DEF CON 12 - Wendy Seltzer and Seth Schoen, Hacking the Spectrum
Wendy Seltzer and Seth Schoen, Hacking the Spectrum: Open Source Software vs. the Broadcast Flag The FCC, at Hollywood #39;s request, has mandated a broadcast fl...
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DEF CON 12 - Wendy Seltzer and Seth Schoen, Hacking the Spectrum - Video
The more mission-critical the open source software, the more necessary it is to acquire paid support, suggested Suse's Gerald Pfeifer. "Individual users will often tough out solving problems through community help forums, but SMB owners and enterprise users more likely will opt for paid support rather than devoting internal resources to support open source software," he added.
This story was originally published on Nov. 5, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.
One of the big attractions behind the growing popularity of open source software is the ability to get it and use it for free. In a world of ever-rising costs in pretty much every other aspect of business and life, "free" is an offer that's increasingly difficult to refuse.
Support is one area, however, where "free" may not be all it seems -- particularly for enterprises.
Users of free software typically rely on the generally sizable community of users and developers for help if questions arise. That support can be excellent, and many users swear by it. At the enterprise level, however, it's worth considering more closely -- particularly when many users are involved and the software is mission-critical.
In addition to offering their software for free, most of the big enterprise Linux operating systems and numerous popular applications give users a choice of paying for support from the developers themselves. In some cases, a software developer may even sell a more feature-rich commercial version.
So when does it make sense to spend the extra money? There's no one formula to provide an answer to that common question, but numerous key factors can help you decide.
One potential variable in relying on free community support is the character of the community. Just as open source version options are different, so are open source communities.
"Open source communities can be like a box of chocolates in that the flavors are not always what you expect them to be," Gerald Pfeifer, senior director for product management and operations at Suse, told LinuxInsider.
An enterprise's own in-house staff, of course, will also play a key role.
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Open Source in the Enterprise: To Pay or Not to Pay?
Feb 17, 2014, 11:00 (0 Talkback[s])
None of these companies sell software; they don't even sell platforms. Rather, each has built a business that's powered by open source software, and each has gone on to create new projects that developers all over the world want to use. Those developers don't compete with them. Rather, they have a vested interest in the code they are using, so they fix bugs and develop features.
When smart developers do that, they realize that contributing back to the original project makes more sense than sustaining a fork of the code themselves. Thus, they contribute. Some model this as a "gift economy" -- and there's no doubt that a sense of community is important for open source developers. But fundamentally this is about self-interest and making sure the code ends up in a place where the most people will be motivated to use and maintain it.
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Open source startups: Don't try to be Red Hat
The Asgard Show Episode 6
If your company is using Asgard or other Netflix Open Source Software and you #39;d like your logo featured on http://netflix.github.io/#powered then please emai...
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The Asgard Show Episode 6 - Video
Feb 15, 2014, 03:00 (0 Talkback[s]) (Other stories by Mark Lefcowitz)
In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace.
The open source software (OSS) movement has grown and matured over the past four decades. What first began as a strategy by Bell Laboratories to recruit pre-trained college students who had hard to find UNIX skill sets, has blossomed into an alternative to the "cathedral" approach to software development. This movement gained momentum, particularly after development of Linux in the early 1990s, and use of the open source approach for production of high quality, innovative software has grown exponentially. Despite this impressive track record, and some notable exceptions, OSS has been generally avoided as a viable software alternative within the US federal government sector. The objections to OSS are based primarily upon two pivotal concerns: security and lack of support.
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Three college students build a health provider search site in six weeks
Intel has unveiled a suite of open-source software intended to provide a platform for big data analytics, with Hadoop - not surprisingly - at the core.
The Platform will help organisations to import, manage and analyse, and also features several new data processing capabilities including streaming data processing, interactive and iterative analytics, and graph processing that cannot be obtained from Hadoop alone.
Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Software Division, said that it would help ease the complexity of running big data environments.
"Much like an operating system for big data processing, the Intel Data Platform supports a wide variety of applications while providing improved security, reliability and peace of mind to customers using open source software," said Davis.
The toolkit provides a foundation of common algorithms, such as graphs and network-based clustering, that IT teams can build on and customise with domain-specific code, claimed Intel. The algorithms are easy to deploy, it adds, but broad enough to be applied to multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare and retail. The toolkit will also provide a development framework for unifying graph analytics and classical machine learning to ease the programming effort.
The Platform is currently in beta and will be fully released by the end of the second quarter in June.
The company says that it will come in two versions. An enterprise edition will be free, but organisations will be left to support it themselves. The premium edition will be available on a subscription basis and will include enhanced automation, proactive security fixes, and technical support, according to Intel.
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Intel launches big data software suite - free to a good home
2012 Red Hat Summit Build a PaaS using Open Source Software ~ Redhat Linux Video YouTube
An operating system (OS) is a collection of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operati...
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2012 Red Hat Summit Build a PaaS using Open Source Software ~ Redhat Linux Video YouTube - Video
Fremont, CA (PRWEB) February 14, 2014
eRacks Open Source Systems is pleased to announce the eRacks/NAS36 rackmount storage server.
Available immediately, it combines a rack usage of only 4U with a density of 36 drives (24 front and 12 rear), which, when combined with the current technology of widely available 4TB drives, yields a total storage of 144TB.
With the forthcoming 6TB drives from WD HGST, this will increase to 216 Terabytes*, giving a truly petascale solution in only 4U of rackspace.
This rounds out eRacks' line of rackmount multi-drive storage servers and NAS solutions, nicely filling the gap between the 24-drive eRacks/NAS24 and the all-front-loading 50-drive eRacks/NAS50, eRacks' flagship storage server.
When populated with 36 removable drives in only 4U, this represent a density / price breakthrough - using the best value (lowest price/TB) 3TB drives, this enables 108TB of raw storage in only 4U, and for less than $20,000, as configured on the eRacks website.
The unit is also available partially populated, at a reduced price, to make it accessible at a lower initial price, and the storage can be increased later by filling the empty drive trays.
It's signature service, eRacks will be happy to install any of the popular Linux distributions on request - Ubuntu, Debian, edHat, Centos, Fedora, even the Arch Linux distro, which is growing fast in popularity, as well as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or other Open Source OSes.
eRacks will also pre-install any open source NAS software, such as FreeNAS, OpenFIler, NAS4Free and OpenMediaVault, among others - and administrative dashboards and web GUIs are offered on most of these software choices.
Also available is best-of-breed Open Source software for BigData / Cloud storage, NAS, and networking - including Hadoop, MooseFS, CIFS, GlusterFS, etc - and eRacks is a partner with MooseFS.org.
Perhaps the real indicator for long-term cloud dominance is what is driving customers to select Linux. Linux and open source really are driving movement away from proprietary software, according to Open Source Storage founder Eren Niazi. "The first to market usually gets the control. Linux was the first platform in the clouds. Linux developers already have the cloud space controlled pretty well."
Linux on the desktop may have missed its adoption time line, but Linux in the cloud is a win-win proposition for the post-PC movement.
Linux shows signs that it is the go-to cloud platform. Microsoft's Azure may be the only real threat to Linux cloud dominance -- all other major cloud software platforms are based on Linux and open source software.
Some enterprise Linux distros are showing up as cloud-based offerings. It is becoming very common to find options to run Ubuntu, CentOS, Suse Linux Enterprise Server and openSuse offered on cloud platforms. Even better for Linux fans is that Microsoft includes openSuse as an option to run on its own Azure platform.
"Linux has already conquered the public cloud. With the exception of Azure, all of the other dominant public clouds run both compute and storage on Linux. And for virtual machines running in the cloud, it's all Linux, including Azure," Ross Turk, vice president of community at Inktank, told LinuxInsider.
The only challenge left for Linux to fully conquer the cloud is in the private and hybrid sectors. Private cloud technology like OpenStack is pushing Linux kernel-based virtual machines, or KVMs, on the compute side and challenging VMware's position, asserted Turk.
"However, when you consider the entire cloud -- compute, work and storage -- open source still needs to win on the storage and networking side," he said.
Storage is the last bastion of proprietary technology in the data center. It accounts for a very large portion of IT spending. However, Linux has disrupted the operating system and database markets with its benefits of cost savings, no vendor lock-in and rapid innovation.
"These all have been monumental in its rise to dominance, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the rest of the cloud," said Turk.
The fight for cloud supremacy may be done and won. Especially for providers, the bottom line is Linux, according to Ryan Koop, director of products and marketing at CohesiveFT.
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Has Linux Conquered the Cloud?
Today the future of internet begins - and open source is ready Companies world-wide start to embrace the new standard for communication on the internet; the Internet Protocol version 6 - also known as IPv6. IPv6 will at some point replace existing IPv4 which have been used to transport our data through the internet for more than 30 years.
The main reason to switch is that IPv4 only allows around 4 billion internet addresses. In order for one device to communicate with another on the internet each of them has to have a unique internet address (IP address). With the number of devices currently on the market - computers, smartphones, smart tvs and set-top boxes - we are already out of addresses. However, clever manipulation allows some devices to share IP addresses with other devices, but this is not an ideal situation. The sharing of addresses makes it difficult for devices to communicate freely on the internet, thus limited functionality.
IPv6 solves the IP address issue simply by introducing a new type of IP address that can handle 3.4e+38 - or 4 billion times 4 billion times 4 billion times 4 billion. It a huge number - difficult for most people to understand. But lets just assume that we will not be running out of IP address ever again.
Today (6/6/12) was been chosen by the Internet Society to mark the launch of IPv6 . IPv6 has been around for many years but the deployment very limited - and mainly used for research within companies and institutions. ISP, hosting providers and other companies on the internet have been repluctant to start offering services on IPv6, primarily because of the investment required both in hardware, software and training.
The Internet Society on the other hand has tried to initiate a movement encouraging ISP, webiste and hardware vendors to take the leap to IPv6 anyway - and thus promote their businesses by using cutting-edge technology.
Another reason why IPv6 has taken such a long time to be accepted is that it is not compatible with IPv4, even though they can exist side by side. But not being compatible means that every piece of software communicating on the internet has to be re-written to support IPv6. Luckily, a lot of software already supports IPv6 - and especially open source software. The communities around each of the open source projects have a natural interest to support new features; and many projects strive to be forerunners in these areas.
On Open Source Alternative we have tagged each open source project that supports IPv6 with an IPv6 tag - making it easy to see and search for software that supports IPv6. A list of all IPv6 enabled open source projects is available here: Open source alternatives with IPv6 support
One of the most important projects is Apache - the open source web server that hosts almost 2/3 of all websites on the internet. Apache is also the web server used by Open Source Alternative to make our website available on both IPv4 and IPv6. The software, however, gets you nowhere, unless your hosting provider also supports IPv6, which is the reason why Osalt switched to Linode VPS for great hosting and IPv6 connectivity to the internet.
On the other end of a connection to an IPv6 webserver is of course an IPv6 web browser. Again, the open source community has the answer in terms of Firefox and Google Chrome.
If you want to explore the new world of IPv6 - either check if you ISP offers IPv6 or visit http://www.tunnelbroker.net/
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