Munich is continuing its switch to open source software with its decision to start using Kolab Enterprise groupware for its city-wide IT infrastructure.

The city of Munich successfully completed its switch from Windows NT to its own open source Linux distribution, LiMux, in December. It created over 14,800 LiMux workspaces for its approximately 15,500 desktops.

While that part of its switch to open source was completed, it still needed a groupware system to manage mail, mailing lists, calendars and contacts for its employees though. To achieve this, it issued a tender that was won by the Swiss Kolab Systems, the company announced Tuesday.

The Kolab groupware system that was originally developed for the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) will be employed as part of Munichs MigMak project, a abbreviation used by the city to describe the migration of its mail and calendar system, Kolab said. The system is to be provided as completely open-source technology, including the necessary professional support, it added.

All the citys LiMux PCs and the remaining Windows PCs will be using the Kolab Desktop Client in combination with the Kolab web client based on Kolab Enterprise 13, it said.

Kolab Enterprise 13 was introduced in December. It was initially made available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but Kolab promised at the time that the system would be made available for other platforms.

Enterprise 13 is based on the Kolab.org 3.1 community edition and is completely open source. However, the enterprise version comes with paid enterprise support.

It has, for instance, support for mobile phones and tablets, Mac OS X and applications such as Mozilla Thunderbird, while it also has a Web client and provides email, calendar and other standard features for mobile, according to Kolab.

Kolab Enterprise has been developed with a security centric architecture from its beginnings in the Federal Office for Information Security to prevent corporate and governmental espionage , Kolab said.

The system will be implemented by Munich-based general IT contractor ESG, Kolab said. A customized training program will be developed for the employees, it added.

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Munich opts for open source groupware from Kolab

DARPA has invested in many programs that sponsor fundamental and applied research in areas of computer science, which have led to new advances in theory as well as practical software.

The R and D community has asked about the availability of results, and now DARPA has responded by creating the DARPA Open Catalog, a place for organizing and sharing those results in the form of software, publications, data and experimental details. The Catalog can be found at http://go.usa.gov/BDhY.

Many DoD and government research efforts and software procurements contain publicly releasable elements, including open source software.

The nature of open source software lends itself to collaboration where communities of developers augment initial products, build on each other's expertise, enable transparency for performance evaluation, and identify software vulnerabilities. DARPA has an open source strategy for areas of work including big data to help increase the impact of government investments in building a flexible technology base.

"Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government," said Chris White, DARPA program manager.

"Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products."

The initial offerings in the DARPA Open Catalog include software toolkits and peer-reviewed publications from the XDATA program in the agency's Information Innovation Office (I2O).

The partially funded toolkits are designed to encourage flexible development of software that may enable users of targeted defense applications to process large volumes of data in a timely manner to meet their mission requirements. DARPA is interested in building communities around government-funded software and research.

If the R and D community shows sufficient interest, DARPA will continue to make available information generated by DARPA programs, including software, publications, data and experimental results.

Future updates are scheduled to include components from other I2O programs such as Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) and Visual Media Reasoning (VMR).

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DARPA Open Catalog Makes Agency-Sponsored Software and Publications Available to All

NYLUG Presents: Mark Tolliver on Palamida. Application Security for Open Source Software (6/25/08)
Open Source has been a blessing to the development community. However undocumented open source now permeates production code. While IP issues are the most ob...

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NYLUG Presents: Mark Tolliver on Palamida. Application Security for Open Source Software (6/25/08) - Video

FOSS4G with Eric Brelsford
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"This isn't about switching to open source software, but to a format widely and well-supported by open source office formats," noted blogger Chris Travers. "The government could continue to run Microsoft Office, but the preferred data format would be ODF. This makes Microsoft's argument seem to be rather shrill. Why on earth would changing the default format of released documents be a big deal?"

Here in the Linux community, we're all familiar with the many benefits that come with using open source software -- customizability, interoperability, and freedom from vendor lock-in, to name just a few examples.

Well, Linux Girl has shocking news to report. It turns out there's also a BIG PROBLEM associated with open source software that we've all apparently overlooked: dissatisfaction!

Yes, that's right, dear readers: Open source software causes dissatisfaction and other assorted problems for its users! Thank goodness Microsoft is around to alert us to this worrying situation.

'This Will Cause Problems'

"You may not be aware, but the UK government is currently in the process of making important selections about which open standards to mandate the use of in future," began Microsoft blogger Alexbuk in a post last week.

"The government proposes to mandate Open Document format (ODF) and exclude the most widely supported and used open standard for document formats, Open XML (OOXML)," Alexbuk went on to helpfully explain.

"We believe this will cause problems for citizens and businesses who use office suites which don't support ODF," he suggested. Not only that, but "we believe very strongly that the current proposal is likely to increase costs, cause dissatisfaction amongst citizens and businesses, add complexity to the process of dealing with government and negatively impact some suppliers to government."

Imagine that, dear readers! All these years and we had no idea. Luckily, there's been plenty of tequila on hand down at the blogosphere's Broken Windows Lounge to help soften the blow.

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News Flash from Redmond: FOSS Causes Dissatisfaction!

Open Source Software | 46 of 62 | MconneX

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Open Source Software | 46 of 62 | MconneX - Video

PayPal has hired its first head of open source software: Danese Cooper, a veteran of such tech giants as Apple, Sun Microsystems, and Intel.

In her new role, Cooper will assess the ways that PayPal is using open source software, and seek to improve collaboration on projects both inside and outside the company. Many large web operations, including Google and Facebook and even Microsoft, have people in similar roles. But Cooper is a particularly welcome addition to the role because shes a woman. Women are still underrepresented in top tech posts.

Open source software is computer code thats freely available for anyone to use as they see fit software that has been released to the public by individual developers, nonprofit organizations, and even large corporations. That may seem like a bad business move, but if you open source your code, anyone can improve upon it, and this has led many companies to pool their resources around mutually beneficial projects, such the Linux operating system or the Apache web server.

Although open source is often invisible to the end user, many of the computing devices and online services that we use every day including Android phones, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are built on open source foundations. PayPal is no exception. The company has long used open source tools such as the Hadoop data-crunching software and the OpenStack cloud computing platform, and its now looking to hone its open source efforts through Danese Cooper.

Cooper has seen the benefits of open source collaboration first hand and has learned the hard way what happens when developers dont share code when they should. At Apple, she managed a team that developed a video chat program based on Apples QuickTime video format, and the code behind Quicktime wasnt even shared with everyone inside the company. There were some people in my group that helped write Quicktime, but because of an internal licensing struggle at the time, the QuickTime team shut them out of their own code tree, she says. It was really inefficient, and it really pissed me off.

She eventually left Apple for Symantec. But although Symantec offered a more collaborative company culture, its software wasnt open source. Her open source career began two years later in a Sushi restaurant in Cupertino, California, near Apple headquarters. Cooper was raving about Symantecs collaborative ethos when a stranger walked up, tapped her on the shoulder, and asked if shed like to help open source the Java programming language. It turned out he was a recruiter for Sun Microsystems, the maker of Java, and after overhearing Coopers conversation, he had the feeling shed be a good fit at the company.

Cooper eventually became Suns chief open source evangelist. At the company, she saw the benefits of open source, such as the time a developer from outside Sun submitted an update to Java that saw the language run about 16 times faster. But she also the company stray from open source in ways that undermined its mission.

After stints at Intel, Revolution Analytics, and the Wikimedia Foundation, she started her own open source consulting business, and thats how she got in touch with PayPal. In addition to using open source tools like Hadoop, PayPal has released its own open source projects, such as the software development framework Kraken. And as its open source contributions grew, the company needed someone to help build a strategy for managing all its projects.

After some discussion, Cooper agreed to give up the consultants life and join PayPal full-time. She cites the opportunity to work on longer term projects and a team that includes Kirsten Wolberg another leading woman in tech as big reasons for joining the company. But most importantly, she thinks PayPals developers have their hearts in the right place. In other words, theyre likely to share their code and unlikely to piss her off.

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Apple Veteran Named PayPal's First Head of Open Source Software

By Jack M. Germain LinuxInsider 02/19/14 9:47 PM PT

The biggest driving factor for software developers to work together with open source is cost. It is much cheaper for them to cooperate through open source than it is to remain isolated with proprietary software, asserted Inktank VP of Product Management Neil Levine. "You can no longer rely on one particular vendor to provide everything you need with regard to technology."

The open source business model has an inherent ability to bring software rivals together for mutual gain. This approach to developing and distributing software keeps expanding the usefulness and success of the Linux operating system as well.

Linux has not yet come close to replacing Windows on the desktop, but open source is much more than Linux. Its "co-opetive" nature is spreading through the enterprise as much as it is driving the many different Linux development communities.

The continued growth of open source software is closely linked with the ongoing struggle to bring about an expansion of the Linux footprint. Certainly one unifying factor in bringing together the various competing entities is the leadership provided by the Linux Foundation and other umbrella organizations.

The co-opetive nature of open source is driven further by consortiums that gather cooperation of industry makers and shakers toward a common computing goal. Consider the Allseen Alliance's efforts in growing the Internet of Things. Another example is the Open Compute Project. It formed to drive development of servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects.

Numerous similar organizations have sprung up in recent years to foster the advantages and progress of open source software. Often unspoken in this support is the growth of the Linux OS. There remains an unbreakable link between Linux and open source. This is the case not only in adopting the business model, but also in using open source code. Even chief Linux hater Microsoft has shown a renewed interest in contributing to the development of the Linux kernel and other open source projects.

"It is simply not possible to create technology in isolation any more. The software is too complex. The Linux kernel alone changes nine times an hour. No single organization can compete with that rate of change and pace of innovation," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider.

Onlookers often see only a series of forays that developer communities make into an opposing product maker's domain. Some divergent communities seem to thrive, while others are left behind to struggle. It is sometimes challenging to see mutual gain result from consorting with competitors.

"Obviously, as open source becomes the dominant form of technology development, there will be lots of communities. As I have said many times before, a diversity of communities is a strength rather than a weakness. The bottom line here is that code talks, and we suspect that, as always, the best code will determine which communities thrive versus contract," noted Zemlin.

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Raising Linux to Grow Open Source

Facebook looks and feels like a single application, like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. But behind the scenes, in the companys data centers, youll find that the worlds most popular social network is really a multitude of different applications working in concert.

Facebook engineers build these applications using a wide range of programming languages, picking a language that matches the requirements of each project. That helps them fashion more efficient software, but it creates new challenges when it comes time to meld all these tools together, to ensure they can all communicate. To solve this issue, Facebook built a tool called Thrift, a means of managing communications between all its various applications.

The social networking giant released Thrift as an open source project back in 2007, and its now used by several other web outfits, ranging from Twitter to Evernote to Last.fm. Its a prime example of how open source software has helped bootstrap an entire generation of web services. Most of the leading web companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in any effort to improve the way they work and speed the development of the web as a whole.

Most of the leading web companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in any effort to improve the way they work and speed the development of the web as a whole.

But since 2007 Facebook has moved on from the original version of Thrift, creating a new version of Thrift better suited to its current needs. Today, Facebook released that new version as an open source project called fbthrift.

By open sourcing the software, Facebook is once again allowing other to fashion new services using its secret sauce. Over the years, the company has open sourced myriad projects, ranging from its data center designs to the tools it uses to handle security on Android. But fbthrift is a little different in that it could help Facebook open source a wide range of other tools that are still locked inside the company, says Facebook engineering manager Blake Matheny.

For example, the companys Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which translates code written in the PHP programming language into machine code requires fbthrift to work correctly. In order to open source HHVM, the team had to create a slightly different version that didnt need fbthrift. That means the company is maintaining two separate versions of the software, an open source version and an internal version. Now that fbthrift is open source, the team will be able to maintain just one version. Matheny says there are other projects at Facebook that havent been open sourced at all yet because of this limitation.

But why create a whole new version of Thrift, instead of simply improving the existing open source project? Matheny says that once Facebook committed Thrift to the Apache Foundation an independent organization that manages open source software the company no longer had sole control over the software. That meant that it took longer to approve new changes. The implementation we originally shipped didnt meet our needs, he says We needed a way to iterate quickly and find the right way to solve these problems.

And since Thrift had become so popular, it wasnt clear that all the changes that Facebook wanted to make would actually work for other users. fbthrift is optimized for a high throughput environment that might not be appropriate for everyone who us using apache thrift, he explains. Still, Matheny says he does hope that many of the changes Facebook made to fbthrift will find their way into the original version eventually: We still have a few people at Facebook who are part of the Apache thrift team.

The newly open sourced tool may or may not have an effect on the larger world. But the point is that it at least has a chance to.

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Facebook Boosts Its Open Source Mojo With New Project

dev@Pulse Speaker Predictions - Jonathan Bryce
Come to #devPulse, February 24-25th, to hear Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack, discuss how developers with experience in open source software will be in high demand...

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