As an aid to your decision making, the CTOvision.com site tracks the megatrends we see sweeping across the IT landscape. The following is an update on six we believe to be of significant relevance to the enterprise Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). They are:
- Convergence and trends towards unified communications and user empowerment
- The continued dominance of American IT
- Increasing open development of software and hardware
- Cloud Computing and massive ingest/parsing of data
- Green IT and support to total mission effectiveness
- Increasing pace of technology improvement/development
…#3: Increasing open development of software and hardware
All major IT firms, including the powerhouses that produce proprietary software and hardware, are now embracing the open source movement. Even Microsoft has an open source strategy that applies to some of their offerings. The open source community has long benefited from the developer talent in big companies that help produce and further code in Linux (see Red Hat for a supported variety), OpenOffice and many other open source solutions. We can all expect proprietary software will be the most full featured software (for many market reasons), but even that will be built in a way that works well with open source. The benefit to enterprises is a wider range of choices in solutions, and in many cases an ability to field solutions faster and with more security and lower cost. We can also expect all federal enterprises will find ways to enhance internal collaboration on software development projects, for example, the Forge.mil collaborative development capability.
Complete article here
As director of intellectual property strategy for the Linux Foundation and an attorney at Choate Hall & Stewart, Karen Copenhaver knows a bit about open source software licensing. She recently spoke with Dr. Dobb’s editor in chief Jonathan Erickson.
Dr. Dobb’s: Are open source and public domain the same thing?
Copenhaver: Not at all. Open source licenses are granted by the copyright holder and the license is an exercise of the copyright. In order to enjoy the benefits of the license, you must comply with its terms. If you don’t comply with the license, you’re not licensed–and another word for unlicensed use is “infringement.”
Dr. Dobb’s: There are usually no signed license agreements with open source software. How, then, can users be subject to licenses?
Copenhaver: Confusion is often caused by the fact that the software is made generally available for download. Users may assume that if something is made available for free, it’s thus licensed for use without restriction. That’s not the case. A license may be implied where one isn’t stated, but an implied license can’t contradict an actual stated limited license. The fact that there is no charge for the software is irrelevant.
Dr. Dobb’s: What are the main legal issues regarding open source?
Copenhaver: The main issue for businesses is internal control. Businesses have procurement organizations that are responsible for procuring everything the business uses in its operations. Those organizations review agreements and establish terms before they write the check. The internal control is based on the assumption that the business will pay for everything it uses. In order to arrange for payment, you have to go through procurement.
Because open source is made available without charge, this basic internal control fails. The software often comes into the organization without review of the associated obligations or any process to ensure compliance. Companies are in the process of implementing policies and processes that impose basic internal controls over acquisition, use, and compliance of open source software.
Interview here
Concerns about the fate of MySQL under Oracle Corp.’s ownership has affected the open source database market, with users saying they will inc
rease PostgreSQL adoption while distancing themselves from the MySQL.MySQL share of the open database market is expected to drop from 82.1% today to 78.7% in 2011, declining to 72.3% by 2014, due in part to Oracle’s planned acquisition MySQL owner Sun Microsystems, according to a recent survey of 347 open source users by The 451 Group, a New York-based technology research firm.
“The proposed acquisition of Sun and MySQL by Oracle has raised significant concerns among open source software users about the future of MySQL,” said The 451 Group’s Senior Analyst, Matt Aslett. “While most are happy to continue to use the product, a significant proportion would be less inclined toward MySQL were it owned by Oracle, and usage of MySQL is expected to decline over the next five years.”
In order to gain the blessing of European regulators on its bid to buy Sun Microsystems, Oracle has issued reassurances that it will not stop developing or supporting MySQL.
Complete story here
This week, the Software Freedom Law Center, an organization related to the Free Software Foundation and affiliated with Free Software advocate and attorney Eben Moglen, filed a lawsuit against 14 companies on behalf of Erik Anderson, the author of BusyBox, a popular GPLv2-licensed command interpreter used in the development of embedded Linux devices.
Why are these firms being sued? In short, they violated the terms of the GPLv2 license, which states implicitly that if you use GPLv2 software in any product, be it software or hardware, then you have to publish the source, as well as any modifications to that source, which is where the “Copyleft” angle of Free Software comes into play.
Sounds simple, really. Publish the source — which is basically just a copy of the source you downloaded from whatever project that used it — along with the changes.
Complete story here
Kiwi firms are finally latching on to open source software, early survey results show.
The survey is part of the Public Sector Remix project to investigate the use of free open source software on public sector desktops, and seeks to identify the number and capability of New Zealand companies providing and supporting the software.
Fourteen central and local government agencies are on board, including NZ Post and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
John Rankin, director of project management firm Affinity, which is running the survey along with Victoria University’s school of information management, says the results may dispel some myths.
“There was a bit of a perception at the start of the survey that there wasn’t a lot of capability in the market. We had a guess at the start that we might get between 20 and 30 responses but as of Monday we had received 25 responses and now a number of other companies are planning to respond.
“There’s a lot more interest than there was even a year ago from companies large and small.”
The true extent of open source capability among New Zealand firms will not be known until the results are analysed, he says. “Large government agencies are going to be looking for support from organisations of a commensurate size.”
The survey asks firms what open source software they have and what open source projects they have taken part in, as well as their plans.
Complete story here
The Obama Administration vows to cut costs in part by using open source software (Software whose source code is made available to the user), cloud computing, virtualization, Linux and other low cost technologies. But, does the use of open source software put the government, its records and our national security at risk? The argument goes like this: “If the government uses open source software, then the government is at risk because the security flaws are exposed publicly.” The argument continues with, “The use of proprietary software 
protects the government from security attacks because its code is hidden and not released to the public.” There is, however, a significant flaw in the argument against open source software’s use in government.
The assumption is that by allowing everyone access to the source code, you also open yourself up to more security risk. This is not the case. Open source software guarantees that by exposing its code that any security flaws will be fixed long before its proprietary counterpart’s.
How can I make such a bold statement that would seem to defy logic and common sense?
By allowing everyone access to the source code for a program, you have a worldwide community available to fix any flaws in that code and return those fixes to the project. And, that’s exactly what happens. With proprietary software
, the code is hidden and not released to the public thereby limiting fixes and patches to the original programmers. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes on a project in order to fix it. Proprietary software doesn’t have that advantage.
You’re also at the mercy of the proprietary software vendor to patch your vulnerable system in a timely manner after a flaw is found.
So, the answer to the question is, no. Using open source software in government, in private business or at home actually puts you at less risk.
Complete story here
One of the ongoing debates concerning business intelligence software has been around how to drive more adoption. Obviously, there is a wide gap between the number of people using business intelligence applications today and the number of people that could benefit from this software.
The two biggest efforts being made to increase adoption come in the form of a variety of approaches to deliver BI-as-a-service and the availability of open source implementations of BI software. The former approach is still fairly nascent and highly fragmented in terms of the number of vendors in the category, while the open source approach has been led mostly by Jaspersoft.
As a result, Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile now feels comfortable enough to claim that his company’s BI software is now the most widely used on the market. Of course, it’s hard to track usage of open source software, so let’s examine how Gentile backs up this claim.
At the moment, Gentile says Jaspersoft should surpass the 10 million downloads mark for its software around the beginning of the year. No one knows if that software is actually being used, but Gentile does know that by following “heartbeat data” generated by that software, there appear to be about 150,000 commercial production deployments of the company’s software, and that about 11,000 entities have bought something from Jaspersoft, ranging from basic documentation to full support. The number of companies paying Jaspersoft for support is still below 1,000, but the point remains that there is a lot of Jaspersoft software out there that probably exceeds the amount of BI software sold by any other commercial BI vendor by a good margin.
Complete article here
Red Hat is the number one Linux company on the planet by a wide margin. Their flagship distribution, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), is great, and they have excellent technical support. That hasn’t stopped other companies from trying to ride on their coattails, and lately more businesses are adopting Red Hat’s Linux code base and offering support for it.
Why would anyone want to do this? After all, Red Hat support doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. The first developers who used Red Hat Linux as the foundation for their own distributions — CentOS, StartCom and White Box Enterprise Linux — created distributions for people who were richer in Linux expertise than they were in money. Thus, historically, RHEL clone users tend to be old Linux pros who didn’t need much in the way of Red Hat handholding.
According to a report by Sean Michael Kerner, Red Hat isn’t worried about these users. Kerner quotes Red Hat’s Marco Bill-Peter, VP of Global Support Services: “We are not actively chasing users of CentOS, but rather find that enterprises are naturally turning to Red Hat for the value of the Red Hat subscription model and support.”
That isn’t stopping other companies from trying to horn in on Red Hat’s support business. On December 1st, OpenLogic, an open-source enterprise-software-support company announced that it would sell low-cost support packages for CentOS. OpenLogic also plans to expand its support to other community Linux distributions in 2010.
Complete article here
“RTFM,” Linux newbies are often told — but too often, there isn’t one. The FOSS community is renowned for its helpfulness, but when it comes to good old-fashioned professional documentation, there’s a gaping void. Is it reasonable to expect coders to put in long hours of work to produce documentation they’re unlikely to be paid for — and that’s unlikely to be read?
There’s nothing like weeks of ongoing conversation on the Linux blogs to suggest a topic has struck a chord.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what’s been going on since the middle of last month. The topic? Documentation. Not good documentation, mind you — the bad kind. The kind Linux Today’s Carla Schroder calls “Linux Bug #1.”
“The Internet and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) enable laziness in FOSS development because they make it too easy to abdicate the job of proper documentation to ‘The community,’” Schroder began in a blog post a few weeks ago.
Complete article here
SAN FRANCISCO — In many ways, MySQL embodies the ideals of the populist software movement known as open source, in which a program’s creator releases it to the world free of charge, and legions of volunteers contribute improvements that are also freely shared.
The start-up company came out of nowhere, building a database application beloved by vibrant, young Internet companies. Logging in from homes scattered around the globe, its workers seemed more a part of a virtual commune than a corporate monolith, and they relished taking on proprietary software giants like Microsoft.
But like most open-source companies, MySQL’s sales, tied to support deals, never matched the astronomical number of downloads for its product, about 60,000 a day. In January 2008, the founders decided to sell the company for $1 billion to Sun Microsystems. And this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle, which makes database software aimed at larger companies and tougher jobs, for $7.4 billion.
Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.
Complete story here