Category Archives: Open Source Software

Red Hat Launches ARM Partner Early Access Program for Partner Ecosystem

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During the evolution of the 64-bit ARM ecosystem, Red Hat has consistently worked to establish open source and industry standards as integral components of the emerging architecture. Through founding participation in the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), Red Hat has driven the development of open source software for ARM architectures in a collaborative and transparent environment. More recently, Red Hat participated in the creation of the Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification released by ARM to help accelerate software development and enable support across multiple 64-bit ARM platforms.

Todays ARM Partner Early Access Program announcement enables Red Hat and its partners to better address the evolving ARM ecosystem by:

Red Hat expects the participants in its ARM Partner Early Access Program to contribute to more streamlined and applicable implementations of 64-bit ARM standards and practices. Additionally, through collaboration with program participants, Red Hat will be able to evaluate technical features across various market segments, develop feedback-based targeted use cases, and perform market demand assessments that could influence future product decisions.

Supporting Quotes

Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat

The Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program continues Red Hats efforts to drive open standards and best practices within the 64-bit ARM ecosystem, enabling tighter collaboration with leading innovators in the ARM ecosystem. By providing our participating partners with the tools, resources and support needed to build a common development platform, we can help facilitate partner-driven 64-bit ARM solutions that are based upon Red Hat technologies.

Suresh Gopalakrishnan, general manager and corporate vice president, Server Business Unit, AMD

"The Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program is an excellent vehicle to help accelerate a robust ecosystem for ARM-based servers. In addition to our participation in the Red Hat ARM PEAP, AMD is pleased to support this growing community with standard ARM Cortex-A57 ARMv8 based hardware alongside the newly announced AMD Opteron A1100-Series processor development platform."

Subramonian Shankar, president and CEO, American Megatrends, Inc.

AMI is fully committed to its role as a leading provider of BIOS and UEFI solutions for 64-bit ARM platforms, by being the first independent BIOS vendor to offer a complete early stage solution for the 64-bit ARM ecosystem. Working closely with industry stalwarts such as Red Hat enables AMI to deliver more compelling and engaging solutions for the 64-bit ARM ecosystem including debug and diagnostic tools as well as a complete integrated development environment for UEFI. The end result of our collaboration is a deeper, more efficient platform design and development experience, which in turn enables the creation of the next generation of 64-bit ARM platforms to meet the demands of tomorrow's high efficiency, high performance server platforms.

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Open source IT is the way forward

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A PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.

CERN collects huge volumes of data every day from thousands of detectors at its nuclear collider ring located under the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. It organises and archives all of this data and distributes much of it to research scientists located throughout the world over high-speed internet links. It presently maintains 100 Petabytes of legacy data under management, and collects another 35 Petabytes every year that it remains in operation. One Petabyte comprises one million Gigabytes.

Years ago, CERN realised that its data management challenge would completely overwhelm it unless it adopted open source methods. Therefore, it proactively developed its own Scientific Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux and it took an active part in contributing to the development and use of open source hardware and software systems. It has virtualised its systems and employs many of the latest, cutting-edge approaches to capturing, archiving and distributing data.

During its talk at OSCON, CERN revealed that it has open source contributors on its staff. It uses Openstack hardware standards as it builds out its data centre infrastructure, and uses open source based software like Puppet and Ceph, along with other open source software utilities, tools and products. It revealed that within 12 months, Puppet will be managing 100,000 cores in its data centre.

CERN did the right thing. It rolled up its sleeves and got involved in open source at the basic level of developing its hardware and software infrastructure operations in collaboration with others in universities and IT industry firms - instead of seeking to outsource its data centre infrastructure to commercial vendors, though of course it does outsource the global telecommunications links that it maintains to universities, primarily in Europe and North America.

There's a lesson in CERN's success for governments and industry alike, however, and those organisations that pay attention and emulate it will be successful long term.

Even the UK government has recognised that open source offers the potential to provide IT services that better meet requirements at far lower cost than its legacy proprietary systems. UK cabinet minister Francis Maude made the proposal earlier this year to migrate UK government systems to open source software. That decision must have seemed almost prescient after it was revealed that the UK government paid 5.5m to Microsoft for just one year of continued security updates to its many obsolete Windows XP systems.

As proprietary firms like Microsoft move into charging exorbitant rental fees for software and services, the advantages of using open source will become even more compelling, both for the UK and other governments globally and corporations in all industry sectors.

The IT organisations that take notice of the lessons provided by the success of CERN's embrace of open source will gain immense benefits from following its lead, and will reap tremendous competitive advantages, starting now.

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Open source IT is the way forward

LibreOffice makes its case as open source alternative to MS Office

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LibreOffice looks to make more headway against MS Office LibreOffice

After a headline lull, LibreOffice on Wednesday renewed its drive to replace Microsoft Office with the newest version of its open source suite of applications.

The latest update comes as the organization behind LibreOffice says that its products are now being used by some 80 million users around the world. In contrast, only 10 million users had downloaded the software by Sept. 2011.

LibreOffice came about as part of a grass roots response to tech industry consolidation. In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which was then responsible for an open-source software suite called OpenOffice. However, developers who became unhappy with Oracle's stewardship of the project, subsequently forked the code to create a new office suite called LibreOffice. The OpenOffice project has since been taken up by the Apache Foundation while LibreOffice wound up under the auspices of The Document Foundation.

Executives from The Document Foundation expressed confidence about getting 200 million active users worldwide before the end of the decade. Italo Vignoli, one of the founders of The Document Foundation, also expressed hope that a decision governing the use of open source software by the UK government will prove to be a harbinger of more rapid adoption.

Earlier this week, the United Kingdom finally put in practice a directive that all official office suites must support an open format for documents called ODF. Government officials say the move to standardize around open formats will reduce costs associated with the Office suite and break what they describe as the 'oligopoly' of IT suppliers. (Or at least one supplier in particular. Wink, wink.)

The thrust of the UK announcement will be to let users choose open-source office suites, should they wish. Vignoli is hoping that will help the organization build on earlier successes winning over other European governments. For instance, the French government has already deployed LibreOffice on about a half million computers while Spain's Valencia region has installed the program on 120,000 desktops.

"Our compatibility with legacy Microsoft Office documents and actually Microsoft Office docs is now extremely good," Vignoli said. He added that developers have cleaned up the code base from the first four releases of the product and that only 130 of the 10,000 documents used in compatability testing of the latest incarnation of the product with MS Office broke.

The question is whether that will be enough to reel in MS Office users of long standing. Even though the competition with Microsoft Office reaches back several years, Office continues to have a strong hold with businesses as the competition has moved to the cloud. Part of the challenge is the message -- on in this case, making that message resonate.

"The Open Source community has always had a problem with marketing," Vignoli said. "I think it was a fundamental mistake because if you talk to developers, they'll tell you that if the product is good, then you don't need marketing. But that's the most absurd thing you can say. You need marketing for every product. Even if you don't use marketing, you need a strategy on how to bring the product to market....you must make the user aware that you're product is there."

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LibreOffice makes its case as open source alternative to MS Office

The great Ars experiment—free and open source software on a smartphone?!

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Android minus the Google Apps. We've got some work to do.

Ron Amadeo

Android is a Google productit's designed and built from the ground up tointegrate with Google services andbe a cloud-powered OS. A lot of Android is open source, though, and there's nothing that says youhave to use it the way that Google would prefer.With some work, its possible to turn a modern Android smartphone into a Google-less, completely open deviceso we wanted to try just that. Afterdusting off the Nexus 4 and grabbing a copy of the open source parts of Android,we jumped off the grid and dumped all theproprietaryGoogle and cloud-based services you'd normally use on Android. Instead, this experiment runs entirely onopen source alternatives. FOSS or bust!

But, wait... did we say we'd dump "all" services? Not going to happen. Almostinstantly, wehad tocompromise our open source ideals due to hardware.The SoC in the Nexus 4 is made by Qualcomm, and manyof the drivers for it are closed source(this is the case with nearly all smartphones, not just our sacrificial Nexus 4). The firmware and drivers for the cellular modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and camera are closed source, too. The CyanogenModrepository has a list of closed source drivers ineach device branch called "proprietary-blobs.txt." You can see the list for our Nexus 4 here, which is 184 items long.

These chunks of proprietary code come from the component manufacturers themselves (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Synaptics, Sony, Samsung), and seeing what's in them usually requires you to be a big developer with an NDA in place. While some of this code is locked downfor competitive reasons,there's also a concern that modifying the firmware for basic components could damage the device or, in the case of the modem,disrupt the cellular network. There is reallyno escaping proprietary component firmwareon any device (though some are trying), so we had to hold our nose and just deal with it. With that disclaimer, the journey begins:

It starts withCyanogenMod (CM), what we're going with for our software build. The "Android" that ships on phones today is a mix of open source software from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and proprietary Google software. CyanogenMod takes AOSP, adds a bunch of handy enhancements, and ports it to tons of devices.While most people install CyanogenMod and immediately sideloadthe proprietary Google Apps, that's an extra, optional step. This experience isall about FOSS, so we're going to skip the Googley parts and just run raw AOSP-based CM.

Installing CyanogenMod today is a relatively simple affair, thanks to the CyanogenMod installer.If you're interested in what installing CM looks like, check out our previous article on the process.

Ron Amadeo

Time to install, boot up, andhey, this doesn't look so bad! At only one page, theapp selection is a little sparse, but it looks like we're starting with a good amount of base functionality. We still get software buttons and a status bar. The home screen (CM's "Trebuchet")even looks like Google's KitKat version, minus the Google Now integration.

Even with the seriously slimmed down app selection, a lot of these apps are junk. DSP Manager isCyanogenMod's audio equalizer, which really belongs in thesettings somewhereinstead of theapp drawer. Movie Studio, Sound Recorder, and Voice Dialerare part of AOSP, but like a lot of AOSP apps, they aren't actively developed and aren't meant to be taken seriously. Terminal Emulator is definitely one of those apps that belongs in an app store, since the majority of users won't touch it.

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The great Ars experiment—free and open source software on a smartphone?!

Your iPhone Can Finally Make Free, Encrypted Calls

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If youre making a phone call with your iPhone, you used to have two options: Accept the notionthat any wiretapper, hacker or spook can listen in on your conversations, or pay for pricey voice encryption software.

As of today theres a third option: The open source software group known as Open Whisper Systems has announced the release of Signal, the first iOS app designed to enable easy, strongly encrypted voice calls for free. Were trying to make private communications as available and accessible as any normal phone call, says Moxie Marlinspike, the hacker security researcher who founded the nonprofit software group. Later this summer, he adds, encrypted text messaging will be integrated into Signal, too, to create what he describes as a single, unified app for free, easy, open source, private voice and text messaging.

Signal encrypts calls with a well-tested protocol known as ZRTP and AES 128 encryption, in theory strong enough to withstand all known practical attacks by anyone from script-kiddy hackers to the NSA. But WIREDs test calls with an early version of the app, after a few false-starts due to bugs that Marlinspike says have now been ironed out, were indistinguishable from any other phone call. The only sign users have that their voice has been encrypted is a pair of words that appear on the screen. Those two terms are meant to be read aloud to the person on the other end of the call as a form of authentication. If they match, a user can be sure he or she is speaking with the intended contact, with no man-in-the-middle eavesdropping on the conversation and sneakily decrypting and then re-encryptingthe voice data.

Like any new and relatively untested crypto app, users shouldnt entirely trust Signals security until other researchers have had a chance to examine it. Marlinspike admits there are always unknowns, such as vulnerabilities in the software of the iPhone that could allow snooping. But in terms of preventing an eavesdropper on the phones network from intercepting calls, Signals security protections are probably pretty great, he says.

After all, the technology behind Signal isnt exactly new. Marlinspike first took on the problem of smartphone voice encryption four years ago withRedphone, an Android app designed to foil all wiretaps.Signal and Redphone both use an encryption protocol called ZRTP, invented by Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the iconic crypto software PGP.

Zimmermann has developed his own iPhone implementation of ZRTP for his startup Silent Circle, which sells an iPhone and Android app that enables encrypted calls and instant messaging. But unlike Open Whisper Systems, Silent Circles charges its mostly corporate users $20 a month to use its closed-source privacy app. Signal offers the same services gratis, making it the first free encryption app of its kind for iOS.

Since Silent Circle users are limited to calling only contacts with the same paid software installed, its practicality for non-business users has been limited. Though Signal and Redphone users similarly cant make encrypted calls to users without Open Whisper Systems apps installed, they can make secure calls from one app to the other, a feature that will make both Android and iOS-encrypted calling apps vastly more practical. Marlinspike notes that journalists hoping to communicate privately with a source, for instance, would have a difficult time convincing them to shell out for an expensive subscription app. If you want the ability to, in principle, call anyone securely, it really has to be free, says Christine Corbett Moran, one of the lead volunteer coders on Signal.

Instead of taking the for-profit startup route, Open Whisper Systems will instead by funded by a combination of donations and government grants. Marlinspike says the project has received money from the free-software-focused Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government program that has also funded other privacy projects like the anonymity software Tor and the encrypted instant messaging website Cryptocat.

That government funding is ironic given the last years boost in encryption interest from the Snowden Effect: Open Whisper Systems argues, like other encryption projects, that the eavesdropping countermeasures Signal and its Android counterpart provide are more important than ever in the wake of Snowdens year of revelations of blanket spying by the NSA. When I call the United States Im hearing more and more self-censorshiprelatives in the U.S. saying, Id rather talk about this in person, says Moran, who is pursuing a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Zurich. Thats not a climate anyone should have to live in.

Open Whisper Systems founder Marlinspike has been a fixture of the security and cryptography community for years, demonstrating groundbreaking hacks like ones that revealed vulnerabilities in the Web encryption SSL and Microsofts widely used VPN encryption MS-CHAPv2. He co-founded the San Francisco-based startup Whisper Systems in 2010 with the intention of hardening the security of Googles Android and providing tools for encrypted communications. But that work took a hiatus when Whisper Systems was acquired by Twitter in late 2011.

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Your iPhone Can Finally Make Free, Encrypted Calls

XRobots – New features in Slic3r 1.1.6, improved multi-material print handling and more! – Video

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XRobots - New features in Slic3r 1.1.6, improved multi-material print handling and more!
Update on the latest version of the open source software Slic3r - for slicing 3D prints and generating G-code for Reprap 3D printers others. Slic3r: http://slic3r.org/ Autodesk123D: http://www.1...

By: James Bruton

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XRobots - New features in Slic3r 1.1.6, improved multi-material print handling and more! - Video