True to its name, Googles famous Borg cluster controller has absorbed a lot of different ideas about how to manage server clusters and the applications that run atop them at the search engine and now cloud computing giant. And while the Kubernetes container controller that Google open sourced in June 2014 was certainly inspired by Borg, Kubernetes was really more of a kernel than it was a complete system, and the way you know that is that it took a long time to get Kubernetes to be truly usable in the enterprise.

Oddly enough, Airship, a mashup of Kubernetes, the OpenStack cloud controller with bare metal extensions, and a slew of other open source projects spearheaded by AT&T yes, the same Ma Bell that created the C compiler and then the Unix operating system back in 1969, starting the open source and Unix revolutions has surprisingly and, at least to some, quietly created a complete software stack that arguably rivals Borg and its extensions inside of Google.

This is a considerably different outcome than anyone might have predicted only four years ago, when we were all trying to figure out if OpenStack, Mesos, or Kubernetes was going to emerge as the ultimate cluster controller and application scheduler.

We wanted to make sure that what we were seeing unfolding with Airship made sense, so we reached out to Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, to make sure we were interpreting what AT&T was doing with systems software and specifically with the Airship extensions to OpenStack and Kubernetes correctly. And to be very precise, we asked if Airship was analogous to Borg and Omega at Google and Autopilot at Microsoft Azure, which control the clusters and overlaying layers of workload isolation, including virtual machines and containers, at these two hyperscalers.

The answer was a qualified probably, but Airship is more than Borg/Omega, which we covered here in detail more than four years ago, or Autopilot, which we discussed a few months later. We are not sure that Airship should not be called an uberating system, a conglomeration of runtimes, virtualization layers, and system management tools that can span an entire distributed computing system. Bryce, being a software developer and one with open source keenly in mind thinks of Airship as a framework more than an operating system.

From what I know, Airship is similar in concept to Autopilot and Borg/Omega, says Bryce. The way that I think about it, Airship is really a lifecycle management framework for operating open source software. Its focused on Kubernetes and OpenStack now, but down the road there, if there emerges a leading serverless framework or new AI tooling, these could plug in.

The real issue that Airship is addressing, says Bryce, is not only creating an operating system that can span bare metal, virtual machines, and containers (or any mix of them), wrapping around OpenStack and its bare metal extensions like Ironic or the MaaS layers added by Canonical, and the Kubernetes podding system for containers, but in taking control of how all of this open source software, which innovates at different rates, can be managed itself, including all of the release dependencies and including rollback capabilities when some piece of the open source software stack doesnt work out right.

For me, Airship is not just about installing software and getting it up and running, but its how do you benefit from this continuous innovation that open source projects deliver. The concept of lifecycle is so critical and its really a core of Airship.

Almost eight years ago, AT&T made a commitment to using and extending open source software to build out its global network, and to use whitebox hardware to run it, as a means of lowering the cost of its network services. This has been a huge transition for the company, but it is putting control back in its own hands rather than those of its equipment suppliers.

Airship is not to be confused with other open source efforts that AT&T has undertaken in recent years to provide orchestration and virtualization in its network. Airship has nothing to do with the Open Network Automation Platform, an orchestration and virtualization layer for network function virtualization that AT&T developed internally as ECOMP short for Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy and merged with the competing and Open Orchestrator (Open-O) project back in 2017. Airship also has nothing to do with the DANOS open source network operating system that AT&T created, enhanced, and preserved starting in 2017 in the wake of Brocade Communications buying routing NOS provider Vyatta in 2012 and then losing interest. ONAP and DANOS have both been moved under the Linux Foundation umbrella, like many open source projects. Airship is thus far a free-standing community that administered under the OpenStack Foundation umbrella.

There are a lot of moving parts to Airship, but before getting into that, it is probably helpful to understand why AT&T created its own mashup of OpenStack and Kubernetes. Most large enterprises have a few to many datacenters, and the largest hyperscalers and cloud builders have maybe dozens of regions with a few datacenters in each region. AT&T has tens of thousands of datacenters, and deploying applications across these datacenters, which have a wide mix of sizes and types of equipment, is a very big hassle. What was needed, says Bryce, was a systems-level, pluggable approach to software, allowing for all kinds of open source projects to be snapped into Airship and maintained as a whole even though it is really a collection of pieces all being innovated at different rates. The other interesting thing about Airship is that it has a declarative approach to describing, deploying, and configuring software atop hardware. Airship is for deploying a datacenter, not a server or a switch or a storage server.

Googles Borg is also declarative when it comes to setting up clusters, and uses the Borg Control Language, or BCL, which is itself a variant of the General Configuration Language that the search engine giant created to configure and deploy hardware and the applications that run on it. That Airship declarative language is YAML, a variant of XML that is used in conjunction with OpenStack Helm, a document-based package manager for OpenStack that has been extended to Kubernetes. Here is what the Airship workflow looks like:

That makes it look simple, we know. It takes a lot of software, all working in concert, to make anything this complex look that simple.

Airship starts out with a minimalist Kubernetes environment that can in turn bootstrap OpenStack and other services. In fact, OpenStack is containerized with Airship, inside of Docker containers under the control of Kubernetes, which is like the package manager, and can be thought of as just another microservices application with components that can be tweaked or swapped out independently from the others in that collection of microservices that is called OpenStack.

Once OpenStack is up and running on Airship, you can, of course deploy Kubernetes on either bare metal using Ironic or on virtual machines using Nova. In most cases, service providers like AT&T want exactly this kind of isolation not just to keep applications and data separate from different users, but to keep users and administrators both among AT&Ts IT staff and the customers that use its network away from the underlying Kubernetes and OpenStack layers that implement the environment.

Here is how OpenStack, Kubernetes, and the unique code created by AT&T and then others who joined the Airship project last year, such as SK Telecom and Intel, that glues Airship all together:

The chunks that AT&T and the Airship team have been working on are in blue, and with the exception of one piece, they are all relegated to a layer of the complete system stack that AT&T calls the Under Cloud Platform, or UCP, runtime. This all starts with bare metal servers, on top of which is a host operating system in this case Linux and a container runtime that is compliant with the Open Container Initiative specification meaning, in essence, a Docker container running atop that.

Airship then has containerized services that manage the configuration of the hybrid OpenStack/Kubernetes setup and that run underneath OpenStack and beside Kubernetes and Helm. OpenStack is the controller for virtual machine and bare metal provisioning, and Kubernetes is the controller for podded containers. Airship uses its own Ceph object store as the back-end for the Airship control plane, which is separate from the OpenStack or Kubernetes storage that will be used by applications. The stack also uses the Calico Layer 3 software-defined networking framework to provide routing functions for Airship that are separate from the networking stack used by OpenStack and Kubernetes applications. Sitting next to Kubernetes and Helm is a bit of orchestration software that AT&T created called Armada, which is where all that declaring with YAML in Helm documents, called charts, gets done.

In the blue boxes underneath OpenStack Helm sit Promenade, Shipyard, Drydock, Deckhand, Divingbell, and Berth. Promenade, through a process AT&T calls genesis (another Star Trek reference, no doubt) takes a single host system, loading it up with the current stack of Kubernetes and OpenStack software and use all of the code and configuration in this initial host to build out the remainder of the Kubernetes/OpenStack cluster that is described in the Helm documents. Here is the important bit: The same process that creates the initial Airship host is the one that is used to update the hosts from that point forward.

Shipyard is the REST front-end to Airship, which allows it to be integrated with continuous integration/continuous development platforms and to do audits and take various operational actions. Drydock replicates and configurations additional nodes in the cluster once the genesis machine is created, including control plane hosts to run the Airship elements as well as compute and storage hosts for applications. This bare metal provisioning done by Drydock includes setting up BIOS and firmware, RAID drive configurations, operating systems, and network configurations on these host machines. Deckhand is a central repository for site designs and changes to them, as expressed in those YAML documents. Divingbell is a minimalist bare metal configuration manager that aligns with Kubernetes pods and is used to repair or otherwise tweak a setup that is running, much as a Navy specialist in a diving bell can work on a ship. Berth is a minimalist VM that runs inside a container that also aligns with Kubernetes pods and is used in very specific ways. Aligning to Kubernetes means if you kill the pods, you kill the bare metal or VM instances.

The interesting thing about Airship is that although software could be provisioned to run on bare metal, in a virtual machine, or inside of a container in this entire environment, it is assumed that all elements of Airship itself are only deployed using containers.

Airship v1.0 went live in May and the project has just been graduated to a top-level project by the OpenStack Foundation. That means it is ready for prime-time deployments.

It will be interesting to see how this stands up in production against Googles on-premises Anthos stack, which was formerly known as Cloud Services Platform and which is a containers-only environment for applications as well as for Kubernetes itself.

The other thing that needs to be resolved is how various job schedulers can plug into Airship. Presumably the schedulers that work with OpenStack, such as Qonos, or Kubernetes, such as Volcano, kube-scehduler, or Navops and GridEngine from Univa, can plug right in at a higher level here in the Airship stack. One of the key things about Borg was not just that it set up hardware and software for applications, but it figured out when to actually run a mix of batch and interactive workloads to maximize utilization across Googles vast fleet of millions of servers. This is one of the trickier bits to manage, and even Google has had to make Borg pluggable and able to support different schedulers, including Omega and a slew of ones that exist but Google has not named outside of its own walls.

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Ma Bell, Not Google, Creates The Real Open Source Borg - The Next Platform

BENGALURU :Three months after International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. completed the acquisition of Red Hat Inc., president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the open source software company, Jim Whitehurst, insists that his strategy remains the same, even as IBMs market capabilities and size help his company achieve faster growth.

In an interview in Bengaluru, Whitehurst and Red Hat chairman and Nexus Venture Partners co-founder Naren Gupta spoke about the companys India plans and explained why they continue to see open source models as the future. Edited excerpts:

It has been a year since the deal was announced and three months since it was closed. Has the Red Hat strategy changed since?

Whitehurst: Red Hats strategy remains unchanged. We are an open source software company looking to deliver open source platforms. Every line of code we have is open source. That will continue to be true. Even for employee contributions, IBM changed its entire contribution policy to match that of Red Hat. The logic of the deal was more around how IBMs go-to-market capability can help us scale faster. Earlier, we just didnt have the size and scale to really be able to deliver these huge platforms for telcos. IBM is working hard to better optimize their software to run on our platforms.

Gupta: In many ways, the Red Hat-IBM deal extends the benefits of open source. We were doing well ourselves, but certainly we can accelerate whatever we are doing in partnership with IBM.

How is the deal panning out in India?

Whitehurst: Great. While we have credibility in open source, when it comes to running big mission critical systems, people trust IBM. Telcos around the world are a great example. Taking our stack together with IBM allows us to take that credibility and propel our business quickly. In India, IBM has a strong brand.

Typically, merger deals take a toll on employees, either in terms of morale or concerns around layoffs. How are you addressing that aspect?

Whitehurst: We were very clear from day one that RedHat is a distinct unit. There have been no layoffs and no changes in benefits. I still have a finance department, a legal department, and an human resources department. Everyone at Red Hat reports to me and I report to Ginni (IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometty). Weve actually accelerated our hiring and we are accelerating our business. Thats true here in India as well.

How did you manage to convince IBM that you need to be a separate unit? There are few parallelsVMware and LinkedIn to name only a couple.

Whitehurst: I spoke with Pat (Gelsinger, VMware CEO), Michael Dell (chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies). I also spent a lot of time with Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn) and Satya (Nadella, Microsoft CEO) who were all very generous with their time, talking about how they helped VMware and LinkedIn to remain separate companies.

To some extent, it helps that IBMs model is similar in terms of the nature of the company around revenue and margin. Were a subscription model, so I pretty much know how my revenue will shape up each quarter. As were operating on a different set of metrics, its easy for us to go back to IBM saying heres what were going to deliver in terms of revenue this quarter. So, a lot of friction points havent been there. The one exception is that we no longer have equity to give. So, we give IBM equity instead of Red Hat equity.

Gupta: I think IBM is being very smart about this thing. The reason they bought Red Hat was to leverage the innovation.

The pace of innovation is rising in technology. Youre going to see more models such as the Red Hat-IBM acquisition model. People are realizing that a lot of the innovation could be compromised if you merge two organizations.

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Red Hats credibility with IBMs strong brand to propel biz in India - Livemint

Amazon has made another effort to be a good Java citizen by joining brewmasters at the Java Community Process (JCP), the group which develops specifications for the Java platform.

The firm's latest move was mentioned by Amazon's Yishai Galatzer, manager of the AWS Artifacts and Languages group at AWS, on Tuesday. Galatzer's team, of course, builds Amazon Corretto, a distribution of the OpenJDK.

The OpenJDK is an open source implementation of Java licensed under GPL v2 and presented in collaboration with Oracle, owners of Java, which uses OpenJDK code in its own Oracle JDK. Since April 2019, the Oracle JDK is not free for commercial use, for versions 9 and higher, a change which has increased interest in the OpenJDK.

Galatzer says that "we are ramping up our investment in OpenJDK," and references the company's contribution of the Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider earlier this year. It is also worth noting that James Gosling, inventor of Java, joined AWS as a Distinguished Engineer in 2017.

Now the company is joining the JCP, whose other members include (among many others) Apple, Arm, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Oracle, Samsung and VMware but not Microsoft.

AWS and open source is a contentious subject. Some open source companies see cloud providers as a threat because they make a business from providing services driven by open source software, without giving much back to the creators and stewards of that software. In some cases, open source projects have adopted new more restrictive licences as a result.

Tim Bray, co-author of the original XML specification, now works at AWS. He argues in a recent blog post that "the hypothesis that Open Source in and of itself constitutes a business model is not well supported by the evidence."

Rather, "operational excellence", as offered by (you guessed it) AWS is a proven good business. He recalls working for Sun when it acquired the open source database MySQL, but failing to get Twitter to pay for MySQL support even though "they were existentially dependent on this technology." Bray's post reads like an kind of apologia for the way AWS uses open source.

This tension in the open source community means that anything AWS can do to win kudos is good for public relations. That said, it also makes perfect sense that AWS, as a big Java user, aspires to a greater say in how the platform advances.

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Put on your tech specs: Amazon Web Services has joined the Java Community Process - The Register

An open source software not only provides you with free access to the product but also an ability to modify the code and make your own version. This is one of the reasons why many people use Linux because it provides a lot of free and open source tools. But, for Windows, its a different story. Most of the Windows applications are very expensive and users usually have no other choice.

There are some great open-source tools available for Windows as well but theres no marketing or promotion. People usually dont get to know about them because no one promotes things for free. So Ive decided to make a list of 10 absolutely free and open-source PC software for Windows users.

OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OpenOffice was initially released on May 1, 2002. It is an open source discontinued office suite of its earlier version the StarOffice written in C++ and Java. The Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice in 1999 for its internal use. OpenOffice includes

Its default file format was the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO/IEC standard, that could read a wide variety of other file formats, with particular attention to those from Microsoft Office.

This is an open source media player that can practically handle any file format and one of the worlds most popular free media players. This can handle any audio files, video files, or media stream without the need of installing additional codecs. It also gives you a degree of control over playback, optimizing video and audio for your specific hardware configuration and even screen recording for your desktop.

VLC is also ideal for streaming podcasts, as well as internet radio stations with its latest addition feature, the 360-degree playback, which lets you enjoy immersive videos with a VR headset. Thats not all you can also use it to record screen in Windows 10 and earlier versions of Windows

You may also like:Top VLC Tricks and Hidden Features You need to Know

This was originally released on May 28, 2000, Audacity is a free and open source digital audio editor and recording computer software application, available for Windows, macOS/OS X, Linux and other operating systems in 36 languages. It was developed by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University.

Moreover, to recording audio from multiple sources, it can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out, recording and mixing entire albums. It is currently used for the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

Initially released on February 15, 1996, GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free and open-source raster graphics editor that is used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks which was written in C. With the operating systems: Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows and BSD, Solaris.

This is a professional, free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for:

Blenders features include texturing, graphics editing 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, raster, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing. It also features an integrated game engine which was initially released in January 1998 and written in C, C++, and Python.

ClamWin is a free and open-source antivirus tool for Windows written in C++ and Python and supports Windows 98 and newer versions. It provides a graphical user interface to the Clam AntiVirus engine. It is a standalone virus scanner licensed under GNU General Public License.

You may also like:Top 5 Absolutely Free Open-Source AntiVirus Tools for PC

This is a free software advanced text editor with a variety of tools for programming in general and the development of dynamic websites that supports development in the following: HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Google Go, Vala, Ada, D, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby and shell.

It also is available for many platforms like Linux, Solaris, OS X, and Windows that can be used via integration with GNOME or run as a standalone application. Bluefish has been translated into 17 languages.

You may also like:Top 5 Popular Free Source Code Editors for Programmers

It was initially released on July 18, 1999, this is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as archives which was developed by Igor Pavlov. It uses its own 7z archive format but can read and write several other archive formats that can be used from a command-line interface as the command p7zip or through a graphical user interface that also features shell integration.

Most of the 7-Zip source code is under the GNU LGPL license whereas the unRAR code is under the GNU LGPL with an unRAR restriction which states that developers are not permitted to use the code to reverse-engineer the RAR compression algorithm. It was written in C++ and available in 86 languages.

Developed by Dominic Reichl, KeePass Password Safe is a free and open-source password manager primarily for Windows and officially supports macOS and Linux operating systems through the use of Mono.

It stores usernames, passwords, and other fields, including free-form notes and file attachments in an encrypted file which file can be protected by a master password, key file, and/or the current Windows account details which were stored on a local file system. It was initially released on November 16, 2003, written in C++ and C#.

You may also like:Password Secrets: Why Your Password is Never Secure

It is a free and open-source disk space cleaner, privacy manager, and computer system optimizer written in Python that supports 64 languages with operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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10 Best Free and Open Source Software For Windows 10

Open source software in simple terms is free software that you can use in your business. Open source developers choose to make the source code of their software publicly available for the good of the community and to publish their software with an open source license meaning that other developers can see how it works and add to it.

Examples of open source products such as WordPress (a content management system), Open Office, the internet browser Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system and its derivative Android, an operating system for mobile devices.

From a business user perspective, open source software works in much the same way as proprietary software systems provided by commercial software firms the only difference being that generally you dont pay for it. However there are a few important differences the idea behind open source software is that users are effectively co-developers, suggesting ways to improve it and helping to hunt out bugs and problems.

This means that if you wish, you can modify it to your own needs, port it to new operating systems and share it with others.

You can download open source software onto your computer system in the same way you would proprietary software. Some software providers such as Alfresco, MySQL and Ingres offer both open source versions of their software and paid-for proprietary versions.

Because of the way it has been developed, open source software can require more technical know-how than commercial proprietary systems, so you may need to put time and effort into training employees to the level required to use it.

Start with the most popular open source software systems that have built up a large community of support behind them, so you have somewhere to go to if you need advice.

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Open source software: Advantages & disadvantages

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: -1 (from 1 vote)Database Schematics can be drawn, and exported to SQL statements. Import SQL descriptions and visualise them using DDT. Map ERD relationships visually.ScreenshotOfficial...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)TortoiseCVS can directly check out modules, update, commit and see differences by right clicking on files and folders within Explorer;check the state of a file...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems,...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)Jext Featuresproject management;workspaces;open zip and internet files;mail source code;system commands within the console;fast typing with HyperTyper...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)SharpDevelop features a Forms designer and code completion both C# andVB.NET. Expect Code AutoInsert (Alt+Ins), C# toVB.NETconverter, as well...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)XAMPP includes Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)NetBeansIDEis a tool for Java programmers to develop cross-platform desktop, mobile and web applications.NetBeansIDESome Featuressyntax highlighting...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)DBDesigner has features to create a visual model of any database. Starting from a reverse engineering engine to automatically retrieve a model from existing databases,...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)Just released; Blender 2.36, with over 5 weeks of only stabilizing and bug fixing. This is the definite version to use to enjoy the new full undo system, complete...

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)Dev-C++IDEuses theMingwport ofGCCas its compiler. It creates native Win32 executables, either console or GUI. Dev-C++ can also be used in combination...

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MyOpenSource | Open source software for windows

Do you use "open source software" or "free software"? Although there are different rules for free software licenses (four freedoms) andopen source licenses (Open Source Definition), what is not apparent from those two sets of rulesis:

In other words, although the terms "free software" and "open source software" refer to essentially the same set of licenses, they arrive at that set via different routes. (The results aren't perfectly identical, but the differences are unlikely to matter broadly.) And, even though the licenses are the same, a person's choice of terminology may imply a different emphasis in values.

The concept of "free software" was developed by Richard Stallman in the 1980s. The focus is on what the recipient of software is permitted to do with the software: "Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software."

"Open source" focuses on the practical consequences enabled by these licenses: surprisingly effective collaboration on software development. Free software came first. Later, it became apparent that free software was leading to remarkable collaboration dynamics. In 1997, Eric Raymond's seminal essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" focused attention on the implications that free software has for software development methodology.

In "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software," Stallman explains: "The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement."

Different values? Yes. But not mutually exclusive. Rather than aligning with one or the other, many people find varying degrees of resonance with the values underlying each term.

Rather than aligning with one or the other, many people find varying degrees of resonance with the values underlying each term.

The closest to a neutral term would be FOSS (free and open source software) or FLOSS (free/libre/open source software), which have had limited success fulfilling that value-neutral role. Perhaps the existence of two such terms (with and without "L") may have diluted and thus diminished the ability of either to break out as a broadly used term.

This assortment of terms has contributed to confusion. Would a neutral term be useful? Or is the attempt to separate the associated values a flawed goal? Is a neutral term inappropriate because there are significant free software projects that would not be considered open source? Orthe reverse? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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What's the difference between open source software and free ...

Open source is at the core of the software development. But today, you have to go deeper. You need to know how to implement new technologies like Kubernetes and TensorFlow. You need to work in a cloud environment that isn't always open source-friendly. To know how machine learning can make or break your code. Whether you're looking to understand where software development is headed, or want to dive into the key technologies that you need to build resilient, useful, innovative software, the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference is where you'll find the answers you need.

At OSCON, youll explore the five key ideas that are driving software development forward today:

Join the OSCON community to understand where to focus your efforts, which partners you can count on, and how to choose and implement new solutions. Bring your team and accelerate the learning opportunities.

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Immerse yourself in two days of in-depth education on critical topics. Training courses take place July 15-16 and are limited in size to maintain a high level of learning and instructor interaction.

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We believe that true innovation depends on hearing from, and listening to, people with a variety of perspectives. Please read our Diversity Statement and learn more about our Diversity and Inclusion scholarship program. The conference takes place in an ADA-compliant venue where we provide a nursing room and all-gender restroom access; we also live-caption the keynote presentations and offer childcare expenses reimbursement.

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Open Source & Software Development | O'Reilly OSCON

When someone buys a new smartphone, often they're preoccupied with the camera specs or the size of the screen or its storage capabilities. It's easy to overlook one of the most foundational aspects of these sleek consumer gadgets: their operating systems. The world's most popular mobile operating system is Google's Android. It powers more than 86 percent of smartphones in the world. What's even more remarkable is that Android is based on the open source Linux operating system.

That means anyone can view the code at the heart of the vast majority of smartphones, modify it, and, more important, share it with anyone else. This openness enables collaboration. Unlike, say, Microsoft Windows, which was developed and is maintained by a single company, Linux is developed and maintained by more than 15,000 programmers around the world. These programmers might work for companies that compete with each other, or they might volunteer to create something new thats then given away. For free. Gratis.

As crazy as that might sound, the open source way of building software is now embraced by the likes of IBM, which plans to pay $34 billion for open source company Red Hat, Microsoft, which paid $7.5 billion to acquire the code hosting and collaboration platform GitHub, and Walmart, which released its own open source software.

Open source is even seeing applications in the next iteration of technology: AI. Google open sourced its artificial intelligence engine, TensorFlow, in 2015, enabling companies and researchers to build applications using some of the same software the search giant used to create tools that search photos, recognize spoken words, and translate languages. Since then, Dropbox has used TensorFlow to recognize text in scanned documents and photographs, Airbnb has used it to help categorize photos in its listings, and a company called Connecterra has used it to help dairy farmers analyze their cows' health.

Why would Google give away something so central to its business? Because it hoped outside developers would make the software better as they adapted it to their own needs. And they have: Google says more than 1,300 outsiders have worked on TensorFlow. By making it open source, Google helped TensorFlow become one of the standard frameworks for developing AI applications, which could bolster its cloud-hosted AI services. In addition to garnering outside help for a project, open source can provide valuable marketing, helping companies attract and retain technical talent.

Keep in mind that Google didn't give away the data that powers its AI applications. Just using TensorFlow won't magically allow you to build a search engine and advertising business that can compete with Google.

So Google stands to benefit, but why would an outsider contribute improvements to TensorFlow? Let's say a company makes its own version of TensorFlow with unique elements, but keeps those elements private. Over time, as Google made its own changes to TensorFlow, it might become harder for that other company to integrate its changes with the official version; also, the second company would miss out on improvements contributed by others.

In short, open source provides a way for companies to collaborate on technology thats mutually beneficial.

The open source software movement grew out of the related, but separate, "free software" movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman, at the time a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said he would create a free alternative to the Unix operating system, then owned by AT&T; Stallman dubbed his alternative GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."

For Stallman, the idea of "free" software was about more than giving software away. It was about ensuring that users were free to use software as they saw fit, free to study its source code, free to modify it for their own purposes, and free to share it with others. Stallman released his code under a license known as the GNU Public License, or GPL, which guarantees users those four software freedoms. The GPL is a "viral" license, meaning that anyone who creates software based on code licensed under the GPL must also release that derivative code under a GPL license.

Source codeThe human-readable code that is translated, or "compiled," into the binary code that machines can read. When you buy software like Microsoft Office, you typically only get the binary code, which makes it hard to understand or modify the software.

Open source softwareSoftware distributed with a license that allows anyone to use, view, modify, and share the software's source code.

GPLThe GNU Public License, a software license that allows anyone to use, view, modify, and share a project's source code; but anyone who uses the code to create a derivative work must also provide the source code for that work under the GPL.

ApacheAn open source web server, a software foundation, and a permissive license that, unlike the GPL, allows source code to be mixed into non-open source, commercial code.

Open core softwareCommercial software built on open source software that also includes non-open source code.

LibraryUsually smaller collections of code that can be used as building blocks for larger projects, saving developers from having to write common features, such as password authentication, from scratch.

ForkA copy of a code base that serves as the basis for a distinct version of the software. Often forks are used by individuals or companies to customize software for their own needs. Other times, they become the foundations of separate projects. Libre Office, for example, is a fork of Open Office.

GitHubA popular service now owned by Microsoft for hosting code. Offers the ability to fork code bases with one click.

Importantly, the license doesn't forbid companies from selling copies of GNU software. As long as you allow your customers to share your code, you can charge as much as you want for your software. The phrase "free as in free speech, not free as in free beer" is often used to help explain this apparent contradiction.

Other programmers soon followed Stallman's example. One of the most important was Linus Torvalds, the vitriolic Finnish programmer who created the Linux operating system in 1991. Linux is a "kernel," the core of an operating system that talks to the hardware and translates the basic input from your keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen into something the software can understand. GNU lacked a finished kernel at the time, so many GNU users combined GNU and Linux into a functional operating system. Bundles of the GNU operating system, Linux kernel, and other tools became known as GNU/Linux distributions; some purists still refer to Linux-based operating systems as "GNU/Linux." Soon, companies like Red Hat were making money selling support for open source technologies like Linux.

Linuxor GNU/Linux if you preferbecame especially popular for running web servers and now runs 69.4 percent of web servers, according to data compiled by W3Techs. Alongside the rise of Linux and the web came several other free tools, including the Apache web server, MySQL database, and programming languages like Perl and PHP. Many used the GPL license, but others adopted more permissive licenses that, unlike the GPL, allowed companies to create proprietary products using their code.

In time, tensions grew between those, like Stallman, who believed that all software should be free on ethical grounds, and more business-oriented developers who thought that freely sharing code was a better way to build software but not an ethical imperative. In 1998, a group met to discuss how to promote the idea of shared code and open collaboration. Worried that the term free software and Stallmans more absolutist philosophy would make their ideas less palatable to businesses that wanted to keep some of their code proprietary, the group settled on the label "open source," coined by Christine Peterson, to distinguish its aims.

During the 2000s, open source went truly mainstream. In 2004, programmer David Heinemeier Hansson released his web application programming framework Ruby on Rails, which quickly became one of the worlds most important web development tools, as well as the foundation for services like Twitter and Kickstarter. Meanwhile, Yahoo was funding the development of the open source data-crunching system Hadoop. After its release in 2006, other companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and eBay began contributing to the project, helping demonstrate the value of inter-company collaboration. Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of MySQL in 2008 proved open source could be big business. That same year Google released its first Android phones, moving open source from the server to your pocket.

Now open source is practically everywhere. Walmart uses open source software like the development platform Node, and it has opened up the code of its cloud management tool OneOps and its development platform Electrode. JP Morgan Chase open sourced its blockchain platform Quorum, on which its employees collaborated with the creators of the privacy focused bitcoin alternative Zcash. Even Microsoft, whose former CEO once called Linux a "cancer," now uses and releases open source software such as its popular .NET programming framework. It even uses Linux to run parts of its cloud service Azure and has shared its own Linux tools with the community.

Open source isnt counterculture anymore. Its the establishment.

The rise of open source hasn't been without glitches. Despite the corporate world's embrace of open source software, many independent or startup-based projects still haven't figured out how to make money. Even the developers of software thats widely used by major companies can struggle to raise funds to cover their costs or hire others. That can have serious consequences.

August 1969Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie create the Unix operating system at AT&T's Bell Labs. It's not open source, but they make the source code available.

September 1983Richard Stallman announces that he's working on a free alternative to Unix called GNU that won't require a license from AT&T.

August 1991Linus Torvalds announces that he is "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)." That operating system would become known as Linux.

April 1995Former WIRED web developer Brian Behlendorf and eight others release the first version of Apache web serverwith bandwidth sponsored by WIRED. The project's permissive licensing helped win big corporations over to open source. Apache is still the most popular web server today.

February 1998Christine Peterson introduces the term "open source" at a summit for promoting code sharing and collaboration.

August 1999Red Hat, which sells support for Linux to companies, goes public with a successful IPO. It would go on to become the first open source company to rake in $1 billion in annual revenue. But its big payday was yet to come.

June 2001Then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer calls Linux a "cancer" in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times.

July 2004The first release of Ruby on Rails, the open source development platform used by countless startups, including Twitter during its early days.

January 2008Sun acquires opens source database maker MySQL for $1 billion.

October 2008The first Android phone, the T-Mobile G-1, goes on sale, bringing the Linux operating system to the masses.

June 2012As part of its long effort to rehabilitate relations with the open source world, Microsoft announces support for Linux on its cloud service Azure.

November 2014Microsoft announces an open source version of its .NET programming framework.

October 2018Database company MongoDB adopts a new license that restricts how cloud services can use its software amid a growing controversy over commercial licensing for open source software.

October 2018IBM announces plans to buy Red Hat for $34 billion.

For example, in 2014, security researchers revealed serious vulnerabilities in two crucial open source projects: OpenSSL and Bash, which are part of many major operating systems. No software is free of potential security problems, but the fact that these issues went undetected for so long highlighted a big problem for open source: Many big-name open source projects rely on lesser-known open source components run by volunteers who have little time to fix problems and no money to hire security auditors.

Some companies that have built businesses around open source products are adopting controversial new licensing schemes. In an effort to keep cloud computing services from selling competing services based on its code, MongoDB created a new license in 2018 that restricts how other companies can use its MongoDB Community Server. Other open source companies have adopted the Fair Source license, which requires companies with more than 15 employees to pay a fee to use software that uses the license, or the newer Commons Clause, which restricts how companies can commercialize the software. You can still view the source code from software released under these licenses, but they break with the free and open source software tradition of allowing users to do whatever they want with the code.

Startups, meanwhile, are working on novel ways to turn a profit on open source. Red Hat makes money by selling support for its open source products, but thats not feasible for every open source project. A company called Tidelift aims to sell support through a single subscription fee for a package of open source projects. Think of it as Netflix for open source.

Solving these funding problems is crucial to the future of open source. But money isnt the only problem. The open source workforce is even less diverse than the tech industry as a whole, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by GitHub. Half of the respondents had witnessed bad behaviorsuch as rudeness, name calling, or harassmentand said it was enough to keep them away from a particular project or community. Around 18 percent of survey respondents had experienced such bad behavior firsthand. That's a problem because working on open source projects is now an important part of landing a job in technology. If women and minorities are shut out of open source, then the technology industry as a whole becomes that much less diverse.

One way many open source projects are trying to address the issue is through a code of conduct called the Contributor Covenant, which warns participants against personal attacks, harassment, or "other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting." As common sense as these guidelines might sound, they've proved controversial among open source coders used to being judged solely on their code, not their professionalismor lack thereof. The author of the Contributor Covenant is still periodically harassed.

Still, there are signs of progress. In 2018, Torvalds, long accused of creating a toxic environment in the Linux community, apologized for his past behavior, and the Linux project adopted the Contributor Covenant.

Inclusion isnt just an ethical issue for open source. Diverse teams build better products. And making better software is what open source is all about.

Is Stallman Stalled?WIRED profiled Richard Stallman and the free software movement in our first issue in 1993.

Google Just Open Sourced TensorFlow, Its Artificial Intelligence EngineGoogle has a long history of releasing open source code, including the AI code thats part of its software empire. This wasn't an entirely altruistic decision: Google expects to benefit from other companies advancing the state of AI.

Microsoft Says It's in Love With Linux. Now It's Finally Proving ItHow Microsoft went from being the poster child of proprietary software to open source proponent by releasing one of its flagship developer-centric products as open source.

The Internet Is Broken, and Shellshock Is Just the Start of Our WoesHow the massive security bug called Shellshock lay undiscovered for more than two decades in the open source program Bash, which is included with MacOS and most Linux-powered operating systemsand why it matters for the internet.

Open Source Won. Now What?Red Hat rakes in billions in revenue every year, but many other open source companies have struggled. Meanwhile, volunteer developers burn out, and serious bugs go unaddressed.

Giving Open Source Projects Life After a Developer's DeathWhen the developers of open source projects pass away or burn out, it can have ripple effects across many projects that rely on those developers' code. Here's how the community is learning to handle these situations.

The Woman Bringing Civility to Open Source ProjectsAda Coraline wrote the Contributor Covenant, a code of conduct for open source projects in 2014. She has faced harassment ever since, but many of the largest open source projects have adopted either her covenant or a similar code of conduct.

Last updated April 23, 2019.

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Open Source Software: The Complete Wired Guide | WIRED

Open source software mainly is known as (OSS) is used as an open development process. Linux has a lot of open source software. Open source software is licensed software that you will have the codes to modify it. However, there are many websites where you can download open source software for your Linux, but it is a little bit difficult for you to find these websites for downloading OSS.

Today I am here to share with you some websites where you can download free Open Source Software without any cost. You can bookmark them if you want. This list is not as per any ranking or popularity, just random sequence. So lets start.

SourceForge is known as one of the best websites to provide free open source software. It will be your premier resource to have open source projects at all. This website has 30 million monthly users containing 500000 open source projects. You can download a lot of open source projects from its homepage. There is a search option there which help you to choose your best open source software at all.

You can easily see the favorite download lists of open source software that will help you to determine which one is better for you.You will also see the licensed software based on your operating system. If you are a registered member of SourceForge, you can write a review of the apps like as Google Play Store or App Store.

In 2013-14 SourceForge ran the software downloading process with Adware. But when it is owned by Slashdot media, software downloading remains free of cost and Ads free at the same time. The president of SourceForge declared that SourceForge would have a modern look and will become more user-friendly.

SourceForge Website

BitBucket is just like GitHub where users can host their development project. But it hosts both public and private open source project. So you can understand that it offers a versatile project management system for the private uses. But up to 5 users, its free. More than 480000 application repositories are there in the hub of BitBucket, and many of them are searchable.

BitBucket

As this site is mainly focused on Ubuntu, so I must not miss this versatile open source project hosting site LaunchPad. Its maintained by Canonical and allows the Ubuntu developer to manage and support the projects that only runon Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-based derivatives.

LaunchPad

Tigris is a bit different open source software management host site like GitHub or SourceForge. It has a define small goal building better tools for collaborative software development. You will not find any unrelated and dead project here. Every software development project is reviewed to test the community commitment towards that specific app development.

Tigris

Github is mainly built for the developers who like to develop the open source project. This is the place where you can download a lot of open source software for Linux, but mainly its made for hosting open source code and project development.

Every page is smooth and but not that user-friendly for downloading and browsing software directly. You will have the direct download link for downloading any software from its vast variety of software repositories inside the project page. If you are a developer, Github is the best place for you to develop the open source project.

Github

FossHub is another website portal to download free open source software. It was started its journey in 2007 and became a reliable place to download open source projects. However, it provides fast servers that take a short moment to load optimized pages for faster download. You will get direct download links for any open source software. No redirection will occur at all. Project page will show you the total downloads of the software which you are going to download. You can write a review for the software if you are not a registered member. Sometimes, FossHub contains some closed source software that makes the user confused sometimes. However, FossHub can be the best place for you to download your favorite open source software.

FossHub

Savannah is a website that will offer you to download a lot of free open source software. It looks like an old-school website which is not very much user-friendly. However, you can try this website to download the software.

Savannah

If you have an open source license,TuxFamily is ready to host your project. At this moment, it has more than 2400 active open source project.

TuxFamily

Freecode is one of the best and most significant open source directory sites for hosting Unix and multi-cross platform software. This open source software website is also founded by the same owner ofSourceForge.

Freecode

Blackduck open hub is a fantastic and useful directory open source hub. Users can get a varietyof information of the open source project like license, language, websites, developer, users ratings, download stats, etc. You can find all the primary developer and open source project here.

BLACKDUCK | Open Hub

Its an open source directory where users can find out a filter system to get the best open source software list. This directory also provides the project site links with necessary information. Its a great and useful tool site to find out the best open source software for home and business use.

Open Source Software Directory

F-Droid is another excellent platform to download free open source software for Android. You will see some best Android software which you will not get in the Google Play Store. You can quickly browse different categories of an app with the F-Droid apk on Android. However, if you use this app for downloading open source software, you will update the apps via the F-Droid client. No additional component is required to download apps. You will have the direct link.

F-Droid

AlternativeTo is an excellent website to download open source software. In recent years it has become trendy to the user although it doesnt host an open source project.

AlternativeTo

OSLiving offers the best keyword tool to find out the open source software you are looking for. The goal of this site is to make an archive of the worlds best open source software. Users can search by keyword or category to get the best one.

Open Source Living OS Living

This is a directory of best open source software which can be run on Windows. Its an Ubuntu site and mainly created for showing the quality of open source applications. In this list of free software, you can find application based on communication, education, engineering, financial, games and much more.

LOOP

Final Thought

I think you have got a clear concept about the website lists that I mentioned above to download free open source software. I hope these lists will be helpful to you. If you like this article, please share with your friends. Thank you very much.

Visit link:
15 Best Websites for Downloading Open Source Software