, thinks Symantec has done well with these deals and “Symantec got a lot more for less money.”

While it’s unclear if there was a bidding war over PGP, it is known that IBM is very close to the company.

Fishbein says he hopes Symantec, which has made large-scale acquisitions in the past, will focus on retaining “the intellectual capital of the companies,” such as the core engineering talent, among other personnel. That’s something he thinks has not always gone well for Symantec in the past, he says, and “that’s the question mark.”

For its part, Symantec acknowledges the next step is to make it a smooth transition in bringing GuardianEdge and PGP into Symantec. GuardianEdge has 80 employees, PGP has 400 employees, and there’s the expectation that most will join, though as in most mergers, there could be the types of overlap that mean not all employees end up on board.

Symantec’s deSouza says there’s the strong sense of purpose to make it all work because the acquisitions may “give us a lead position in the fast-growing encryption market.”

For those with a long memory, the bargaining and buying is full of some ironies in the go-go software industry.

The PGP Corp. acquisition by Symantec is but the latest chapter in the turbulent history of PGP, started by Phil Zimmermann in the early 1990s to commercialize his groundbreaking open-source encryption software, PGP being the acronym for what he called “Pretty Good Privacy.” In 1997, PGP, Inc. was bought by Network Associates, which eventually lost interest in PGP technology, though ex-PGP people founded the new PGP Corp. in 2002 after buying assets from Network Associates.

Symantec itself, over a decade ago, was in the desktop encryption game, even perhaps the leader, with a product called ForYourEyesOnly, Pescatore says. The company eventually abandoned it, thinking Microsoft was going to take over its target market for encryption, even though that didn’t happen.

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Microsoft says its contentious relationship with open source is changing

By JM Tuazon on March 19, 2010

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
March 19, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (03/18/2010) - Acknowledging the relationship between Microsoft and the open source community has been contentious, a Microsoft official Thursday nonetheless emphasized the company’s embrace of the open source paradigm, even if it was not necessarily for altruistic purposes.

The presentation by Microsoft’s Stuart McKee, who holds the title of national technology officer for the United States, continued a pattern in recent years that has seen Microsoft publicly embracing the open source movement and even funding it.

“[Microsoft feels] strongly that Microsoft’s success has been based on the fact that we can run a lot of diverse technologies on the Microsoft platform including open source,” McKee said. Microsoft has had a “contentious” relationship with open source proponents but “things are really changing,” he said.

McKee, who focuses on governmental customers for Microsoft, offered his perspectives in a keynote speech at the OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) in San Francisco.

Microsoft contributes to open source efforts, including sponsoring Linux, he said. Microsoft has contributed 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux kernel so Linux can run on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology, noted Robert Duffner, Microsoft director of open source strategy, who also was present at OSBC.

“To be quite honest, it’s not that we’re altruistic, necessarily. Our key desire is to satisfy customers. We build software for a living — that’ what we do,” McKee said. “And we understand profoundly that a diverse ecosystem is absolutely critical to satisfying the needs of customers and increasingly, that ecosystem does include open source.”

Among other examples of Microsoft’s embrace of open source cited by McKee included the Microsoft.web site for the Microsoft Web platform, which features 23 open source applications out of a total of 25 applications. Also, Apache software, the MySQL database, and PHP all run on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform, McKee said.

Microsoft in recent years has been endorsing open source via efforts such as sponsoring the Apache Foundation. The Microsoft-backed CodePlex Foundation, meanwhile, was set up last year as an effort to enable collaboration between open source communities and software companies.

Prior to McKee’s appearance, David Recordon, head of open source initiatives at Facebook, stressed the emphasis on open source software on the site.

“We rely on the Varnish project. Varnish is an incredible open source cache,” Recordon said. Billions of requests are served through Varnish everyday around the world on Facebook, he said.

To boost PHP performance on the site, Facebook developed an open source technology, HipHop for PHP, which transforms PHP code into highly optimized C++, said Recordon.

Facebook also uses the open source Memcached distributed memory object caching system and the MySQL database, Recordon said. Memcached, he said, “is sort of like that magic pixie dust” for scalability.

“We really use MySQL as our data store,” offering data integrity, decent backup tools and reliability, Recordon said.

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Investment firm manages business rules with open-source system

By JM Tuazon on February 19, 2010

Computerworld Philippines Staff
February 19, 2010

Aiming to improve the flexibility of its compliance system to improve user efficiency and reduce mounting system queries, investment company Millennium Global Investments (MGI) recently deployed JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System), an open-source business rules solution developed by Red Hat, Inc.

JBoss Enterprise BRMS enables business policy rules and development, access, and management by streamlining processes to reduce the time it takes to develop and update applications and processes with new business rules and policies.

“Red Hat’s flexible subscription terms for JBoss Enterprise Middleware allowed us to deploy only the components needed for the new platform and to avoid vendor lock-in. Unlike other vendors, Red Hat offers the ability to support other applications of the rules engine, be it market signal monitoring or algorithmic trading,” said Richard Macaskill, managing director, IT & Systems Development, MGI. “We were very pleased with the level of support Red Hat provided during the new business rules repository’s development. We are extremely satisfied to have deployed an integrated business rules platform that has improved our efficiency and ability to manage risk.”

The distinguishing feature of the JBoss Enterprise BRMS lies in its transparency, allowing users to access detailed information about why certain rules may prevent trading, eliminating constant queries to the firm’s management and aids the company’s risk management strategies.

“We are delighted with the positive feedback from MGI on its deployment of JBoss Enterprise BRMS. We are seeing further momentum of JBoss Enterprise BRMS as the enterprise continues to drive innovation through open source middleware,” said Pierre Fricke, Director, SOA Products, Red Hat. “Automating business decisions with JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help a business run faster and enable business process stakeholders to rapidly implement change. This is the kind of agility that enterprise deployments demand in today’s marketplace.” – John Mark V. Tuazon

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Red Hat launches ‘Spice project’ for virtualization innovation

By Computerworld Philippines on February 12, 2010

By Computerworld Philippines Staff
February 12, 2010

With the goal to openly collaborate with partners to drive the future of virtualization, open source solutions company Red Hat recently “open sourced” its hosted virtual desktop protocol named Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE).

Through the Spice project, Red Hat will collaborate with its partners and the open source community to expand the development of the protocol in an effort to help break down barriers to virtualization adoption.

SPICE serves as Red Hat’s high-performance communication protocol for hosted virtual desktops, a core component of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops product that is currently in beta.

A component of Red Hat’s September 2008 acquisition of Qumranet, SPICE is an adaptive remote rendering protocol designed specifically for virtual environments. The technology aims to provide a seamless user experience for today’s bandwidth-intensive applications such as multi-media and VoIP, offering a user experience comparable to that of a physical desktop.

“By open sourcing this technology, we are allowing our industry partners and the community to contribute to the future of virtualization with us,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Engineering at Red Hat.

Stevens explained the SPICE protocol is designed to optimize performance by automatically adapting to the graphics and communications environment that it is running in, so vendors have a terrific opportunity to enhance it for their specific applications.

“Open sourcing technologies is at the heart of Red Hat’s development and business model, and we hope that the ecosystem around desktop virtualization will now grow more rapidly and deliver more innovation to customers sooner,” Stevens said.

Jay Lyman, enterprise software analyst with The 451 Group, said that while open sourcing acquired technologies is only logical for Red Hat, the company is backing its release of the SPICE protocol source code as open source with supporting implementation code and components for server and client deployment.

“We’re still very early on in the adoption of virtual desktop technology and standards, but an open source SPICE has real potential to build developer and ecosystem support and to serve as a common layer among different VDI options,” Layman said.

Similarly, Daniel Frye, vice president, Open Systems Development, IBM, commented that Red Hat’s delivery of the open source SPICE protocol is an important step toward the goal of interoperability for the industry’s heterogeneous virtualization solutions. “We look forward to working with Red Hat and the open source community to drive virtualization adoption forward.”

A strong supporter of the SPICE protocol using its thin clients, Joe Makoid, president of Devon IT, reported that his company is at the forefront of delivering multimedia through thin client solutions and claims that open sourcing paves the way for an industry standard upon which Devon IT can help customers build valuable solutions.

“Devon IT is pleased to offer our leadership to help enable open source solutions that integrate into customers’ existing environments,” Makoid said. – Tom S. Noda

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Red Hat open-sources desktop application protocol

By Computerworld Philippines on December 10, 2009

By Joab Jackson
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
December 10, 2009

NEW YORK - Red Hat has open sourced a virtual desktop protocol it acquired last year, called the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment</a> (SPICE), in the hope of fostering its wider adoption.

Red Hat is using SPICE as one of the components of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops application, which should be released within a few months, according to Jim Brennan, senior product marketing manager at Red Hat.

By making SPICE open source, the company hopes other vendors will use it for their own virtual desktop offerings. Red Hat has set up a Web site and a mailing list to try to foster community involvement.

Red Hat acquired SPICE in 2008 when it purchased Qumranet. Qumranet used SPICE for its own commercial desktop-virtualization product, called SolidIce.

SPICE can be used to deploy virtual desktops from a server out to remote computers, such as desktop PCs and thin-client devices.

It resembles other rendering protocols used for remote desktop management and deployment, such as Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Citrix’s Independent Computing Architecture (ICA). Brennan said SPICE has advantages over those other protocols, in that SPICE can dynamically customize desktop instances to fit specific operating environments.

“It was designed with a tiered architecture,” he said. Processing can be divided between the remote device and the server, either at the hypervisor or the virtual desktop level. If the protocol senses that the remote client has some excess graphics processing capability, for instance, it will dynamically offload some of the visualization work to that device, freeing up capacity on the server.

At present, SPICE will support rendering virtual instances of Microsoft Windows XP and Windows 7, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. At the server level, it runs on 64-bit Linux platforms. As more companies participate in SPICE, more OSes should be made available at both the client and server level, Brennan predicted.

In addition to SPICE, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops package will also include a stripped-down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.4, with the KVM virtualization module compiled in, as well as desktop management software called the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

Red Hat placed most of the SPICE code under the GNU General Public License version 2, though parts are also licensed under Lesser GPL (LGPL) and BSD-styled licenses.

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Microsoft delays open-sourcing of Windows 7 tool

By Computerworld Philippines on November 26, 2009

By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
November 26, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Microsoft has delayed re-releasing a Windows 7 installation tool that it has admitted included open-source code, saying that it’s still testing the revamped utility.

The company now plans to issue a new version of Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT) in the “next few weeks,” said Peter Galli, Microsoft’s open-source community manager in a post to the firm’s Port25 blog last Friday.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft yanked WUDT from its Web site after blogger Rafael Rivera accused the company of lifting code from the GPLv2-licensed “Imagemaster” open-source project. Rivera, who writes the Within Windows blog, said Microsoft compounded the problem by not acknowledging the source of the code embedded in WDUT, and by not sharing the source code for its modifications, or the tool itself, to the project, as required by the terms of GPL (GNU General Public License).

Galli admitted the error Nov. 13, also on the Port25 blog , saying that it was “not intentional on our part.” He blamed a third-party developer Microsoft had contracted to create WDUT, but said Microsoft took final responsibility for the snafu.

“We share responsibility, as we did not catch it as part of our code review process,” Galli said.

At the time, Galli also promised that Microsoft would make the source code and the binaries for WDUT available the following week under the GPLv2 terms.

However, he had to backtrack on Friday. “While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today [Nov. 20], we still need to test and localize it,” said Galli. “Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks.”

Microsoft originally released WUDT in October, when it touted the tool as a way for netbook owners to create a bootable flash drive from a downloaded .iso file, or disk image, of Windows 7 purchased from Microsoft’s online store. Most netbooks lack an optical drive and so can’t install the new OS from a DVD.

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Microsoft: Win7 tool includes GPL code; software will go open source

By Fei Lumbania on November 16, 2009

By John Fontana
Network World (US)
November 16, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Microsoft Friday acknowledged that its Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool does indeed include open source code. To correct the error, the company next week will make the source code and binaries for the tool available under terms of the GPL v2 license.

Microsoft representative Peter Gali confirmed in a blog post that the tool does include GPLv2 code. He said the tool, offered through the Microsoft Store, was created by a third-party. But Gali did not shirk responsibility, saying Microsoft did not catch the error in its code review.

Earlier this week, Microsoft pulled the Download Tool after a prominent blogger accused the company of using open-source code without acknowledging where it originated. The tool helps users of netbooks that lack a DVD to install Windows 7.

Slideshow/story: 11 Open Source Companies to Watch

The Download Tool is free and was made available to users to create bootable USB drives or DVD backup media from the electronic editions of Windows 7 that come in an ISO format.

Gali also wrote that Microsoft is “taking measures to apply what we have learned from this experience for future code reviews we perform.”

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Microsoft extends Windows 7 and Azure to open source developers

By Melba Bernad on October 29, 2009

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
October 29, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft will unveil this week several open source initiatives to boost interoperability between Microsoft technologies, such as Windows 7, Windows Azure, and Silverlight, and open source technologies, including the Eclipse tools platform and Java.

Although the company has at times been viewed as the commercial opposite of the open source movement, the company’s latest gestures to the open source community show Microsoft is willing to make moves that can assist open source devotees build products that rely on Microsoft’s products. Microsoft is working with Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec in projects and technologies unveiled Tuesday.

“This is part of our ongoing efforts to make our products more open,” said Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect for the Microsoft interoperability strategy team.

In partnership with Eclipse solutions provider Tasktop, Microsoft is looking to enhance the developer experience of Eclipse on the newly released Windows 7 platform. Support is being extended to run the Eclipse IDE on Windows 7 and also to build Windows 7 applications.

The two companies will develop updates to the Eclipse IDE to incorporate features of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The intention, according to Microsoft, is to ensure that the “improved” productivity and user experience of Windows 7 will be available to developers using the Eclipse IDE and also to desktop applications built on the Eclipse platform.

Developers will be able to access Windows 7 functionality such as Jump Lists from the redesigned Windows 7 task bar. Jump Lists enable access to Eclipse-specific functions. Also, the project will extend Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit to integrate Windows 7 features such as task bar display of progress and search widget integration. Updates also will modernize the look and feel of Eclipse to match the Windows 7 user interface experience.

“We are working with Tasktop to improve the developer experience on Windows 7,” Rajagopalan said.

Tasktop will contribute enhancements to the Eclipse that will be available under the Eclipse Public License for early access in the first quarter of 2010. General release is planned for the Eclipse Helios technology release train in June 2010.

Windows remains a critical platform for Eclipse users, stressed Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop. “Over three-quarters of Eclipse downloads are of the Windows distribution,” he said.

“This joint effort between Tasktop and Microsoft is going to bring those new enhancements in Windows 7 into the hands of Eclipse IDE users,” Kersten said.

Microsoft also is announcing an open source plug-in, called Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, to give PHP developers more flexibility in developing Web applications for the Windows Azure cloud platform. The plug-in, available as a free download, features wizards and utilities for writing, debugging, and deploying PHP applications to Azure.

“Essentially, it’s an open source plugin that will enable PHP developers using Eclipse to create PHP Web applications,” Rajagopalan said. The technology is available for download.

The existing Windows SDK for PHP is bundled into the Eclipse PHP project through the plug-in, which also includes a Windows Azure “storage explorer” to browse data contained in Azure tables, blobs, or queues.

Despite its Eclipse endeavors, Microsoft still has no plans to join the Eclipse Foundation. “I think we’ll continue to explore opportunities to work with them,” Rajagopalan said. “At this stage, we haven’t made any decision to join the Eclipse community.”

Also being unveiled is Windows Azure SDK for Java, providing tools to help Java developers use Azure. The SDK leverages Windows Azure Storage services for storing data and offers development methods for writing Web applications.
“We are releasing the Java SDK for Windows Azure so that Java developers who are running on-premise applications or other cloud applications can [also] use Azure storage,” said Rajagopalan.

Soyatec partnered with Microsoft on both Eclipse Tools for Windows Azure for PHP and Windows Azure SDK for Java. Microsoft and Soyatec also have released a 1.0 version of Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, which is a plug-in for Eclipse-based developers to build rich Internet applications that leverage Silverlight.

Included in the project is support for Macintosh and guidance on interoperability between Silverlight applications and Java-based Web sites and Web services, including REST, JSON, and other standards, Microsoft said. A customer technology preview of the plug-in was offered in March.

A Microsoft-Soyatec road map calls for spring 2010 availability of version 2 of Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, featuring support for Silverlight 3.0 and offline application capabilities.

With its initiatives, Microsoft is reaching over to the “other side” — the open source developers, said analyst Al Hilwa of IDC. “[However,] it’s a question mark” as far as how many developers will take Microsoft up on its accommodations, he said. But Microsoft’s efforts are commendable, even if the company does have its own self interest in mind, Hilwa said.

“At the end of the day, this is not a charitable organization per se. I don’t expect them to be, but the important thing is there’s different ways to interpret what may be in their interest,” he said. “Now, they’re taking a more open view of what’s in their interest.”

For example, Microsoft is trying to extend adoption of Azure to Java developers, Hilwa noted. “They’re saying it’s not necessary that you have to be a .Net developer to take advantage of Azure,” said Hilwa.

Microsoft has been on a campaign in recent years to make accommodations for open source. The company cited developments such as its Windows Azure for PHP effort and Restlet Extension for ADO.Net Services to bridge Java and .Net. The company also is working with Zend, IBM and others on Simple API for Cloud Application Services, an open source project for cloud interoperability.

The company in the past, however, has irked open source devotees with endeavors like forging an intellectual property agreement with Novell pertaining to Linux.

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Mozilla blocks Microsoft’s sneaky Firefox plug-in

By Fei Lumbania on October 19, 2009

By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
October 19, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Mozilla late Friday blocked the Microsoft-made software that had put Firefox users at risk from attack.

The two-part Microsoft component — an add-on dubbed “.NET Framework Assistant” and a plug-in named “Windows Presentation Foundation” — have been blocked by Mozilla as a precautionary measure, said Mike Shaver, the company’s head of engineering.

“Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plug-in for all users via our blocklisting mechanism,” Shaver said in an announcement posted Friday night to the company’s security blog .

Mozilla maintains an add-on/plug-in blocking list that automatically bars risky software from being used by Firefox. The open-source company first used the blocker in 2007. Mozilla has used the tool only nine times, including Friday’s blocking of the Microsoft add-on and plug-in. In May 2008, for example, Mozilla added a Vietnamese language pack for Firefox to the blocking list when the pack was found to contain a worm.

According to Shaver, Microsoft gave Mozilla the go-ahead to block the .Net Framework Assistant and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Last week, Microsoft’s security team acknowledged that its software — which had been silently installed in Firefox as far back as February 2009 — contained a critical vulnerability that could be used by hackers to hijack Windows PCs. The same vulnerability also affected all versions of Internet Explorer (IE), including the newest version, IE8.

Microsoft maintained that users who applied the patches it issued last week as part of a record-setting security update would protect Firefox users from attack. However, the MS09-054 bulletin, which provided details on the vulnerability, said nothing about Firefox. Later last Tuesday, Microsoft expanded on MS09-054 in a blog post by security engineers , and confirmed that Firefox was affected because of the add-on and plug-in.

Mozilla, however, clearly felt that that was not enough, and took the unusual step of blocking the Microsoft add-on and plug-in. Multiple Computerworld staffers have confirmed that Firefox is now blocking the Microsoft software. “These add-ons have a high risk of causing stability or security problems and have been blocked, but a restart is required to disable them completely,” the Firefox warning message reads.

The history of the .Net Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation software is tangled and contentious. Firefox users complained last February, and then again in May, when they found out that Microsoft had pushed the components to their browser as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) update, which was delivered via Windows Update.

Users were furious that the software was installed without their approval. To add salt to the wound, the components were impossible to uninstall without editing the Windows registry, a chore most users avoid because any misstep could cripple the PC. Later, Microsoft issued a follow-on update that made it possible to uninstall or disable the components without a registry edit.

Mozilla has been aggressively pursuing risky add-ons and plug-ins of late. Last month, it warned Firefox users running outdated versions of Adobe’s Flash Player to upgrade, then last week added a more thorough plug-in checking service to its arsenal.

The next edition of the browser, Firefox 3.6, will warn users when they visit a Web site that relies on one or more outdated plug-ins. A beta of Firefox 3.6 is set to launch Wednesday.

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Red Hat sets stage for open source virtualization

By JM Tuazon on October 8, 2009

By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
October 6, 2009

Resolved to the fact that virtualization will be a key technology for businesses to move forward, open source IT solutions provider Red Hat declared on Friday its moves to clamp down on the new trend space, with a focus on next-generation virtualization technology.

The new form of virtualization, the open-source advocate explained, is built upon KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) where the power of virtualization is achieved and embedded in the kernel itself. This technology, it said, is included in its newly-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

“Around 95% of enterprises have already deployed ‘some’ virtualization,” noted Gery Messer, president, Red Hat Asia Pacific/Japan. “It is predicted that every single data center in the coming years will be virtualized.”

Messer shared that a lot of CIOs are still weary of adopting virtualization, citing performance, scalability, security, ecosystem and cost as main barriers to adoption.

He stressed, however, how open source technology is gaining more adopters globally, and how it is becoming more mainstream. “Open source technology is already enterprise-ready, proven and mature,” he related. “In fact, the whole New York Stock Exchange is running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

The common problem of interoperability among open source software, Messer added, is addressed by Red Hat’s agreement with Microsoft to enable interoperability across the two platforms. “The world of IT today is a mixture of virtualized and non-virtualized environments,” said Mike Evans, vice president, corporate development at Red Hat, in an earlier press statement. “Red Hat is looking to help customer extend more rapidly into virtualized environments, including mixed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server environments.”

The key components of the reciprocal agreements, the company said, include validation of guests from both servers, and the service of coordinated technical support for customers of both systems. “Physical hardware doesn’t care what operating system is installed on top of it, and virtual hardware provided by a hypervisor should be no different,” said Gary Chen, research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC.

Messer said this opens up more customers to adopt virtualization solutions of their choice, including Red Hat’s four main offerings for businesses: the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaton Manager for Servers, the Red Hat Virtualization Manager for Desktops, and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

All of Red Hat’s offerings are served on a per subscription basis, which Messer described as “the most ideal model for any software company,” given its main capability to change CAPEX (capital expenditures) to OPEX (operating expenditures). “A new release, therefore, is not a revenue event for us. All businesses will need is an active subscription to be able to upgrade,” he added.

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IDC: Organizations adopt open source to reduce expenses

By JM Tuazon on September 30, 2009

By Anuradha Shukla
MIS Asia
September 30, 2009

SINGAPORE - Recent studies from IDC show that organizations in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) looking to reduce their operational expenses have begun to see open source software as a viable alternative.

Many Indonesian companies (34.5%) intend to deploy new open source customer relationship management (CRM) applications over the next 18 months.

IDC provides market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. Their recent studies include ‘Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoption in 2009′, and ‘Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoptions: Customer Case Study’.

Increased deployment in the coming months
The first report indicates that CRM applications, database management and virtualisation software are the most popular solutions. IDC said these three categories boast the highest percentage of respondents from each primary market that intend to use open source over the next 18 months.

“Verticals like distribution services (13 per cent), infrastructure services (12.1 per cent) and public sector (11.8 per cent) plan to deploy open source for CRM applications within the next 18 months,” said Ridhi Sawhney, market analyst of Asia Pacific enterprise applications research at IDC.

Sawhney added that the public sector has more than one reason to adopt open source. Besides cost reductions, they want to build an ecosystem, lower the entry barrier, and promote open source adoption.

IDC pointed out that vendors position open source as a solution and customise it to the needs of specific verticals. They want to build a partner ecosystem and expand through partners’ sales support and services. Many open source vendors such as SugarCRM Ingres and Jaspersoft are also collaborating to create awareness and generate demand.

According to Sawhney, other perceived benefits of adopting open source such as no vendor lock-in and access to the source code can increase the ease of integration with the existing infrastructure of an organisation. Also, it will facilitate compatibility with different platforms.

“This gives the organisation an opportunity to use and test open source without changing their whole IT infrastructure.”

Big names such as Red Hat, Sun, and EnterpriseDB have a direct presence in the region but others depend on their partners. Some companies are also using Web training, pilots, and proof of concept via phone but the lack of direct presence, localisation, and support and services offerings pose obstacles in getting the projects started.

End-user organisations are also discouraged by the perceived lack of internal and external skills to support the shift towards adopting an open source strategy. IDC said companies would be more likely to subscribe to hardware or software support services in order to support open source software.

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Goldman Sachs case; can open-source software be stolen?

By Melba Bernad on August 27, 2009

By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
August 27, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Arrested last month for stealing cutting-edge trading software from his former employer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., programmer Sergey Aleynikov offered up an interesting defense: he was only trying to download open-source software. According to a report published Sunday in the New York Times , Aleynikov told FBI investigators that he had inadvertently taken about 32 MB of proprietary Goldman Sachs while taking open source code that can be used freely by anyone.
Aleynikov, a high-level developer for Goldman Sachs, was arrested by the FBI on July 3 on charges of stealing computer code that automates the firm’s high-volume trading on stock and commodities markets.
Aleynikov, who is now free on bail, told the FBI he had not used the code at his new job nor given it to anyone else, according to the Times story. The complaint does not include such charges.

The case raises many intriguing questions, such as what exactly is the ’secret sauce’ behind the high-speed trading software that some experts told the Times is used by Wall Street firms to generate huge revenues — some $8 billion this year. Experts also say the software could be giving the large trading firms an unfair advantage over regular investors.
Observers also wonder why Aleynikov didn’t simply download the unnamed open-source code from any of its free repositories rather than from Goldman Sachs systems. And programmers and open-source users are left wondering whether Aleynikov can be found guilty of stealing the code that belongs to the programming community.

Actually, he can, according to legal and open-source experts who cite the terms and conditions of the General Public License (GPL), which is used to govern the use of about two-thirds of open-source software. . “This is a common misconception,” said Brett Smith, license compliance engineer at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which oversees use of the GPL.

Though the FSF has long argued that all software and source code should be free — just today, it launched a campaign against the “sins” of Microsoft’s proprietary Windows 7 operating system — the terms of the GPL does include some restrictions.
For example, the GPL states that companies that modify open-source software for internal use aren’t required to share code changes with the open source world, said Smith. “You never have to provide the source code to an upstream developer or the general public if you don’t want to,” he said.

The GPL does require the sharing of source code if the developer or his or her employer plans to distribute the software, either by giving it away for free or even selling it, Smith said.

“People get the impression that you’re not allowed to distribute GPL-licensed software for a fee,” he said. “We’re pretty happy for you to make money on it.”

Nonetheless, Smith did contend that the GPL is the strictest open-source license when it comes to code-sharing requirements.

The MIT and BSD licenses, for example, “have no ongoing obligations,” according to Andy Updegrove, a Boston lawyer who represents several open-source organizations. “So if the [Goldman Sachs] code in question was under these, then this guy would not have had any right to the code nor would he be likely to have had a public repository to turn to find Goldman Sach’s altered version.”

So Goldman Sachs likely was not required to share any of its modified open-source code, and thus its aggressive moves to make sure none of it comes to light is unsurprising. “I’ve never heard of” a Wall Street firm donating source code back to a project, Smith said.

And having worked in a highly-competitive industry that depends of the top-secret software to generate billions in profits, Aleynikov probably should have known better, says Daren Orzechowski, a New York-based intellectual property lawyer with White & Case LLP.

“I’ve worked with a lot of financial institutions and large corporations,” he said. “I’m sure that a person with this type of position (Aleynikov was a Goldman Sachs vice-president earning some $400,000 a year who left to make $1.2 million at his next job, according to the Times) would have signed a number of agreements that would have made it very clear that everything that he works on and touches while working for the bank is the property of the bank. The IP laws in the U.S. would back that up.”

Updegrove added: “To the extent that the identical code was available elsewhere, he used poor judgment taking the code from a Goldman Sachs server. To the extent he took any altered code based on open-source code that Goldman Sachs had not already contributed back to the project, I see no reason why this would not run afoul of his contractual obligations to Goldman Sachs, just as would normal proprietary code.”

On the other hand, the downloading of the code has not yet damaged Goldman Sachs’ business. And Securities Industry News reported earlier this month that the bank is likely to settle with Aleynikov to make sure that it can minimize the amount of information they would have to reveal about their trading platform.

Orzechowski recommends that programmers in highly-competitive industries like securities trading talk to their company’s lawyers about how to use and document their use of open-source software. “There are ways to develop apps that are isolated modules so that you won’t trigger the viral [code-sharing] provisions of open-source software,” he said.

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Open-source users revolt over OpenOffice.org ribbon-esque UI

By Melba Bernad on August 11, 2009

By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
August 11, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The open-source faithful are lambasting a proposed overhaul of OpenOffice.org’s user interface, with critics saying it would “ape” Microsoft Office’s controversial Ribbon layout.

Design of the new UI has been going on for the past nine months, led by OpenOffice.org’s main contributor, Sun Microsystems Inc.

According to an update by Sun in July (download presentation), the still-rough overhaul aims to “create a user interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users’ choice not only out of need but also out of desire.”

Judging by the vast majority of the 500-odd comments at Sun’s blog last week, the new UI caused many to recoil at its strong association with Microsoft.

“This would be a killer feature for not using OpenOffice.org…. Don’t implement this,” wrote ‘e7′.

“The Office ribbon sucks. Please don’t copy it,” wrote Robert Hicks.

“This is the definite evidence that either there’s no God, or that he hates us,” tweeted another user.

Not all commentators shared the negativity. Said “sRC,” “I like where this is going…. The Office 07 Ribbon does look functionally challenged at first, but once you get used to it, it is so much nicer to work with than a standard interface.”

Similarities abound

OpenOffice.org has long consciously emulated Microsoft Office, from the features and apps it offers to the interface, with drop-down menus and even the same keyboard shortcuts. That’s designed to shorten the learning curve for users moving from Office to the free open-source productivity suite.

With Office 2007, Microsoft switched to an XML-based document format and re-invented its user interface to better expose Office’s deep well of features.

That has attracted much criticism from users complaining about having to relearn commands they’ve used for decades to those who say its chunkiness eats up too much horizontal real estate on today’s predominantly wide-screen monitors. Others are looking for a chance “to rag on Microsoft,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc.

The backlash is so strong that several companies have released tools enabling Office 2007 users to go back to their beloved drop-down menus.

Microsoft, on the other hand, says the Ribbon is so popular that it is using it for some of Windows 7’s built-in apps such as WordPad and Paint, though not for Windows 7’s interface itself.

OpenOffice.org eyed 145 mock-ups

OpenOffice.org faced the same dilemma as Microsoft Office in exposing its many features.

In the last six months, OpenOffice.org evaluated more than 17 proposals with 145 design mock-ups, according to John McCreesh, marketing head for OpenOffice.org. Besides the toolbar redesign, OpenOffice.org is thinking of adding live previews, more dragging-and-dropping and a 3D view.

Slamming the redesign simply on the toolbar redesign “is a bit unfair,” McCreesh wrote in an e-mail. “Yes, one of the elements of the new design was a new toolbar, which reminded people of the Microsoft Ribbon. Not really surprising, in that using tabs like this is pretty common in UIs, e.g. on web sites.”

The redesign still needs to be “formally tested with real users and refined,” he wrote. “The team will analyze the feedback from people who have used prototypes; other prototypes may be built…. It will be fascinating to see what emerges.”

Haff said he prefers Microsoft’s forceful hand when deploying the Ribbon, which he called “a clean sheet replacement for years of accumulated user interface crud.” By contrast, OpenOffice.org’s ribbon “*looks* to be an addition to what is already there, which, if that’s the case, wouldn’t solve anything,” he wrote.

Michael Meeks, a Novell Inc. engineer working on OpenOffice.org, said he personally likes Office 2007’s ribbon UI. His main concern about OpenOffice.org’s proposed redesign is that “it is unclear to me who is going to do the coding,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Lots of good ideas out there, but not enough typing muscle.”

Controversy aside, OpenOffice.org appears more popular than ever. The latest version 3.1 passed the 20 million download mark last week, just three months after its release.

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Does GPL still matter?

By Melba Bernad on August 11, 2009

By John Edwards
InfoWorld (US)
August 11, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company’s future. That decision: to toss away his upcoming product’s Gnu General Public License (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. “We initially started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer to move the license to Apache,” Haynie says.

Haynie isn’t the only business-oriented open source community member to have made, or at least pondered, a move to a GPL-free future. A June study conducted by Black Duck Software, an open source development tools vendor, shows that the Free Software Foundation’s GPL — although far and away still the dominant open source licensing platform — could be starting to slide. The survey found that despite strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants dropped from 70% to 65% from the previous year.

Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. “Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,” he says.

“The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that’s actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,” says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL.

Alternative licenses offer liberal code distribution terms (which means more revenue potential) and more clearly written licenses — and they have eager and qualified developer communities, advocates say.

GPL limits developers’ ability to make money
As the open source market continues marching away from its roots — the lone developer who creates a useful product as a labor of love — appreciation for the idealism that lies at the GPL’s heart is diminishing. Businesses that view open source development as a path to a profitable future rather than as an altruistic mission are increasingly balking at what they view as the license’s excessively restrictive aspects concerning code improvements.

Open software license usage: License and percentage of apps using it
Gnu General Public License (GPL) 2.0: 50.1%
Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1: 9.6%
Artistic License (Perl): 8.7%
BSD License 2.0: 6.3%
Gnu General Public License (GPL) 3.0: 5.1%
Apache License 2.0: 3.9%
MIT License: 3.8%
Code Project Open 1.02 License: 3.4%
Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1: 1.3%
Microsoft Public License (MS-PL): 1.0%
Source: Black Duck Software

A big reason for the decline of GPL is that its terms severely limit a licensee’s ability to remarket any code improvements. The claims that Eclipse’s Milinkovich makes for the Eclipse license is typical of the GPL alternatives: “Our licensing is very much based on the notion that we want to be commercially friendly. … The typical business model in the Eclipse ecosystem takes technology from the Eclipse community, adds commercial value on top of that, and commercially license the results.”

The GPL effectively prevents businesses from fully reaping the financial benefits of any code enhancements they bring to a product, says Van Lindberg, a lawyer specializing in open source issues at Haynes and Boone. “Essentially, the rule with GPL is that the code that comes in GPL, and any improvements that are directly built on that, are to stay [in] GPL,” he says. “You can sell code that is GPL’d; you just need to give certain guarantees and rights to people who receive the code, including the ability for them to pass it on without cost.”

Appcelerator’s Haynie notes that his company’s decision to jump from GPL to Apache was made after many weeks of serious research and thought. “The move was made strictly on a business-case basis,” he says. Haynie says that Apache removed GPL’s code distribution roadblock without adding any significant disadvantages. “It furthered what we believed is our ultimate model of monetization,” he says, particularly “because of the explicit patent language in the license, which gave us a little bit more [advantage] from a legal standpoint.”

“The GPL guys are very much focused on a particular ideology about free software, and all software must be free, even if they have to force it to be free,” Milinkovich says. “There are some people who almost look at it as a religious discussion — the idea that there is only one set, or valid, open source license,” echoes Jim Jagielski, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, an alternative license provider.

The GPL was conceived as a way to ensure complete redistribution of intellectual property, notes Howard Kiewe, an analyst at Info-Tech research group. “That’s no longer a suitable arrangement for many business-oriented licensees,” he says.

Other benefits of GPL alternatives
Jagielski says that beyond friendly business terms, most alternative licenses offer the benefit of being written more clearly and precisely than GPL. “There’s some concern that the GPL, as written, is just a little bit hard to understand,” he says. “You need to worry much more about when GPL kicks in and when it doesn’t and that means, of course, that you might need to get the legal department involved.”

Jagielski claims that Apache’s licensing terms are written to be comprehensible to people with no legal training. “It’s very, very easy to read and understand, so it’s a less risky license for external companies to use,” he says.

While license terms are critical, open source developers must also ponder other considerations, including the scope and depth of each license platform’s respective development community. “The reason why these other licenses are gaining traction is because of the community that has evolved around them, almost as much — or even more than — features of the licenses themselves,” says attorney Lindberg.

Thanks to its longevity and market dominance, GPL has a very large, deep, and active developer community. But other licensors are catching up. “I think that you’re starting to see a slow push back from some of these other licensing communities, where they’re starting to prove that they can build, establish, and maintain a strong community without the reciprocal provision of the GPL,” Lindberg says. “That’s opening the door for those who are more comfortable with these more permissive licenses, like Apache and Eclipse, to exercise their preferences.”

GPL changes would hinder commercial cloud-based apps
To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on. Under GPL, “you’ve got to give it away for free, and you’ve got to give the source code away for free as well,” says analyst Kiewe.

The cloud gave developers a loophole, since software provisioned over the Internet such as through SaaS isn’t actually distributed, just run from a central server accessible over the Internet. That means there’s no need to distribute the source code for GPL cloud applications. Thus, many cloud developers still use the original GPL, assuming that they are exempt from its distribution restrictions.

“The traditional GPL doesn’t apply to the provision of Salesforce.com or to Google Search,” Lindberg says. This fact hasn’t escaped the notice of the Free Software Foundation. The so-called SaaS loophole is being addressed by an updated version of GPL called Affero GPL. “It’s just a way to keep that original intent of GPL is met in a new computing environment,” Lindberg says.

And that move to force cloud-provisioned software developers to give away their source code for free is making many look for a new license, to keep the GPL mentality out of the cloud. Amazon.com, for example, uses Eclipse’s license for its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service to avoid having to give away its code, says Eclipse’s Milinkovich.

Your alternatives to GPL
Businesses that don’t like GPL’s restrictions have no shortage of alternatives. Major competitors to GPL include Apache, which is using its Web development roots to attract licensees, and Eclipse, which began as a project targeting Java developers but has since expanded into many software areas. Other significant licenses include the Perl-focused Artistic License, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License, the MIT License, and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). There are also dozens of smaller licensors.

“I believe that licensing innovation is positive for the industry, as new business models are tested,” says Josep Mitja, COO of Openbravo, a developer of open source business software. But there’s also a downside, he notes, since vendors can easily spend weeks or even months seeking out the best possible choice: “The industry needs to avoid an excessive proliferation of those licenses to avoid creating confusion in the market.”

GPL still has a place, given its reach
Despite the arrival of newer, more business-friendly rivals, hardly anyone believes GPL is at any risk of disappearing. “GPL code has the largest single, sharable base of code across the entire open source spectrum,” observes attorney Lindberg. “That’s a tremendous advantage that’s not going to go away anytime soon.”

Analyst Kiewe says that there will be places for both GPL and alternate licensing platforms in open source’s future. He believes that GPL will continue to attract large numbers of nonbusiness users. “You’ll always have people who want to work on the big ideas, want to share those freely, and don’t want to be inhibited by nondisclosure agreements and all the rest of the stuff that comes with typical commercial development,” he says.

“If you’re a university or a research center, and you want to get your ideas out into the world, and you want them to be used freely, and you don’t necessarily want somebody else essentially stealing your concept and repurposing them in the commercial context, then a GPL license is appropriate,” Kiewe says.

But Lindberg predicts that GPL’s current overwhelming market dominance is destined to diminish as the open source market continues to both expand and fragment into niches. “You are going to see a wide variety of licensing options, as different projects are tuned toward different preferences and different segments of the market,” he says.

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Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat to Windows client

By Melba Bernad on August 5, 2009

IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
August 5, 2009

NEW YORK - Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The move is an acknowledgement of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft’s Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks.

“Netbooks opened Microsoft to the possibility that some other OS could get its grip on the desktop, however briefly,” said Rob Helm, director of research for Directions on Microsoft. “Now it’s alert to that possibility going forward.”

In its annual Form 10-K report for the fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft cited Red Hat and Canonical — the latter of which maintains the Ubuntu Linux distribution — as competitors to its client business, which includes the desktop version of its Windows OS.

Previously, Microsoft had only noted competition from Red Hat to its Server and Tools business, which includes the Windows Server version of the OS for server hardware, in its 10-K reports.

“Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market,” Microsoft said in the filing. “Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.”

The filing goes on to note, in a thinly veiled reference to netbooks, that Linux has gained what Microsoft characterizes as “some acceptance” as an alternative client OS to Windows, in particular in “emerging markets” where “competitive pressures lead OEMs to reduce costs and new, lower-price PC form-factors gain adoption.”

It also mentions the work of Microsoft’s own OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners Hewlett-Packard and Intel to support Linux on PCs.

Seattle-based blogger Todd Bishop called attention to Microsoft’s acknowledged change to the competitive landscape in a blog post on the TechFlash Microsoft Blog. He also posted a link to Microsoft’s 10-K filing.

While Linux on servers is a well-established market among business customers, Linux as a viable alternative to Windows on PCs has never taken off. However, the emergence of the netbook as a low-cost, smaller form factor to the traditional notebook PC has certainly changed that, so much so that Microsoft lately has been pushing a lightweight notebook as an alternative to netbooks, Helm said.

“Microsoft would like the netbook to go away and be replaced by lightweight laptops — ones with long battery life that cost enough to justify running full Windows on them,” he said.

Helm added that Microsoft is trying to discourage the production of inexpensive computers where Windows becomes the most expensive component because it can’t make as much money on Windows on these devices, and they could drive down the price of Windows.

Microsoft’s current Windows client OS, Windows Vista, had too large a hardware footprint and was too expensive for netbooks, giving Linux an opening in that market when it emerged late last year. However, Microsoft’s eight-year-old Windows XP OS is still the dominant system for netbooks, and the release of Windows 7 in October will feature a Starter Edition that is especially geared toward that market as well.

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Open-source project aims to make secure DNS easier

By Fei Lumbania on July 31, 2009

By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service (London Bureau)
July 31, 2009

LONDON - A group of developers has released open-source software that gives administrators a hand in making the Internet’s addressing system less vulnerable to hackers.The software, called OpenDNSSEC, automates many tasks associated with implementing DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions), which is a set a set of protocols that allows DNS (Domain Name System) records to carry a digital signature, said John A. Dickinson, a DNS consultant working on the project.

DNS records allow Web sites to be translated from a name into an IP (Internet Protocol) address, which can be queried by a computer. But the DNS system has several flaws dating from its original design that are being increasingly targeted by hackers. By tampering with a DNS server, it’s possible for a user to type in the correct Web site name but be directed to a fraudulent site, a type of attack called cache poisoning. That’s one of many concerns that is driving a movement for ISPs and other entities running DNS servers to use DNSSEC. With DNSSEC, DNS records are cryptographically signed, and those signatures are verified to ensure the information is accurate.

Adoption of DNSSEC, however, has been held back by both the complexity of implementation and a lack of simpler tools, Dickinson said. To sign DNS records, DNSSEC uses public key cryptography, where signatures are created using a public and private key and implemented on a zone level. Part of the problem is management of those keys, since they must be refreshed periodically to maintain a high level of security, Dickinson said. A mistake in managing those keys could cause major problems, which is one of the challenges for administrators.

OpenDNSSEC allows administrators to create policies and then automate managing the keys and signing the records, Dickinson said. The process now involves more manual intervention, which increases the chance for errors. OpenDNSSEC “takes care of making sure that zone stays signed properly and correctly according to the policy on a permanent basis,” Dickinson said. “All of that is completely automated so that the administrator can concentrate on doing DNS and let the security work in the background.”

The software also has a key storage feature that lets administrators keep keys in either a hardware or security software module, an additional layer of protection that ensure keys don’t end up in the wrong hands, Dickinson said. The OpenDNSSEC software is available for download, although it is being offered as a technology preview and shouldn’t be used yet in production, Dickinson said. Developers will gather feedback on the tool and release improved versions in the near future. As of earlier this year, most top-level domains, such as those ending in “.com,” were not cryptographically signed, and neither were those in the DNS root zone, the master list of where computers can go to look up an address in a particular domain. VeriSign, which is the registry for “.com,” said in February it will implement DNSSEC across top-level domains including .com by 2011. Other organizations are also moving toward using DNSSEC. The U.S. government has committed to using DNSSEC for its “.gov” domain. Other ccTLDs (country-code Top-Level Domains) operators in Sweden (.se), Brazil (.br), Puerto Rico (.pr) and Bulgaria (.bg), are also using DNSSEC. Security experts argue that DNSSEC should be used sooner rather than later due to existing vulnerabilities in DNS. One of the more serious ones was revealed by security researcher Dan Kaminsky in July 2008. He showed that DNS servers could be quickly filled with inaccurate information, which could be used for a variety of attacks on e-mail systems, software updating systems and password recovery systems on Web sites.

While temporary patches have been deployed, it’s not a long-term solution since it just takes longer to perform an attack, according to a white paper published earlier this year by SurfNet, a Dutch research and education organization. SurfNet is among OpenDNSSEC’s backers, which also includes the “.uk” registry Nominet, NLnet Labs and SIDN, the “.nl” registry. Unless DNSSEC is used, “the basic flaw in the Domain Name System — that there is no way to ensure that answers to queries are genuine — remains,” the paper said.

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Linux exec: Personal computers will be free like phones

By Fei Lumbania on July 27, 2009

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 27, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Look for personal computer users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.

In a presentation at the O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Convention), Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said a trend will emerge in which users would select a wireless or network service provider and get a free PC with a data plan. AT&T, he said, already is offering netbooks as part of a service plan, with the user getting the netbook for $50.

In an interview on Thursday, Zemlin elaborated on his free PC vision, enabled by the rise of netbooks running Linux. “What made the cell phone industry in the U.S. in particular take off in the mid-90s was the free phone,” he said.

Carriers, he predicted, can provide Linux-based devices and develop their own app stores. Device makers also can provide these store, like Apple has, Zemlin said.

During his keynote, Zemlin emphasized the use of Linux in multiple types of systems and how Linux was changing the game in operating systems even on the client. “Today, everybody in the modern world uses Linux multiple times a day,” he said, citing examples such as laptops, Google searches, and other systems.

Meanwhile, phones and PC devices are starting to converge, offering a lot of the same functionality, he explained. A PC can be cheaper than a phone, he said.

“If you look at what the iPhone has, it looks pretty similar to that PC,” said Zemlin, comparing the iPhone to a $1,000 ThinkPad PC.

Linux also is benefitting from the down economy, with customers looking to save costs, Zemlin said. It also is overcoming potential legal hurdles with developments such as Microsoft now embracing the GPL, Zemlin said.

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Intel official touts netbooks at open source conference

By Fei Lumbania on July 23, 2009

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 23, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Intel’s work promoting netbooks — the downsized PCs that are gaining in mindshare — was touted by a company official Wednesday, who stressed benefits in boot-up times, graphics, and network capabilities during a technology conference.

Speaking at the O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Convention) in San Jose, Calif., Dirk Hohndel, Intel chief open source technologist, said the company has gone from a company that was considered skeptical by the open source community to a top contributor in Linux and open source. A key example of Intel’s efforts involve netbooks, Hohndel said.

“What is remarkable about this is this a computer category that started with Linux,” Hohndel said.

“The category is hot; there is competition,” he said. A critical differentiator for netbooks is fast boot-up, said Hohndel. “No one wants to wait for a few minutes until they can do something,” he said.

Also key to netbooks is a revamped graphics stack. “We want to re-set the way graphics are done in Linux, and we’ve done a lot of work [on] this in the last three years,” Hohndel said. Graphics have been moved into the kernel, he said.

Connectivity also is critical for netbooks and mobile Linux, he said. Work has been done on connection management; Intel also has worked with Nokia on a telephony stack, Hohndel said.

Intel, he noted, has been working on the Moblin open source project intended to provide a Linux platform for netbooks and other systems such as mobile Internet devices. The company recently turned over the project to the Linux Foundation in order to attract more community support. Hohndel invited the audience to join the effort and “help us make Moblin the OS you want.”

Also at the conference on Wednesday, proponents of the Perl 6 upgrade to the Perl language detailed improvements planned for the language. An implementation of Perl 6 is anticipated next spring.

Among the features is incorporation of unit test facilities right into the language itself, as opposed to implementing them as add-on modules. This makes testing easier, said Damien Conway, a designer of Perl. Better control of randomness, to lessen mistakes in programming and boost reliability and readability, also is eyed. Better joining for arrays is planned as well.

WSO2, an open source SOA software vendor, at OSCON is announcing WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0 and WSO2 Identity Server 2.0. Formerly WSO Registry, WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0 features service governance through discovery, impact analysis and extraction of metadata. Lifecycle management and federation also are featured.

WSO2 Identity Server offers identity and entitlement management for authorization and authentication in SOA. Entitlement pertains to authorizing persons to conduct activities, said Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 CEO. An entitlement engine based on OASIS extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) 2.0 is featured for fine-grained authorization, WSO2 said.

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Save Mart grocery chain sees savings in open source

By Melba Bernad on July 3, 2009

By Ellen Messmer
Network World (US)

FRAMINGHAM - Open-source software is not only as good as proprietary vendor software in many cases, it’s better — and certainly a lot cheaper, according to James Sims, vice president of information technology and chief information officer at the grocery retailer, Save Mart.

With about 245 stores, three warehouses, 20,000-plus employees, and a trucking fleet as part of a multi-billion-dollar grocery operation, Modesto, Calif.-based Save Mart has discovered that where it made a shift to open-source software for databases, operating systems and network management, it lowered costs by more than half.

“Open source is profoundly less expensive,” says Sims, citing the adoption of SuSe Linux, the Ingres open-source database, MySQL, and Hobbit open-source monitoring as changes that contributed to over 50% in IT savings in comparison to the proprietary software from Oracle, Microsoft Windows or HP OpenView that was replaced.

Open source “is free but we do pay for support and services,” Sim’s points out, noting that Save Mart has established vendor alliances with Novell, Red Hat and Ingres to support open-source software the grocery retailer uses.

Save Mart’s first experience with the Ingres open-source database came when it acquired grocery stores from Albertsons about two years ago, and because the acquisition didn’t include software licenses, the decision was made to try the Ingres open-source database.

At the time, it was viewed as a bit radical to make this shift, but Save Mart has had such a positive experience, it’s now likely to migrate away from Oracle’s database which it uses elsewhere, if only because Oracle has turned out to be “one of the worst business partners we’ve had” because of abysmal service and support, says Sims.

“We get better service and support with open-source and Ingres than with Oracle,” says Sims, with about one-quarter of the overall costs.

Every little bit helps in the grocery business, where profit margins are razor-thin, Sims notes. A shift towards open source also means that Save Mart puts more value on IT staff with interest and skills in Linux and open source.

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Open source integration tools are ‘enterprise ready’

By Computerworld Philippines on May 7, 2009

LONDON - Enterprises are increasingly looking at open source for critical enterprise date integration projects, according to a global survey of more than 1,000 respondents.

The survey, conducted by open source data integration provider Talend, said organisations trying to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for data integration software, were considering OSS.

This was not just for one-time projects, but also “for on-going mission-critical processes, to replace or complement their expensive CPU-dependent solutions,” Talend claimed.

The survey found 31.2 percent of respondents use open source tools in combination with commercial applications for data integration. Talend said: “In fact, open source solutions are often complementary to an existing proprietary solution that, for functional or cost reasons, is unable to address a specific need.”

The key drivers for using open source tools were ease of use (59%), performance (53.9%), and no vendor lock-in (42.5%), followed by licensing costs with only 42.1% respondents.

Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing at Talend, said OSS’s cost argument is compelling for IT managers: “Open source solutions are continually evolving to meet market requirements. The TCO is significantly better than proprietary solutions and users confirm the ease of use and performance of these products.”

Montcheuil added that IT departments do not have to justify “significant up-front fees, a key consideration in today’s economic climate.”

By Computerworld UK staff
Computerworld UK
February 17, 2009

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Red Hat CEO seeks open source in government

By oaxtech on April 15, 2009

By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US

SAN FRANCISCO- Red Hat’s CEO, in a blog post on Monday, is endorsing the Obama Administration’s call for openness and participation in government by likening the President’s statement to the open source software movement.

Linking to a White House statement in which President Obama calls for transparency, participation, and collaboration in government, Red Hat president/CEO Jim Whitehurst said open source provides an answer to calls for transparency and participation.

“Red Hat is excited that the Obama administration recognizes the value of open source beyond software. Open source principles are changing how we learn, how we share information, how developers create, and how companies do business. Now it has the opportunity to change our government,” Whitehurst said.

“Open source can provide an effective way for government to cut costs and ensure open access to information,” Whitehurst said. “Lowering the costs of infrastructure will help provide resources for our government to focus on finding solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.”

[ See also: "Red Hat CEO questions desktop's relevance in Linux debate." ]

Linux and open source have brought choice and savings in the private sector, and some governments have adopted open source as an alternative to “expensive, proprietary technology,” said Whitehurst.

“Open source has already saved the federal government a substantial amount of money and can provide an opportunity to save millions more,” said Whitehurst, who also endorsed Open Document Format.

“We believe that the Obama Administration has an unprecedented opportunity to use open source to spark innovation and positive change. It won’t happen overnight, but all levels of government can make it happen if they work collaboratively and follow Obama’s rallying cry, ‘Yes, we can,’ ” Whitehurst said.

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