Category Archives: Open Source Software

Out in the Open: Teenage Hacker Transforms Web Into One Giant Bitcoin Network

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Most people think of bitcoin as a form of money, if they think of bitcoin at all. But 19-year-old hacker Vitalik Buterin sees it as something more much more. He sees it as a new way of building just about any internet application.

The bitcoin digital currency is driven by open source software that runs across thousands of machines around the globe. Borrowing code from this rather clever piece of software, independent hackers have already built applications such as the Twitter-style social network Twister, the encrypted e-mail alternative Bitmessage, and the unseizable domain name system Namecoin. But Buterin believes that many other applications can benefit from the genius of the bitcoin software, and thats why hes joining forces with several other hackers to create something called Ethereum.

Buterin believes so many other applications can benefit from the genius of the bitcoin software, and thats why he has joined forces with several other hackers to create something called Ethereum.

He envisions Ethereum as an online service that lets you build practically anything in the image of bitcoin and run it across a worldwide network of machines. At its core, bitcoin is a way of reliably storing and moving digital objects or pieces of information. Today, it stores and moves money, but Buterin believes the same basic system could give rise to a new breed of social networks, data storage systems and securities markets all operated without the help of a central authority.

Born in Russia and raised in Canada, Buterin was interested in mathematics and computer science from an early age. But when he first stumbled on to bitcoin in 2011, it didnt grab him. I ignored it, he says. I thought it had no intrinsic value, so it had to fail.

But, over the next few weeks, he grew curious about this unusual creation. He received his first bitcoins as payment for articles written for a site called Bitcoin Weekly, where he was paid five bitcoins per article, the equivalent of $3.75 at the time. It was my first ever real job, and it paid around $1.30 per hour, he says. He kept writing about the digital currency in the pages of Bitcoin Magazine and other pubs. Then, in 2013, just as he was about to lose interest in the thing, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed.

Deciding that bitcoin was going to be a much bigger deal than most people realized, he dropped out of university and started traveling the world, jumping from bitcoin meetup to bitcoin meetup and contributing to various open source projects. Ethereum is the result of all those conversations and software experiments.

Ethereum wont use the peer-to-peer network that bitcoin runs on, nor will it use the same software. Instead, Buterin and his team are building a completely new system that will run atop its own network. But the project borrows heavily from the ideas behind the bitcoin software.

All bitcoin transactions, for instance, are stored in a massive public ledger called the blockchain. This is a type of encrypted database, and you can use it to power other applications as weve seen with Twister and BitMessage. Ethereum will feed still more applications through something similar to the blockchain, and it will offer a stripped-down version of the Python programming language known as Ethereum Script thats specifically designed for building these blockchain-based applications.

As with bitcoin, the network that underpins Ethereum will be powered by machines donated by the people of the world, and to encourage donations, the system will allow these machines to collect fees from developers who build and run an applications atop the network. In similar fashion, bitcoin shares its money with those who run the machines driving its network.

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Out in the Open: Teenage Hacker Transforms Web Into One Giant Bitcoin Network

EnterpriseDB Expands in Korea to Meet Rising Demand for Postgres

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BEDFORD, Massachusetts, January 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Sweeping government initiatives to adopt open source software alternatives are driving greater demand for Postgres software and expertise

EnterpriseDB(EDB), the leading worldwide provider of enterprise-class Postgres products andOracle database compatibilitysolutions, today announced its expansion in South Korea with the opening of a new branch office in Seoul. EnterpriseDB has appointed Jihoon (James) Kim as manager to provide local support to Korean governments and corporations adopting Postgres.

The use of open source software has expanded dramatically in Korea in recent years following government initiatives to adopt and develop solutions that utilize open source software to avoid proprietary lock-in. Under the stewardship of Korea's National IT Industry Promotion Agency and the National Computing & Information Agency (NCIA), government agencies are working to convert systems to open source to meet goals set by national initiatives. The NCIA is working to create benchmark deployments that help Korean government agencies achieve the government's goal of running 40 percent of its operations on open source software by 2016.

"Major initiatives in Korea to use open source software wherever possible have propelled Postgres to the forefront in the database sector. Postgres is gaining widespread recognition among global enterprises for its performance and stability," said Jihoon (James) Kim, Branch Manager at EnterpriseDB. "Organizations in Korea have been particularly aggressive given government initiatives and the nation's overall drive for innovation. We're expanding in Korea to ensure organizations have the resources they need to succeed with Postgres."

In the Korean corporate sector, the telecommunications industry has taken a leadership position in adopting open source based database solutions. KT Corporation, for example, is working on one of the largest enterprise database migrations from a proprietary vendor to EnterpriseDB's open source based Postgres Plus Advanced Server. KT Corp. has deployed Postgres to support multiple mission-critical applications with tremendous success and is currently identifying workloads across the enterprise that can be migrated from a costly traditional database to Postgres.

"We continue to be impressed by the performance of Postgres and we're actively seeking more opportunities to deploy the database," said Jungsook Jaegal, General Manager, IT Architecture team, IT Strategy and Planning BU, at KT. "We enjoy a rewarding partnership with EnterpriseDB in our efforts to deploy Postgres in place of more costly, traditional solutions based on proprietary technology."

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EnterpriseDB Expands in Korea to Meet Rising Demand for Postgres

Open Source Power for Small Business in 2014

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The biggest impact that open source software offers small business in 2014 takes place in the cloud. Open source software powers the cloudwhere you can take advantage of both hosted software and services, and hosted IT infrastructure (e.g., servers). We're already used to hosted services such as Web and mail hosting. They're convenient and cheap, and they prevent headaches.

What about running your small business without buying or maintaining a roomful of your own servers? Do you dream of not having to recruit and retain good tech talent? Can you run your shop with no on-premises servers at allsimply plug into some kind of hosted turnkey IT-in-a-box, and just buy smartphones, tablets, and PCs? The answer to all of these questions is yesand no.

We're in the midst of a genuine tech revolution thanks to cloud technologies, which are possible because of open source software such as OpenStack and OpenShift, and Linux vendors like Red Hat and SUSE. The cloud makes it possible for hosting providers to offer more services than ever. Cloud services fall into three basic levels:

First, consider whether you even want to outsource your IT. It's an attractive option if you can find service providers that offer what you need, and if you have sufficient network bandwidth that lets you work without going crazy waiting for pages to load. The hosting provider handles the burden of provisioning, maintenance, security, and bandwidth, which reduces your staffing needs. It will likely cost less than doing it yourself.

As the state of technology stands right now, you can outsource at least part of your IT to hosting providers and, as the cloud evolves, you'll have a wider range of services and products to choose from in the future. Let's look at a few different scenarios.

If you use Google Apps for Business, you're already outsourcing some of your IT without thinking of it in those terms. Google offers an assortment of basic applications for reasonable prices: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Hangouts (videoconferencing), Google Calendar, and Google+ (communities).

You get to use your own branding and domain name, and you don't need a tech guru to set it up and maintain it. The main pitfall is that Google makes it too easy to share everything with the world, so you have to be very careful with your access permissions. For some small shops, Google Apps for Business is all they need, and at $5/month per user it's a real deal.

Other examples of basic hosted services for small businesses include Dropbox, Swift, GoogleDocs, and Amazon S3. However they may not be suitable, because they don't meet compliance laws that require certain documents remain under your control. If your business has compliance or security concerns, you don't store sensitive documents on cloud services.

So what do you? Set up a private, on-premises cloud withOwnCloud. It isn't magic, but a moderately knowledgeable computer user can manage OwnCloud, and it provides secure file storage, sharing, sync, and management. It also syncs with Dropbox, Swift, GoogleDocs, and Amazon S3, so you can place your external storage under a good central management console. For more information, read our OwnCloud review.

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Open Source Power for Small Business in 2014

Guest articles setting out the author’s position on the current status and future directions of KDE and its software

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From its beginning, KDE has been a leader in innovation in free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS), but there is a threat to that leadership in one of the fastest growing areas of technology. The advantages of free and open development and use are clear for software; now closed and proprietary strategies have become standard in other kinds of technology. The need for technology freedom has moved from software to other more corporate-controllable areasnotably hardware and the Internet.

As was the case when KDE started, community-developed, freedom-oriented technology is necessary to break the stranglehold of large companies that are more committed to managers and investors than to users. But this wont be easy and it cant be left to a few people. The entire KDE Community has a stake in the outcome. For that matter, this should be a concern to anyone who develops free and open software, anyone who uses it, anyone who benefits from it. And that includes just about everyone using technology today.

New hardware has been announced that addresses the need for openness beyond software. Community help is needed to support a generous, far-sighted open hardware project involving mostly KDE people and certainly following KDE principles. Please consider contributing financially to open hardware for KDE.

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Guest articles setting out the author's position on the current status and future directions of KDE and its software

osalt.com – Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial …

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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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osalt.com - Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial ...