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Linux and Open Source Lead New Era of Software Development Linux.com (blog) With the rapid growth of virtualized infrastructure and containerization, open source software and especially Linux are leading the way into a new era of software development. That was the message Al Gillen, vice president of the software and open ... Open Source Boosts Innovation in Software, Hardware and BeyondR & D Magazine all 2 news articles »

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Linux and Open Source Lead New Era of Software Development - Linux.com (blog)

"A lot of people are a little shocked and confused to hear about how EMC is contributing to and supporting open source development," Joshua Bernstein said to open his keynote address at last year's MesosCon conference in Denver. "I think that while many of us already understand the benefit of that, convincing large companies to do this sort of thing is a challenge."

Berstein became Dell EMC's vice president of technology in 2015, after a four year stint as manager of Siri development and architecture at Apple. At MesosCon, he talked about some of the things that DevOps should consider when deciding whether to deploy open source or proprietarysolutions.

"The opportunity that I got, to leave Apple and come to EMC to open our open source development team, EMC Code, forced me to reflect on how open source changed the way we ran our data center, and how we changed things from what's well known, from running very large VMware instances to running on Apache Mesos."

He noted in his reflections that not all the software he was using was open source, which brought up several questions. "What things did you buy versus build out in the community?" he asked. "What things did you find value in paying for?"

This led him to define the value of open source in a DevOps environment, and to determine what distinguishes it from traditional closed source software. He came up with a bullet list of four items: freedom, innovation, flexibility and integration.

"[T]hese four really stick out to me," he said.

Freedom: "Freedom is the ability to run the software anywhere for any purpose. If we want to run it on our own on-premises data center, to push it into the cloud, or whatever the case may be, we really value that freedom. We don't want our vendors, our partners, or the people we pull the software from, to tell us what we can and cannot do with it."

Innovation: "We value the ability to innovate and leverage the collaborative community. Everybody here [at MesosCon] is very interested in leveraging everybody else's work. At EMC Code we have 48 projects fully open sourced. Eight of them are driven by my team directly, the rest are driven by the community themselves. I'm very proud of that, I think if you look at the innovation and technology that's come out of this room, it's quite staggering, and arguably overpowers what any single software company can do on their own. As consumers of open source software, we value that innovation."

Flexibility: "This is the idea to deploy the software in any manner that best suits us. If we're a software developer and we want to deploy it on our laptop for a test dev environment, if we want to put it in our own data centers, or if we want to run it on Amazon, we really value this flexibility, this ability to consume it."

Integration: "It's the ability to integrate open source software more easily with existing infrastructure. The interesting thing is that when we were making purchasing decisions about what proprietary software we'd put in our data center, we actually made purchasing decisions not necessarily based on what was cheaper, or what had the fastest performance, but what integrated with the tool sets that were around it."

According to Berstein, the decision to deploy an open source rather than proprietary solution should rarely be made with cost as the leading consideration.

"It's not so much that it's cheaper," he observed, "because ultimately companies have to pay for support."

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EMC's Joshua Bernstein on When to Deploy Open Source - Windows IT Pro

What are the newest frontiers that open source software is conquering? Black Duck's latest open source "Rookies of the Year" report, which highlights areas like blockchain and SDN, provides some interesting insights.

The report, which Black Duck published Monday, highlights what the company calls "the top new open source projects initiated in 2016." It's the ninth annual report of this type that Black Duck has issued.

The report points to the following as areas where open source developers have been quite active over the past year:

Some of these areas are not surprising. For example, open source network security projects are not especially new. As Black Duck notes, new projects have arisen in this space over the past year, such as Poseidon and Trireme. (These projects also continue the trend set by the Kubernetes folks of naming open source projects after ancient Greeks gods, personages or military technologies, but I digress.) But open source networking platforms like snort and OSSEC have been around for years.

It's also not particularly surprising to see open source leading the way inside the container ecosystem. All of the major projects in the container world -- LXC, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. -- were open source from the beginning. In fact, what would be strange at this point is to see a major platform emerge in the container space that was not open source.

More interesting, perhaps, are the inroads that open source is making in niches like education. The Black Duck report highlighted Kolibri, a project that aims to make educational resources available to people without reliable Internet access using open source technology.

There's actually a pretty long history of open source folks trying to enable better education through technology. Think of the One Laptop Per Child project, for instance, or MOOCs -- online courses that are usually delivered via open source platforms and are rooted in the idea that educational information should be freely shared and accessible in the same way as open source code.

But what makes projects like Kolibri different is that they do not assume that everyone has access to the Internet. In fact, Kolibri is designed specifically for people who don't have good Internet access. That's an important differentiator -- and a key insight for the open source community, which has perhaps historically not always appreciated the fact that lots of people don't have ultra-fast Internet connections like those available to open source developers.

Open source's activity in the blockchain niche is notable, too. Blockchain initially became widely known thanks to Bitcoin, the somewhat shadowy online currency. Bitcoin is still around, and it's still an open source project. But as blockchain technology makes greater inroads inside traditional industries, open source developers are pushing forward other projects, like Sawtooth Lake and Hyperledger, the distributed ledger project launched under the direction of the Linux Foundation in early 2016.

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SDN, Blockchain and Beyond: The Spaces Where Open Source Is Thriving Today - The VAR Guy

'Use open source software for GIS mapping' The Hindu Open sourcing of data for Geographical Information System (GIS) mapping will create a huge potential for employment and transparency in administration, secretary of OSGEO-India V. Ravi Kumar has said. Proprietary software for GIS costs up to Rs. .30 lakh.

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'Use open source software for GIS mapping' - The Hindu

The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official on Sunday. IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was in 2005 only that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software.

The decision made by the curriculum committee to implement it in the higher secondary sector has also been completed now. K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School, said they have been entrusted the job for easy classroom transaction of chapters including customization of applications, teachers training, and video tutorials.

The proprietary version of this software would have incurred a minimum cost of Rs 150,000 per machine in terms of licence fee. Hence, the minimum savings in a year (considering 20,000 machines) is Rs 300 crore. Its not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software licence enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish, he said.

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Kerala government adopts open source software in schools, saves Rs 300 crore - BGR India

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News:

ESI Group (Paris:ESI) (FR0004110310 ESI), pioneer and leader in Virtual Prototyping solutions, today announces the acquisition of Scilab Enterprises SAS, publisher of Scilab, widely regarded as the most compelling open source alternative to MATLAB1, the commercial software for analytical numerical solutions. Scilab provides a world class powerful environment for engineering computation and scientific applications.

Commenting on this acquisition, Vincent Chaillou, ESI Groups COO, said: This acquisition fits perfectly with ESI Groups technology investment strategy. It is aligned with our objective to expand our user base to include all stakeholders involved in the industrial product creation process, starting from the earliest stages of analytical modeling. It paves the way towards the more elaborate 3D-4D numerical simulations of the full Virtual Prototyping and eventually of the all-encompassing Immersive Virtual Engineering transformative solutions of Industry 4.0.

Raphal Auphan, CEO of Scilab Enterprises, said: We are very enthusiastic about joining ESI, a numerical simulation and Virtual Prototyping global leader, to bring Scilab to a wider range of industrial, academic and research players. Our shared vision will provide the engineering community with the latest generation of analytical solutions to meet current and future numerical simulation challenges."

A global community with more than a million engineering users

Scilab Enterprises was created in 2010 out of the Scilab Consortium, which was itself created in 2003 as part of an initiative backed by INRIA, the French National Institute for computer sciences and applied mathematics. Scilab (SCIentific LABoratory) is an open-source multiplatform analytical numerical computation software and scientific & engineering programming language. First introduced in 1980 it is now engaging an active community of over a million engineering users and development partners in diverse industries and in education. With its wide range of mathematical functions, graphic interfaces, graphs and algorithms, Scilab enables users to build their own applications for numerical analysis, system modeling, data analytics, optimization, signal and image processing, embedded and control systems, up to test and measurement interfaces.

Beyond publishing Scilab and offering Scilab consulting services, Scilab Enterprises offers as well Scilab Cloud for the web deployment in Software as a Service (SaaS) mode of scientific and engineering applications. This enables organizations and individuals to publish and manage the web-based use of their own Scilab applications.

A collaborative inter-connectable platform, available in PaaS mode

Thanks to its ability to interconnect with third-party codes, technologies and applications, Scilab can also serve as a single scientific and technical computing platform. Building on that capability Scilab Enterprises now offers a scientific and technological Platform as a Service (PaaS) to enable countless numbers of public and private enterprises as well as individual engineers and scientists to monetize applications written in different programming languages by facilitating their distribution, back-up and use. Importantly, applications exploiting Scilabs many computational functions can be accessed by an unlimited number of users as the software is open source.

A powerful vector for the democratization of ESI Groups Virtual Prototyping and Immersive Virtual Engineering solutions

The acquisition of Scilab will help expand ESI Groups footprint in the product pre-design stage and early analytical phase. Starting with the recent acquisition of ITI, and its SimulationX (0D-1D) system modeling software, this expansion is part of the Groups transformative and disruptive change strategy focused on front-loading the power of computer modeling to everyone involved in the product development process. Already engineers working in the frame of conventional Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) benefit from use of mathematical analytical models, built around Scilab, to quickly explore design options with simple (0D) models, before embarking into detailed (0D-1D to 3D-4D) modeling based design, certification and production. In ESIs PLM disruptive vision, the next step to Virtual Prototyping is to follow the life of the product after its development and certification phases, to cover its actual, real life in operation. Now within the new methodological approach of the Product Performance Lifecycle (PPL) innovative modeling, the as built Virtual Prototype is transformed into its Hybrid Virtual Twin, with data driven updates from sensors in actual operations. Here mathematical models of the product - along with its real or virtual life sensors and control systems - are key to provide reliable predictive prototyping. In this fully End to End vision of innovative product development and subsequent piloting in real life operational conditions, the acquisition of Scilab Enterprises equips ESI to address the full spectrum of early engineering needs, from simple, but physically realistic models, all the way to the as manufactured and as operated virtual products that customers build today and develop for tomorrow assisted or autonomous products.

Following ESIs recent successful acquisition and integration of OpenCFD, specializing in developments and services for OpenFOAM, an open source software for broad band numerical simulation in the field of Fluid Mechanics, this current operation substantiates the Groups commitment to the open source business model to foster the disruptive moves that will democratize Virtual Engineering solutions for all. It will provide beneficiaries with greater freedom to customize applications and to tailor them to their own flexible and affordable needs. In this regard, Scilabs incorporation into ESIs global eco-system is expected to be a major catalyst in easing and speeding up the digital transformation of innovative industrial product development.

Multiple technological and commercial synergies

Scilab Enterprises is naturally synergetic with ESI Group, both in technology and business opportunities. The existing ESI Cloud offering will be greatly boosted by this acquisition and by Scilabs reputation with a very large global community of users in diverse industries and academic circles. It also represents a major asset that will help to increase ESIs global visibility and eventually to unlock valuable commercial opportunities. Moreover, the dynamic presence of Scilab in the educational community worldwide will immediately expand ESIs footprint in that all important sphere.

Financial aspects of the operation

The operation is being financed mainly by the transfer of some ESI Group treasury shares to the shareholders of Scilab Enterprises. Scilabs development platform and team will be rapidly integrated into ESIs operating structure.

You can find all of our press releases at: http://www.esi-group.com/company/press

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About Scilab Enterprises

As publisher of Scilab modeling and simulation software, Scilab Enterprises has a small expert team with a unique mix of applied mathematicians and computer science engineers. Scilab is an open source software used widely in the scientific & engineering community (100 000 downloads every month worldwide). Scilab is used for modeling & simulation and scientific post-processing in industrial companies as well as in education & research. Scilab Enterprises offers on the one hand professional services in numerical computing and on the other hand provides the Scilab Cloud platform for the cloud deployment of scientific and engineering applications.

For more information, please visit http://scilab.io/

About ESI

ESI Group is a leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping software and services. Specialist in material physics, ESI has developed a unique proficiency in helping industrial manufacturers replace physical prototypes by virtually replicating the fabrication, assembly and testing of products in different environments.

Coupled with Virtual Reality, animated by systems modeling, and benefiting from data analytics, Virtual Prototyping has become immersive, shared and interactive. ESIs customers can bring their products to life, ensuring reliable as built performance, serviceability and maintainability. ESI solutions help world-leading OEMs and innovative companies anticipate and make sure that their products will pass certification tests - before any physical prototype is built - and that their new products are competitive when entering their market space.

Recently, ESI has undertaken a major transformative adaptation of its Virtual Prototyping solutions into Hybrid Virtual Twins, to enter the new paradigm of Product Performance Lifecycle (PPL), which addresses, beyond the development phase, the life of the new product in its full operational cycle from launch to retirement. Riding the new age of ubiquitous sensors connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), PPL answers the emerging needs of industrial manufacturers to relentlessly createinnovative products that are smart, assisted and autonomous.

ESIs customer base spans major industry sectors. The company employs more than 1200 high-level engineers, scientists and domain specialists worldwide, to address the needs of customers in more than 40 countries.

ESI Group is listed in compartment B of NYSE Euronext Paris and is granted Entreprise Innovante (Innovative Company) certification since 2000 by Bpifrance. ESI is eligible for inclusion in FCPI (venture capital trusts dedicated to innovation) and PEA PME.

For more information, please visit http://www.esi-group.com/

1 registered trademark of MathWorks Inc.

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ESI Group: Acquisition of Scilab Enterprises, Publisher of Scilab Open Source Analytical Computational Software - Business Wire (press release)

GitHub has recently launched its Open Source Guides, a collection of resources addressing the most common scenarios and best practices for both contributors and maintainers of open source projects. The guides themselves are open source and GitHub is actively inviting developers to participate and share their stories.

According to GitHub, the main motivation for creating the Open Source Guides is helping individuals, communities, and companies to embrace open source.

Open source is complicated, especially for newcomers. Experienced contributors have learned many lessons about the best way to use, contribute to, and produce open source software. Everyone shouldnt have to learn those lessons the hard way.

Making a successful first contribution is not the exclusive focus of the guides, though, which also strives to make it easier to find users for a project, starting a new project, and building healthy open source communities. Other topics the guides dwell on are best practices, getting financial support, metrics, and legal matters.

InfoQ spoke with Brandon Keepers, GitHubs Head of Open Source, to learn more about GitHub Open Source Guides.

What were the main motivations that led to this project?

Developers on GitHub are learning better ways to create healthy projects, improve software workflows, on board new contributors, and build large communities. Weve talked to so many open source maintainers that have had to learn these lessons the hard way, one project at a time. So we created the Open Source Guides to establish the equivalent of a water cooler for the community, where we can all share helpful tools or techniques, common challenges, best practices, and as we evolve our practices for building open source software, document it to pass on this knowledge to the next developer.

The guides are now open-source so anyone can contribute to it, but how were they created? What material did you review or base your effort on?

We set out to create the Guides as an open source project, and wanted to seed them with content that reflects the voice of the community and their years of wisdom and practice. The first set of guides were created and curated by GitHub, based on our own experience and discussions with hundreds of open source maintainers, and reviewed by community leaders.

How did the Open Source community react to GitHubs Open Source Guides, in your view?

We had high hopes for the guides, and the initial response has exceeded our expectations. The Guides saw hundreds of thousands of page views in the first week, and they are already receiving significant contributions from the community.

As mentioned, the GitHub Open Source Guides are open for any contributors to propose changes. The first step in order to do it, as the contribution guide recites, is forking the repository and submit change proposals in form of pull requests from a dedicated branch.

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GitHub Invites Developers to Contribute to the Open Source Guides - InfoQ.com

LOUISVILLE, Colo., Feb. 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- For the second year in a row, Rogue Wave Software has released an Open Source Support Report examining how and why customers use open source software (OSS). The report profiles open source package popularity, shifts in the open source community, and real-world statistics on how OSS is used in the enterprise.

"This year we've added more information exposing what our open source support and audit teams see in real-life situations," says Justin Reock, senior director of support and professional services at Rogue Wave Software. "We can now confirm what we've always suspected: Most OSS issues can be attributed to a lack of product knowledge or something in the environment outside of the package, and not usually the package itself."

The Rogue Wave Open Source Support Report also includes actual use cases from Rogue Wave Open Source Support customers, allowing a rare look into the problems and concerns facing IT and operations teams using open source in mission-critical applications.

As Rod Cope, CTO of Rogue Wave Software and founder of OpenLogic, says in the report, "The old story of needing to understand if your organization uses open source has shifted to how, and what it might mean for your organization." In fact, OSS was discovered in 98 percent of audits, with a shocking number of those audits containing copy-left licenses.

The report exposes the challenge of unknown and unsupported OSS useand offers a remedy to organizations seeking commercial-grade support for OSS. Rogue Wave employs some of the best and most active open source experts; contributing to, setting up, using, and debugging hundreds of OSS packages, and digging into source code on a daily basis. The Rogue Wave Open Source Support Report exposes real data to confidently use and manage open source.

Download the 2017 Rogue Wave Open Source Support Report to learn more.

About Rogue Wave Software Rogue Wave Software is the largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools, components, and platforms in the world. Through decades of solving the most complex problems across financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, government, academia, and other industries, Rogue Wave tools, components, platforms, and services enable developers to write better code, faster.

Presscontact: AmandaBoughey amanda.boughey@roguewave.com 303-545-3182

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Rogue Wave Software Releases 2017 Open Source Support Report - PR Newswire (press release)

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Luxoft Holding, Inc (NYSE:LXFT), a leading provider of software development services and innovative IT solutions to a global client base, will be demonstrating their commercially available open source Software Defined Lab (SDL) platform that reduces time to market for network operators. An important component of the platform is based on Telefonicas contributions to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)-hosted Open Source MANO (MANagement and Orchestration).

Luxoft is excited about demonstrating our SDL Platform as a commercial example of next-generation software defined network framework in conjunction with hardware-based legacy systems, said Vasiliy Suvorov, Luxofts Vice President for Technology Strategy. Luxoft is well positioned in the combined open source efforts of Telefonica and other vendors to cover the full spectrum of steps needed to facilitate and automate redeployment service validation for network operators enabling faster time-to-market and reducing operational overhead.

The demonstration will be available to view at MWC at Luxofts Hall-2 executive meeting room A12MR. Please click here to request a meeting with Luxoft.

About Luxoft

Luxoft Holding, Inc (NYSE:LXFT) is a leading provider of software development services and innovative IT solutions to a global client base consisting primarily of large multinational corporations. Luxofts software development services consist of core and mission critical custom software development and support, product engineering and testing, and technology consulting. Luxofts solutions are based on its proprietary products and platforms that directly impact its clients business outcomes and efficiently deliver continuous innovation. The Company develops its solutions and delivers its services from 32 dedicated delivery centers worldwide. It has more than 12,000 employees across 39 offices in 19 countries in North America, Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, and South Africa. Luxoft is incorporated in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, has its operating headquarters office in Zug, Switzerland and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. For more information, please visithttp://www.luxoft.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release ofLuxoft Holding, Inc(Luxoft) contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements include information about possible or assumed future results of our business and financial condition, as well as the results of operations, liquidity, plans and objectives. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as believe, may, estimate, continue, anticipate, intend, should, plan, expect, predict, potential, or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions. These statements are subject to, without limitation, the risk factors discussed under the heading Risk Factors in Luxofts Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year endedMarch 31, 2016and other documents filed with or furnished to theSecurities and Exchange CommissionbyLuxoft. Except as required by law,Luxoftundertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this news release whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

All trademarks are recognized and are the property of their respective companies.

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Luxoft to Demonstrate Dynamic Open Source Software Defined Lab Platform at Mobile World Congress, 2017 - Business Wire (press release)

A Cork-based subsidiary of open source software specialist Red Hat reported a sharp rise in revenues and profits last year, recently lodged accounts show.

Red Hat Ltd, whose parent acquired Irish software firm Feed Henry for 63.5 million in September 2014, recorded a pretax profit of 33.2 million for the 12 months ending February 2016. This compares with a profit before tax of 26.6 million a year earlier.

Turnover for the company, which also has offices in Dublin and Waterford, the latter a result of the Feed Henry acquisition, rose to 430.7 million from 341.2 million a year earlier.

Distribution costs increased to 362.5 million from 289.5 million as administrative expenses rose to 35.8 million from 25.8 million.

The Irish unit employed 98 people during the reporting period with staff costs totalling 17.4 million, as against 13.4 million in the preceding year.

Red Hat Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Round Pond, which is incorporated in Ireland. Its ultimate parent is North Carolina-base Red Hat Inc, which reported revenues of 2.05 billion for the year ending February 2016.

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Irish unit of open source software developers Red Hat sees profits jump - Irish Times