Tom Hadden of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said the need to manage those risks will become even greater once the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) begins to apply. Businesses face fines of up to 4% of their annual global turnover, or 20 million, whichever is the greatest, under the new Regulation, which will apply from 25 May 2018.

Hadden was commenting after the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) imposed a 100,000 fine on Gloucester City Council over its failure to fix a weakness in the security of its website. The vulnerability was exploited by a hacker who was able to access sensitive personal data relating to between 30 and 40 current and former employees of the council.

The ICO said Gloucester City Council was responsible for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.

According to the ICO, Gloucester City Council failed to ensure software it was using was updated to fix a vulnerability in coding known as the 'Heartbleed' bug, which was identified in April 2014 as existing in some versions of encryption software developed by via the open source 'OpenSSL Project'.

Although IT staff at the council flagged the need to update the software, a patch issued for the software was never applied, according to the monetary penalty notice (17-page / 3.02MB PDF) issued by the ICO. The patching was "overlooked" at a time when the council was outsourcing its IT to a third party supplier, it said.

In a statement, the ICO said that Gloucester City Council "did not have sufficient processes in place to ensure its systems had been updated while changes to suppliers were made". Sally Anne Poole, group enforcement manager at the ICO, described this as "a serious oversight" on the part of the authority.

"A lack of oversight of this outsourcing, along with inadequate security measures on sensitive emails, left them vulnerable to an attack," Poole said. "The council should have known that in the wrong hands, this type of sensitive information could cause substantial distress to staff. Businesses and organisations must understand they need to do everything they can to keep peoples personal information safe and that includes being extra vigilant during periods of change or uncertainty."

Hadden of Pinsent Masons said: "This is a classic cautionary tale for businesses about the importance of keeping their software and systems properly up to date, and exercising constant awareness regarding patches that address security vulnerabilities."

"The Heartbleed bug is probably the most well publicised security vulnerability in the history of open source software because of its wide reaching impact. However, the patch to fix the vulnerability was readily available in April of 2014 and, as the ICO said, the patch was widely publicised," he said.

"Given the hefty fines regime that will be installed by the GDPR when it comes into force in the UK on 25 May 2018, it is of greater importance than ever that companies take the steps necessary to keep their software up to date and ensure that their data, particularly sensitive personal data, remains secure," Hadden said.

See the rest here:
Data protection fine shows security risks from using open source ... - Out-Law.com

As open source hardware gains traction, the potential for a completely open source supercomputing system becomes a compelling proposition, one that is being investigated by the International Workshop on Open Source Supercomputing (OpenSuCo). Ahead of OpenSuCos inaugural workshop taking place at ISC 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany, next week, HPCwire reached out to program committee members Anastasiia Butko and David Donofrio of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryto learn more about the efforts activities and vision.

HPCwire: Please introduce OpenSuCo what are your goals and objectives?

OpenSuCo: As we approach the end of MOSFET scaling, the HPC community needs a way to continue performance scaling. One way of providing that scaling is by providing more specialized architectures tailored for specific applications. In order to make possible the specification and verification of these new architectures, more rapid prototyping methods need to be explored. At the same time, these new architectures need software stacks and programming models to be able to actually use these new designs.

There has been a consistent march toward open source for each of these components. At the node hardware level, Facebook has launched the Open Compute Project; Intel has launched OpenHPC, which provides software tools to manage HPC systems. However, each of these efforts use closed source components in their final version. We present OpenSuCo: a workshop for exploring and collaborating on building an HPC system using open-source hardware and system software IP (intellectual property).

The goal of this workshop is to engage the HPC community and explore open-source solutions for constructing an HPC system from silicon to applications.

Figure illustrates the progress in open source software and hardware

HPCwire: Weve seen significant momentum for open source silicon in the last few years,with RISC-V and Open Compute Project for example, what is the supercomputing perspective on this?

OpenSuCo:Hardware specialization, specifically the creation of Systems-On-Chip (SoCs), offers a method to create cost-effective HPC architectures from off-the-shelf components. However, effectively tapping the advantages provided by SoC specialization requires the use of expensive and often closed source tools. Furthermore, the building blocks used to create the SoC may be closed source, limiting customization. This often leaves SoC design methodologies outside the reach of many academics and DOE researchers. The case for specialized accelerators can also be made from an economic sense as, in contrast to historical trends, the energy consumed per transistor has been holding steady, while the cost (in dollars) per transistor has been steadily decreasing, implying that we will soon be able to pack more transistors into a given area than can be simultaneously operated.

From an economic standpoint, we are witnessing an explosion of highly cost-sensitive and application-specific IoT (internet of things) devices. The developers of these devices face a stark choice: spend millions on a commercial license for processors and other IP or face the significant risk and cost (in both development time and dollars) of developing custom hardware. Similar parallels can be drawn to the low-volume and rapid design needs found in many scientific and government applications. By developing a low cost and robust path to the generation of specialized hardware, we can support the development and deployment of application-tailored processors across many DOE mission areas.

The design methodologies traditionally focused for use in these cost sensitive design flows can be applied to high-end computing due to the emergence of embedded IP offering HPC-centric capabilities, such as double-precision floating point, 64-bit address capability, and options for high performance I/O and memory interfaces. The SoC approach, coupled with highly accessible open source flows, will allow chip designers to include only features they want, excluding those not utilized by mainstream HPC systems. By pushing customization into the chip, we can create customization that is not feasible with todays commodity board-level computing system design.

HPCwire: Despite pervasive support in tech circles not everyone is convinced of the merits of open source, what is the case for open source in high performance computing?

OpenSuCo:While many commercial tools provide technology to customize a processor or system given a static baseline, they generally provide only proprietary solutions that both restrict the level of customization that can be applied, as well as increase the cost of production. This cost is of greatest importance to low-volume or highly specialized markets, such as those found in the scientific, research, and defense applications, as large volume customers can absorb this NRE as part of their overall production. As an alternative to closed source hardware flows, open source hardware has been growing in popularity in recent years and mirrors the rise of Linux and open source software in the 1990s and early 2000s. We put forth that Open Source Hardware will drive the next wave of innovation for hardware IP.

In contrast to closed-source hardware IP and flows, a completely open framework and flow enable extreme customization and drive cost for initial development to virtually zero. Going further, by leveraging community-supported and maintained technology, it is possible to also incorporate all of the supporting software infrastructure, compilers, debuggers, etc. that work with open source processor designs. A community-led effort also creates a support community that replaces what is typically found with commercial products and leads to more robust implementations as a greater number of users are testing and working with designs. Finally, for security purposes, any closed-source design carries an inherent risk in the inability to truly inspect all aspects of its operation. Open source hardware allows the user to inspect all aspects of its design for a thorough review of its security.

HPCwire: Even with the advances in open source hardware, a completely open source supercomputing system seems ambitious at this point. Can you speak to the reality of this goal in the context of the challenges and community support?

OpenSuCo:We agree that building a complete open-source HPC system is a daunting task, however, a system composed of an increased number of open source components is an excellent way to increase technological diversity and spur greater innovation.

The rapid growth and adoption of the RISC-V ISA is an excellent example of how a community can produce a complete and robust software toolchain in a relatively short time. While largely used in IoT devices at the moment, there are multiple efforts to extend the reach of RISC-V in both implementations and functionality, into the HPC space.

HPCwire: What is needed on the software side to make this vision come together?

OpenSuCo:The needs and challenges of an open source-based supercomputer are not any greater than that of a traditional closed system. Most future systems will need to face the continuing demands of increased parallelism, shifting Flop-to-Byte ratios and an increase in the quantity and variety of accelerators. An open system may possess greater transparency and a larger user community allowing more effective and distributed development. Regardless, continued collaboration between software and hardware developers will be necessary to create the required community to support this effort. As part of the OpenSuCo workshop we hope to engage and bring together a diverse community of software and hardware architects willing to engage on the possibility of realizing this vision.

HPCwire: Youre holding a half-day workshop at ISC 2017 in Frankfurt on June 22. What is on the agenda and who should attend?

OpenSuCo:The ISC 2017 workshop agenda consists of three technical tracks:

Hardware Track

Sven Karlsson and Pascal Schleuniger (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet)

Kurt Keville (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Anne Elster (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

Software Track

Hiroaki Kataoka and Ryos Suzuki

Anastasiia Butko (Berkeley Lab)

Xavier Teurel (Barcellona Supercomputing Center)

Collaboration Track

Bill Nitzberg (Altair Engineering, Inc.)

Jens Breitbart (Robert Bosch GmbH)

Antonio Pea (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

Keynote Speaker: Alex Bradbury (University of Cambridge)

The complete agenda of the event can be found online athttp://www.opensuco.community/2017/05/24/isc17-agenda/.

While many of the emerging technologies and opportunities surround the rise of open-source hardware, we would like to invite all members of the HPC community to participate in a true co-design effort in building a completeHPC system.

HPCwire: Youll also be holding a workshop at SC17. Youve put out a call for papers. How else can peopleget involved in OpenSuCo activities?

OpenSuCo:While we have long advocated for innovative and open source systems for the HPC community, we are just beginning to tackle this comprehensive solution and cannot do it alone. We welcome collaborators to help build the next generation of HPC software and hardware design flows.

Go here to see the original:
OpenSuCo: Advancing Open Source Supercomputing at ISC - HPCwire (blog)

Scientists from Geoscience Australia have released new software that will improve the ability to process big remotely-sensed satellite datasets. The new "PyRate" software is open source Python software for collating and analysing Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) displacement time series data.

InSAR is a non-invasive geodetic method that detects changes in the height of the Earth's surface using remotely-sensed satellite imagery. This is a highly accurate satellite monitoring technique that uses two or more Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of an area to identify patterns of surface movement over time.

By monitoring movements of the Earth's surface, scientists can improve their understanding of how the Earth's crust changes over time, including changes in elevation caused by larger earthquakes and potential land subsidence caused by human activities such as groundwater and resource extraction.

The new software builds upon a Python-language translation of the University of -RATE software. This provides a portable and free solution that is scalable from desktop machines for small area processing to large multi-node super computers for conducting regional or continental-scale analyses.

The new software will enable Geoscience Australia to scale up its InSAR processing capability to run on the Australian National University's National Computational Infrastructure facility super computer. It will also support other scientists to make use of the ever expanding Australian national archive of Sentinel-1 SAR data available via the Copernicus Australia data hub, particularly for InSAR time series analysis.

The new PyRate software will be applied to data obtained for a number of existing Geoscience Australia projects, including InSAR monitoring in Queensland's Surat Basin and in the Macarthur region, south of Sydney.

The PyRate version 0.2.0 software is available through Github and via PyPI, the python package index, with additional supporting documentation provided.

Link:
New Open Source Software Strengthens Satellite Geodesy Capability - GIM International (press release) (subscription) (blog)

Why is open source software so popular today? You might think it's about money, open standards or interoperability. Ultimately, however, the most important factor behind the success of open source is its ability to offer control -- or the allusion of it, at least -- to people who use it.

To understand this point, let's take a look at conventional explanations for why open source has become so popular.

It you look at sources like this, this or this that attempt to explain why open source is attractive to organizations today, you'll notice that the answers center around the following:

All of the above are important reasons that help to explain the popularity of open source.

I'd argue, however, that the very most important reason is not on that list -- or most of the lists you can find of explanations for the rise of open source.

The most important factor is that open source software (and free software) gives users a feeling of control over the software they use.

I don't mean simply control in the sense that they can study and contribute to the code. That's obviously important to some open source users.

However, it's a safe bet that the majority of people who use open source software don't actually understand code. They can't inspect or fix it.

I'd also venture a guess that the vast majority of users of major open source platforms don't modify them, even if they have the skills to do so. People using Firefox, LibreOffice, Apache HTTP, Docker or any other popular open source platform tend to use the stock version. They don't generally customize it and recompile the code.

For these reasons, it's hard to argue that people like open source software primarily because they want to study or customize it. In most cases, they lack the expertise to do these things. And even people who have that expertise usually choose not to take advantage of it.

Yet the fact remains that users of open source software could modify it if they wanted. With closed-source software, they don't have that ability. This is the difference that truly matters because it means open source users have a feeling of control over the code they use -- even if they don't exercise that control.

When you think about it, it makes sense that people would crave control over software. Software runs our lives, and in many senses the way it works is mysterious and uncertain. Even if you can view the source code of the software you use, many unknowns remain. There is no certain relationship between source code and the way software works because compilers can translate code in different ways, different machines can execute it in different ways and so on.

So, if you want to understand what really drives people to invest in open source code, I think the answer is a desire to feel some sense of control -- or the possibility of control, at least -- over their digital lives. This yearning for open code will only increase as our digital lives grow ever more complicated.

See the original post here:
Why Does Open Source Really Matter? It's about Control, Not Code - The VAR Guy

As the flag-bearer of open source software, Red Hat has seen its fortunes grow as more companies turn to Linux and, more recently, containers and microservices to power their businesses.

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During its fourth quarter of the 2017 fiscal year, Red Hat raked in revenues of $629m, up 16% year on year. Asia-Pacific was the fastest growing region for the company, contributing 14% of total revenues for the year.

In a wide-ranging interview with Computer Weekly, Damien Wong, vice-president and general manager for Red Hat in ASEAN, sheds light on the companys success, its strategy for tackling the Southeast Asian market that is not used to paying for software, and the role of open source in digital transformation.

Red Hat is widely considered one of the worlds most successful open source companies. What do you think the company got right from the start?

Wong: For a 24-year-old company, our business model has been amazingly consistent. We started off with an open source subscription model, which meant we had to work harder to earn our business and strive to remain relevant to our customers.

As an open source company, we dont have proprietary software, unlike some purported open source companies that have an open core with proprietary add-ons to make their offerings enterprise-ready. That doesnt make them open source companies in the strictest sense. Companies that adopt such software are still beholden to proprietary components.

Neither are we an altruistic company that will only support community versions of open source software, because that does not instil confidence among enterprises. While the open source community is great at delivering innovations and new features at a rapid pace, not everyone is good at maintaining reliable, stable and secure software the not-so-glamorous aspects of software that enterprises need. While we need to leverage the innovations from the community, trying to support the community version is extremely difficult if not impossible because of the rapid evolution of technology.

So what weve done is to provide stable versions of open source software, not only by hardening it, but also making sure it is compatible with different applications and hardware. This enables enterprises to continue using our software, knowing that it will be stable, secure, and will perform well. Our model does not go against the principles of open source, because everything we do goes back to the open source community. But at the same time, were not nave enough to say we will support the latest and greatest community versions of open source software.

During the recent Red Hat Summit, executives acknowledged that open source tends to work better at the infrastructure layer, rather than in applications. Why do you think this is the case?

Wong: Its true that open source software is more mature in infrastructure than in business applications. I think its a case of having a bigger critical mass of users in the infrastructure layer (which is fairly standardised and commoditised), where open source has been proven to deliver a competitive edge in a number of use cases within a snapshot in time. This has made it easier for enterprises to adopt open source software, thrusting it into the mainstream. That said, I think its not a case of open source not being applicable to business applications, which tend be more customised to the needs of a specific organisation or industry. Its just a matter of time before those customisations become open source, which is the preferred mode of innovation today.

Do you think the emergence of microservices will speed up open source developments in business applications, by getting enterprises to think about interoperable open platforms when deploying applications, and not just in the infrastructure layer?

Wong: For sure, one of the key concepts around microservices is reusability. So if you create a microservice and abstract it well enough, it can be used across different applications. I think the evolution of microservices and their maturity in the application ecosystem will lead to a situation where you can pull together microservices from marketplaces in an application that serves a purpose well. When that will happen depends on market demand, and when theres a strong need, the open source community will come together to address that need.

Selling free software can be hard, especially in ASEAN, where a majority of people and businesses are not used to paying for software. Although Red Hat is growing at healthy rates in the region, do you see this as a stumbling block for future growth?

Wong: Southeast Asia has varying levels of economic growth and maturity in technology adoption. Open source provides organisations with access to technology that they otherwise could not afford. While not all organisations will survive, those that do will find that they need security and performance from their software, like any large enterprise would. Take Grab, the ride-hailing company, for example. Its uptime of 87% when it first started out had impacted the livelihoods of its drivers. They worked with Red Hat and made use of Ansible to automate the roll-out of application changes, increasing availability to more than 99%.

Traditional enterprises, on the other hand, are used to paying for software, though this is not the case across the board. In some emerging countries, even large organisations have misperceptions about open source. Some may still be using community versions of open source software without enterprise subscriptions, which we dont encourage as they roll out mission-critical applications.

Many people may not realise it, but a lot of innovation such as big data and cloud arose from the open source community Damien Wong, Red Hat

When deploying mission-critical applications, it is no longer just about creating a sandbox to test out new concepts it will affect the customer experience and financial transactions. If a patch for a known vulnerability is available and you dont have access to that patch because youre on a community version, youll face real issues. While we make security patches available to the open source community, it may take weeks before they make their way into community versions because of open source governance processes. If youre a bank, you could potentially expose customers to unnecessary risk and liability.

Why do you think large organisations in ASEAN still use the community versions despite the risks you have just described? It just doesnt seem rational. Is this about saving money, thinking that they can fix any problems on their own?

Wong: We can only guess why they do it. Some companies may hire good technical people, thinking that its a technology risk rather than a business risk. Having a very smart engineer using community software to support a production system may not be an issue. He can check with the forums or download the patches, so its just a technology thing. The business risks that I talked about may not be so apparent to an engineer or developer. We will have to educate them that open source is not just the domain of IT its the domain of the business as well. With software being seen in some countries as something you download from the internet and not what you pay for, it will take some time before software is seen as something that has to be taken seriously.

In recent years, Red Hat has been touting the role of open source in digital transformation, at least in this region. With almost every other technology company spreading the same message, how is Red Hat making itself heard?

Wong: Many people may not realise it, but a lot of innovation such as big data and cloud arose from the open source community. These technologies gave rise to cloud-native, digital disrupters, which have disrupted nearly every industry, from transportation and retail to hospitality. The traditional companies that were being disrupted then started to look at what they needed to do to stay relevant to their customers, and thats when the concept of digital transformation became really popular. So the root of digital transformation has been open source innovation.

Of course, there have been proprietary companies that have tried to emulate open source innovation. But time and time again, weve seen how open source communities have always out-innovated those companies. And Red Hat, being a proponent of open source, is participating in many open source projects that are driving digital transformation. For example, we talk about DevOps because every company needs to develop applications in a faster, more agile manner. That means moving away from monolithic infrastructure to things like microservices and containers, which Red Hat is backing with its contributions to the Docker and Kubernetes projects. As a leader in the open source world, it is natural that we take leadership in digital transformation as well.

Open source projects like Kubernetes were started by companies like Google, one of the biggest users of open source software. Why do you think that is the case? I would think Red Hat, as an open source leader, would be the one starting those projects.

Wong: Thats a good question that captures the success of Red Hat. We dont espouse the belief that if a piece of open source technology is not invented here at Red Hat, its not good. In fact, we actively look at projects developed by others that might be superior. A good example is OpenShift, which is now fundamentally made up of Docker and Kubernetes, as opposed to the original technologies that we had started with. Our customers dont have to be afraid of being stuck with a technology that may be at a dead end, without broad community support and stubbornly backed by only one company. Its the same case with OpenStack, which was created by Nasa and Rackspace. But today, Red Hat is the largest OpenStack contributor.

Red Hat is perceived to be using Linux to cross-sell OpenStack. Is that the strategy Red Hat is pursuing?

Wong: All our technologies are predicated on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the foundation on which you can build stable infrastructure platforms. Like a building, if your foundation is not stable, it is impossible to build anything substantial on top of it. That is why weve always stood by the position that you have to build your infrastructure on something that we know is stable. If its quicksand, or something that cant withstand scrutiny, we cant back it. So without a stable base in OpenStack, which has many related components, it will be difficult for us to back that project and guarantee that things will work properly. There had been situations where organisations faced challenges because they did not understand how critical the foundation layer was going to be when they rolled out OpenStack.

For now, OpenStacks main adopters are telcos, internet service providers such as MyRepublic and cloud service providers. Do you see other sectors benefiting from OpenStack as well?

Wong: Thats a good observation. Service providers are naturally looking at OpenStack because of the move towards network function virtualisation (NFV). The standards body that governs the NFV movement is the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which has recommended OpenStack as the underlying infrastructure layer for NFV. This has led internet service providers such as MyRepublic to look at OpenStack. While OpenStack has also been deployed by institutes of higher learning, financial institutions and government agencies in the ASEAN region, you are absolutely right that the most advanced users are telcos and service providers. I hope the carrier-ready advantages of OpenStack will have knock-on benefits for enterprise data centres, because if OpenStack can support a telco service, it can definitely support enterprise applications.

Go here to read the rest:
Q&A: Flying the open source flag - ComputerWeekly.com

There is an extremely talented landscape photographer called Thomas Heaton whose YouTube videos I find very instructive and entertaining. Recently he featured a new product he was sent to try out: the Loupedeck, a physical console that lets you control Lightroom (the main software I use to sort, catalog and edit my photographs).

Loupedeck gives you knobs and buttons to press and twiddle rather than pointing and clicking with a mouse, which makes editing much more natural and allows you to be looking at the picture youre editing rather than the controls as you make your changes.

Anyhow, I looked at it and was extremely interested! It is being released for sale in the middle of July and so I floated the idea that my nearest and dearest might like to chip in towards it as a Fathers Day gift (it aint cheap, though its $415!) and they seemed amenable so I pre-ordered it.

But then however I started doing some further research, and found out that the same functionality can be obtained using open source software and a much more affordable MIDI controller (a controller made to control electronic musical instruments and digital audio). And as well as being much cheaper, its much more configurable in that you get to choose exactly what each knob and button controls, so you get control of the Lightroom features you use most and get to put them where it makes most sense to you.

And even better, its a project I have to research and put together myself rather than just buy and plug in thats much more fun and satisfying.

So, I cancelled my Loupedeck order and found a very reasonable MIDI controller for $65 from Adorama and ordered it instead (my lovely daughter is going to pay for it for Fathers Day its so nice shes earning her own money), and downloaded the open source midi2lr software (midi to Lightroom, get it?).

The X-Touch Mini controller arrived yesterday, much quicker than I was expecting, and I was very naughty and couldnt wait, so I started playing with it.

With the help of some very helpful websites (especially this post on a Google Group), a few hours, some trial and error, and lots of P-Touch labels, I think I have it configured the way I want it, but the best thing is that if I dont like the way it is set up I can just move things around and print new labels.

This is going to make it so much easier and more organic to edit pictures in future to be able to make adjustments without having to navigate to the tiny toolbars with the mouse, but to do it with physical knobs while keeping your eyes on the changes as you make them will be great. While it only has 8 knobs and 16 buttons, it is a dual layer setup, so each knob and button can be configured to do at least 2 things (and even more with profiles enabled but thats way more detail than you need).

These couple of videos helped me while I was setting this up, theyre a bit long if youre not a photo nerd, but they give you a better idea of why I did this and why Im so excited.

This guy sets it up with two, which I think is a little overkill

So, happy early Fathers Day to me (thanks, Monkey!), I cant wait to use this new set up to edit the church picnic photos I take tomorrow.

About the author: Crispian Thorne is a photography enthusiast who attempts to post one photo per day to his photoblog. You can find his website here. This article was also published here.

View original post here:
Going Open Source to Make Your Own Loupedeck Alternative - PetaPixel (blog)

June 12, 2017 Dan Burger

One of the most influential and productive fields of new development is the open source community. Its magnitude is just beginning to be felt. Its not just people talking about open source development. Its people doing development and deriving benefit from it. And its people using it often times without realizing it.

At the COMMON Annual Meeting last month, I had an opportunity to talk about open source technology with Brendan Kay, chief technology officer at Fresche Solutions, where open source solutions continue to evolve and provide benefits to internal development and the software products that company delivers to its customers.

Theres been an increase in open source technologies in the development of Fresche products, Kay says. Node.js, and particularly AngularJS, allow Fresche to create continuous integration environments. Angular is a development framework for building mobile and desktop Web applications.

Brendan Kay, chief technology officer at Fresche Solutions.

We are big fans of the AngularJS data-binding functionality, he notes. Its one of the technologies Fresche is using to provide higher quality development in a much faster timeframe.

Data-binding is an automatic way of updating the view whenever the model changes, as well as updating the model whenever the view changes. It eliminates document object model (DOM) manipulation, which is used in cross-platform, language-independent programming.

Fresche has been developing PHP and Node.js versions of BCD WebSmart development tools, since the company acquired BCD Software (along with Quadrant Software) in 2016. The development tools are used for creating multi-platform, Web and mobile applications on IBM i. The open source technology integrates with RPG and supports Windows, Unix and Linux platforms. There are thousands of free PHP scripts online that can provide shortcuts when doing new development. Among IBM i developers, PHP is the most widely used of the open source development environments.

Kay says PHP and Node.js will be coming to looksoftware and Quadrant products soon, but no time table is being mentioned. (Kay was president and CEO of looksoftware when it was acquired by Fresche in 2014.)

Where open source provides the best solution for a problem, we will go there, he says. We use particular open source technologies because they deliver something useful as quickly as possible.

Open source software adds options to the development environment. Becoming aware of the options is a lesson in progress for a lot of IBM i shops. Not that long ago, software companies funneled customers into proprietary technology silos. At its worst, this can result in hammering square pegs into round holes. When there is a broader discussion about how an organization wants to use its applications and where it wants to end up in terms of an IT strategy, its far easier to arrive at a precise solution.

People come to a vendor because they recognize they have a problem, Kay says. And in most cases, theyve thought through it pretty well. Information is easier to get than it used to be blogs and websites and resources can be researched before contacting vendors.

The evaluation is, more times than not, good quality, Kay says. If they have done the research, they are generally on the right track. Sometimes the decision makers are conflicted could go one way or the other. Those usually involve complex environments where help developing a proposal is necessary. There are some cases where a customer has a plan thats not well thought out and we advise them to think about it another way. Come up with a different solution. In these cases, they may understand the first step, but not the second third, or fourth.

Kay looks at modernization as a three-level project involving the database, the business logic and the user experience. All three are equally important.

The code on any of those three levels is either going to get better or worse. It is not going to stay the same, he advises. If you are not putting the effort into making it better, its going to get worse. And when you have a problem in any one of those three areas, it is going to create problems in the other two. You cant fix the problem by just fixing one of the areas.

Making an educated guess, Kay estimates 80 percent of modernization projects begin with user experience and/or integration as the starting point.

The reason the user interface and integration are good starting places, he says, is because thats where IT gets the organizational buy-in. Changes in the interface or in improved integration allow people to quickly see the benefit. Its usually the area that people are complaining about and fixing complaints is a good place to start. Often the benefit can be quantified and then used to fund the activities of the database and code levels. Taking on all three levels at once is more complicated, so making the project sequential is the better choice. The sequence is usually the user interface, the database and then the code, but thats not a hard and fast rule.

Between 10 percent and 20 percent of IBM i shops chose code cleanup as the first step.

The easiest code to modernize is the code that you delete, Kay says. Getting rid of the code you dont need is a great place to start. Then you are left with a smaller and more manageable database interface.

The shops that have the biggest job ahead of them are those that have done a poor job with documentation and maintenance.

For me, code modernization is a redundant term. Continual code improvement should be the practice, Kay says. Improvement should be reflected by more functionality and by continual improvement of architecture. These are things that people talk about as modernization, but for me thats part of development.

There are two activities that Kay suggests for improving a code base and, with regular maintenance, keeping it operating at a high level. One is refactoring making architectural changes that improve the quality, adaptability, performance and ease of maintenance or performance and the other activity is regularly extending functionality providing a graphical user interface or improving integration. Separate the two and do the refactoring first. These two things combine to accelerate rather than retard progress.

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CTO Praises Open Source, Offers Modernization Guidance - IT Jungle

Moneycontrol News

The worlds largest software maker Microsoft has raised concerns over the government putting its weight behind open source software in its recent request for proposal to appoint a managed service provider for its e-marketplace, nicknamed GeM.

The RFP has allocated 50 out of 150 marks to solutions that are built using open source software only; this means that if a bidder does not use open source product only then it would be impossible for such a bidder to achieve the 65 percent qualification marks in solution evaluation and would then automatically become technically disqualified, Microsoft has said in a letter to the government, reviewed by Moneycontrol.

Moneycontrol has accessed a copy of the letter. In an official response, Microsoft confirmed sending a letter in this regard.

We confirm that Microsoft India had sent a letter to the government regarding the e-Marketplace project. The government has taken cognizance of the industrys concerns and is looking at addressing them. We remain committed to the Digital India vision, a Microsoft spokesperson told Moneycontrol in an email response.

The government had floated an RFP for design, development, operation and maintenance of Government e-Marketplace (GeM) on March 21, this year. A new and revised RFP is likely to be floated soon after concerns of various stakeholders.

The letter by Microsoft was written to several ministries and government departments, including the Prime Ministers Office and the Ministry of Commerce.

The letter further said that Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to the open source community. All Microsoft products and cloud offerings work seamlessly with open source. However, we are strongly against shutting out any technology option, the letter added.

GeM is a platform developed by the procurement arm of the government, the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D), under the Ministry of Commerce. It was launched in August 2016.

The marketplace was envisioned as an online portal on the lines of Flipkart or Amazon, which will enable vendors and government buyers to directly communicate with each other.

Read also: GeM of an idea? All you need to know about the govt's online marketplace

Referring to the open source software policy of the government, released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), Microsoft said in the letter, MEITYs (sic) policy on OSS has not been correctly interpreted or followed

We are disappointed that DGS&D, Ministry of Commerce, which is the apex procurement agency, is violating critical norms of purchasing and going against the frameworks developed by MEITY. This also undermines the Honble Prime Ministers efforts to improve the Ease of Doing Business, the letter said.

In March 2015, the government adopted an open source software policy, which made it mandatory for all software applications and services of the government be built using open source software.

Government organisations shall ensure compliance with this requirement and decide by comparing both OSS (open source software) and CSS (closed source software) options with respect to capability, strategic control, scalability, security, lifetime costs and support requirements, the policy states.

Departments opting for closed source software over open source technology have to justify the choice, according to the policy.

Some of the largest e-government projects in India have been implemented on open source, and the key reason for this is the ability to retain control over the technology, said open source evangelist Venkatesh Hariharan.

He added that in a mission critical project like the GeM, technology independence is even more important and that he wasnt surprised that open source has been given a significant weightage.

Use of free and open source software could lead to estimated savings of about Rs 8,254 crore in Indian schools, and about Rs 51.20 crores in police departments in India, says a 2015 study by Rahul De, Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

The United States, United Kingdom and several countries in the European Union have started preferring the use of open source over proprietary software. Closer home, the Unique Identification Authority of India or Aadhaar project has been developed primarily on open source, as is the goods and services tax network, the IT backbone of the GST.

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Microsoft raises concerns on Government's open source push in GeM - Moneycontrol.com

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PrismTech, a global leader in software platforms for distributed systems, today announced the release of the open source DDS Community Edition v6.7. This new release adds significant new functionality and a new open source licensing model to the DDS Community Edition, the leading open source implementation of the Object Management Group's (OMG) Data-Distribution Service (DDS) standard.

The DDS Community Edition v6.7 is being released to the open source community under the widely adopted Apache license, version 2.0 source code license. Unlike many other code licenses the Apache license places relatively few restrictions on the use or availability of the code.

The new DDS Community Edition v6.7 introduces many new features compared to the previous release including:

The new release also includes numerous other updates to the code base such as: performance and footprint improvements, bug fixes, robustness and maintainability improvements.

DDS has been witnessing incredible growth in adoption across a large number of application domains, culminating in its recommendation as part of virtually all Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) Reference Architectures, said Angelo Corsaro, CTO, PrismTech / ADLINK Technology. With DDS Community Edition v6.7 we are making available the most advanced DDS implementation on the market under the liberal open source license Apache license version 2.0. This will help reduce the IoT adoption barriers and further accelerate the penetration of DDS in this new and exciting market.

The latest DDS Community Edition v6.7 open source software can be downloaded from PrismTechs website at: http://www.prismtech.com/dds-community.

For customers needing a fully commercially supported DDS product, PrismTech also offers the Vortex OpenSplice product suite, for further details please visit: http://www.prismtech.com/vortex/vortex-opensplice.

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About PrismTech

PrismTechs customers deliver systems for the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet and advanced wireless communications. PrismTech supplies the data connectivity solutions, tools and professional services they need to build systems with the required: platform coverage, performance, scalability, efficiency, flexibility and robustness. PrismTechs customers service many market sectors, including: industrial automation, energy, healthcare, transportation, smart cities, financial services, aerospace and defense. For additional information about PrismTech, visit the web site at http://www.prismtech.com.

Vortex is a trademark of PrismTech. DDS and Data-Distribution Service are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Object Management Group, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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PrismTech Announces Availability of Open Source DDS Community ... - Business Wire (press release)

Forbes

Red Hat Summit And OpenStack Summit: Two Weeks Of Open Source Software In Boston Forbes Enterprise software comes in two primary varieties: proprietary and open source. Proprietary solutions include things like Oracle databases, Microsoft operating systems and SAP applications. These vendors develop the code and do not allow it to be ... Red Hat, Inc. - RHT - Stock Price Today - ZacksZacks all 100 news articles »

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Red Hat Summit And OpenStack Summit: Two Weeks Of Open Source Software In Boston - Forbes