Open source Magazine

QualiPSo Worldwide Conference Highlights Strengths And Challenges Of Open Source Software, The State Of Play In The Market, And Future Trends

2008-09-03T20:05:30Z

Open Source Software can boost innovation and competitiveness
Significant challenges remain: a cultural shift is needed

Berlin, Guangzhou, Madrid, Paris, Roma, Sao Paulo: Qualipso, a unique international alliance of ICT industry players, SMEs, research, public sector bodies and academics, whose role it is to help industry and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness with Open Source software (OSS) recently published the report of its annual Conference, bringing together top speakers and participants from nearly 30 countries.

The conference focus was on highlighting the strengths and challenges of Open Source Software, the state of the market, and future trends.

Because of its capacity to boost innovation and competitiveness, Open Source Software (OSS) could act as a catalyst for restructuring the entire industry, acting as a lever for the transformation of the economy towards a service-based model. Being innovative, flexible and ultra-accessible so it can be skillfully adapted for both high-end solutions or low-cost software for the general public means OSS could contribute to a profound transformation of the IT ecosystem.

However, despite many successes, OSS uptake remains slowed by certain myths and misconceptions in the industry, and some barriers are still perceived by mainstream users, most notably: security, availability of services and support, TCO, legal/IP issues and viability. OSS stakeholders will have to overcome these barriers for mainstream adoption.

PHP and the Google Summer of Code 2008

2008-03-25T18:11:36Z

Summer is getting closer, Google Summer of Code 2008 also, and like every year, PHP is taking part of the GSoC. A list of project's ideas is already available at PHP Wiki including :

- PECL, Website Improvements, Windows Build support improvements
- Automatic Code Checker
- Zend bytecode to LLVM bitcode converter
- Algorithm Optimizations
- Implement Unicode into PHP 6
- Replace auto* with CMake
- Build Infrastructure and macro bindings for writing extension in D
- Put Ilia's Optimizer in APC
- Rewrite the run-tests.php script
- PhD: The PHP based Docbook renderer
- PHPUnit
- PHP-GTK
- Pave the way for One-Bugtracker-Rules-Them-All
- Anonymous functions and closures and other missing object oriented features

Students are always welcomed to suggest other new ideas for project or application. Over the past three years, the Google summer of Code has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code.

Adobe Launches New Open Source Website

2008-02-26T05:29:40Z

Adobe efforts in the Open Source world are not new at all, but now they have better : a new open source website to keep you up to date on Adobe open source activities. Adobe projects already in the open source website include mainly :

BlazeDS : server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex and Adobe AIR applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.

Flex 3 SDK : Adobe® Flex 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems. The Adobe® Flex SDK is the foundation of Flex, providing the core Flex compilers, component library and debugger. Using only the free SDK and an IDE of your choice, you can build and deploy rich Flex applications.

Adobe Media Gallery : The Adobe Media Gallery (AMG) is a Flash web photo and video gallery whose appearance and behavior can be customized via XML files.

Tamarin : The Tamarin project, which is based on code contributed from Adobe, is designed to implement the upcoming version of the ECMAScript 4th Edition language specification. Tamarin will be used by Mozilla within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla's free Web browser, as well as within the ActionScript Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

Webkit : The WebKit library is used to render HTML and execute JavaScript in Adobe® AIR. Adobe AIR allows web developers to deploy rich Internet applications on the desktop.

An interesting open source experience from Adobe to show the power of Adobe products. The new website is available at opensource.adobe.com. products released under different open source licenses including the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and the LGPL v3

QualiPSo consortium organizes the first international conference on Open Source Software quality

2007-12-13T22:35:44Z

Brussels, 13 December 2007 Faithful to its aim to foster the development and use of Open Source Software (OSS) to help industries in the global race for growth, on 16 and 17 January 2008 the international QualiPSo consortium is organizing its first international conference: "Fostering trust and quality of Open Source Software systems".

Organized in Rome, under the patronage of the European Commission, the QualiPSo 2008 conference will bring together international authorities and experts on OSS trends, reveal the first results of research carried out by the QualiPSo consortium, and be a forum for debate about the drivers for encouraging trust in OSS. It will approach Open Source from three complementary angles: political, economical and technological, covering:

- Business models and strategies in OSS
- Legal issues in Open Source
- Trustworthiness of OSS products and processes
- Interoperability in the area of Open Source
- Networks of OSS Competence Centers
- Next-generation software forges.

GNU GPLv3 Launched

2007-06-29T15:21:16Z

At 12 noon EDT (4pm GMT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3. The most awaited version of GNU GPL is finally going public after many drafts that helped highlight vital issues for the community of free software users. There will be live footage of Richard Stallman announcing GPLv3 from Noon EDT at www.fsf.org, less than one hour remaining from now. We'll keep you updated as soon as we have more information.

Update : The fsf website wasn't updated as expected, but the GPLv3 is officially released now. Below the press release :

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA-Friday, June 29, 2007-The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world's most popular free software license.

Adobe To Open Source Flex API And Framework

2007-04-28T08:08:46Z

In a recent press release Adobe announced its plan to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). With this new decision, developers from all over the world will be able to contribute in the development of Flex, the industry's most advanced framework for building cross-operating system rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web and enabling new Apollo applications for the desktop.

"Open source has been pivotal to the rapid growth of Alfresco, and it's great to see Adobe take a similar approach to Flex technology," said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. "We've been very interested in using the Flex SDK to put a more usable and engaging face on enterprise content management, and this move by Adobe makes that all the more attractive."

FSF releases third draft of GPLv3 for discussion

2007-03-29T14:22:46Z

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA---Wednesday, March 28, 2007---The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released the third discussion draft for version 3 of the most widely used free software license, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

Today's draft incorporates the feedback received from the general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan. Many significant changes have been made since the previous draft, released in July 2006. In recognition of this fact, the FSF now plans to publish one additional draft before the final text of GPL version 3.

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software

2007-03-22T18:14:16Z

The MIT press released a new book titled Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, an excellent reading for the weekend ! The book; edited by Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam and Karim R. Lakhani; analyzes a number of key topics: the motivation behind F/OSS -- why highly skilled software developers devote large amounts of time to the creation of "free" products and services; the objective, empirically grounded evaluation of software -- necessary to counter what one chapter author calls the "steamroller" of F/OSS hype; the software engineering processes and tools used in specific projects, including Apache, GNOME, and Mozilla; the economic and business models that reflect the changing relationships between users and firms, technical communities and firms, and between competitors; and legal, cultural, and social issues, including one contribution that suggests parallels between "open code" and "open society" and another that points to the need for understanding the movement's social causes and consequences.

What is the status of the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) revolution? Has the creation of software that can be freely used, modified, and redistributed transformed industry and society, as some predicted, or is this transformation still a work in progress? Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software brings together leading analysts and researchers to address this question, examining specific aspects of F/OSS in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and highly relevant to real-life managerial and technical concerns.

Ready for Summer of Code ?

2007-03-20T08:51:58Z

Google started accepting applications for the third Summer of Code, the Google's program for introducing college students to open source software development and certainly to discover new talents.

Not everyone knows it, but open source plays an enormous role at Google. Each time you use the Google search engine, you're using open source software. Google relies on the Linux kernel, GCC, python and Samba and commits code into each of those projects.

So if you are interested you can read the terms of service first to be sure that you are eligible to participate, then you can choose from one of the mentoring organizations participating in Google Summer of Code 2007 : Coppermine, Dojo, Creative Commons, Drupal, Django, Gallery, Joomla, Moodle, Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, SquirrelMail, Apache, Wikimedia, Wordpress, ... etc. Organization application are closed now, and if you are interested check project ideas from different organization depending on your skills and submit your participation. One of the very interesting open source events sponsored by Google, which supported 1,000 students with over 100 open source projects until today to create hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The good news that this year the project will accept an additional 200 students beside some additional open source organizations.

Europe, Brazil and China unite to foster open source software to boost growth

2007-03-16T18:15:34Z

Brussels, 15 March 2007 - Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth.

The aim of QualiPSo is to help industries and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness in today's and tomorrow's global environment by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems. To meet that goal, QualiPSo will define and implement the technologies, processes and policies to facilitate the development and use of open source software components, with the same level of trust traditionally offered by proprietary software. The initiative will support the development of local ICT industries - from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to large ICT providers and systems integrators in Europe, Brazil and China - and help establish European leadership in domains such as distributed middleware.

Creative Commons 3.0 Launched

2007-03-05T15:16:00Z

While there are lots of discussion recently on open source and licensing, creative commons version 3.0 have been released. Most notable changes :

Separating the "generic" from the US license
Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties
No Endorsement Language
BY-SA - Compatibility Structure Now Included
Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT

Choose your Creative Commons license here.

Second Life Open Sourced

2007-01-13T11:08:03Z

One of the very important Linden Research, Inc. initiatives is to release Second Life client in open source. Second Life, a virtual reality software, technology and community become very popular in the last years. While I was reading comments from many people that are rejecting the idea of open sourcing Second Life, I think it's a great move that will be positive on the software and the community too. Will see how this is going to change in the future :

Releasing the source now is our next invitation to the world to help build this global space for communication, business, and entertainment. We are eager to work with the community and businesses to further our vision of our space.

Open Source Your Holidays Gifts

2006-11-26T22:59:27Z

Make Magazine have an amazing article about idea of open source gifts for holidays. Gifs goes from mobile phones, OS, synthesizer with sequencer, robots, media center, MIDI interface platform, Router, MP3 player, Analog & digital boards, IR for Xbox, Game of Life Board, web based home automation, engine management, software radio, embedded ethernet, ... and much much more. I don't have holidays coming but I offered myself a PortableApps Suite for my usb key, what about you ?

French National Assembly Embraces Open Source

2006-11-25T11:01:29Z

Slashdotted the French National Assembly's experience to embrace open source as a standard :

The French National Assembly is in the news as they have recently switched to Linux, OpenOffice.org & open source software at the request of several deputy members. Bernard Carayon wrote it it into the proposal entitled 'On Equal Terms' [French PDF]. From the article, 'IT staff at the National Assembly have almost six months to prepare the switch to open source.' The same document urged France to adopt ODF as a standard. Hopefully things go more smoothly for them than the Birmingham library effort.

Court Rules GPL Doesn't Violate Antitrust Laws

2006-11-09T20:24:06Z

Slashdotted today an article regarding the latest suit against IBM, Red Hat and Novell for antitrust. According to the news, the GPL and Open Source are not concerned by the antitrust issue filled against those companies :

Internet Cases reports on a new decision from a federal court in Chicago holding that 'the GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws.' The suit was against IBM, Red Hat and Novell, arguing that by distributing Linux for free, they offered products at an unbeatably low price (free), thus discouraging new market entrants and stifling competition. The court took a different view, focusing instead on how the GPL fosters new development