Category Archives: Open Source Software

Open source and Internet of Things can save public sector millions

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Edward Qualtrough | Nov. 25, 2014

Camden Council CIO says disrupting the vendor market and working closely with other councils can save the government millions.

Open source software and the Internet of Things are two of the disruptive approaches which can save the public sector during the government's austerity measures and lay the ground to deliver next generation digital services, Camden Council CIO John Jackson believes.

Local government organisations are approaching a critical tipping point which could save the public sector and the taxpayer billions, Jackson said when he spoke at theOpen Source, the Cloud and your Businessevent hosted by Paolo Vecchi, the CEO of open source and Linux distribution specialists Omnis Systems.

Camden has to save 150 million between 2012 and 2018 from its bottom line while at the same time delivering fundamental transformation to tackle inequality, foster economic growth and deliver citizen centric services, Jackson explained as he outlined the council's challenges.

"There's a huge opportunity in government for innovation, putting citizens at the heart, cutting costs and doing things differently," Jackson said.

"But the problem is we don't have lots of money - we can't afford the largess of the past, in the future.

"Our existing apps are largely proprietary; there's a disproportionately small number of large vendors dominating the market, and no real open source advocates in government.

"There's lots of cynicism around open source and the art of the possible, particularly in the CIO community who want to buy things off the shelf and are too worried about security."

Disrupting the vendor market Jackson said that local government CIOs need to UK software and services market, and instead of getting shaped by products, shape the tools themselves so they are useful for the public sector.

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Open source and Internet of Things can save public sector millions

Analysis: Why open source runs the world

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We live in a world that has no idea how important open source software is to its smooth running and the free flow of information. The Heartbleed bug was just a taster about how widespread and vital open source software now is to this new digital-world order, which is entirely underpinned by open source software. But why?

Let's play a game: imagine the world with no open source software. Steve Ballmer invented a time machine, went back to 1953 and prevented the birth of Richard Stallman, the God Father of the "open source concept" and head of the Free Software Foundation. Overnight everything open source vanishes from the face of the planet, what changes?

Of course Linux goes, but you don't care about that, right? But you can kiss goodbye to every Android phone and tablet too, as they all utilise the Linux kernel. You're ok as you're an Apple owner? Nope, the Darwin kernel is based on open source BSD, the much-loved Safari uses the open source Webkit, amongst many other elements of open source that power both the mobile iOS and desktop OS X operating systems.

What would be left? Windows of course and the Windows mobile operating systems. But without the innovation of the iPhone and Android, Microsoft would be happy to continue flogging us its terrible Windows Mobile operating system, as it'd have no need to develop a fancy touch OS like Windows Phone.

Nokia would have saved us you cry! Well you're wrong. Nokia developed Symbian that started life as an open source project. The same goes for MeeGo and Tizen, which were Linux-based operating systems. Blackberry is one of the few remaining mobile operators, but again the wonderful BlackBerry 10 wouldn't have existed without innovations from other sectors.

The same story plays out in the web server space. Currently Microsoft Server accounts for around 23% of the 600 million web servers in the world, with the majority of the rest being Linux powered. Remove open source and all you have left is Microsoft powering the world's internet infrastructure.

On the desktop, Linux has always been a bit player, but its influence is still there. Many web technologies and the web itself are based on open source and the open platforms philosophy. Kiss goodbye to Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox. The world would still be dominated by Windows desktop systems, but the range and richness of online software and services simply wouldn't exist. Google services go, Dropbox goes, no Twitter or the varied range of apps we can enjoy today.

This was just a silly academic exercise (the human need to share would have presserved the open source philosophy) but the point is to show how widely open source is used. It increases choice; Android can be adopted and adapted by any company. It speeds adoption of technologies; source code has to be made publicly available, so everyone can contribute and use it. It reduces costs; there's no need to develop technologies from scratch or buy them in at great cost, as tried and tested code can be reused. And it makes new standards widely available in the shortest time possible.

GNU/Linux as an operating system and open source as a movement have become phenomenal driving forces in the technology world. Without it the internet wouldn't exist as the free and open resource we enjoy today.

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Analysis: Why open source runs the world

Survey: 70 percent of IT pros prefer open source to proprietary software

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An overwhelming majority of ITprofessionals favor open source software over proprietary alternatives, according to a new study from the Ponemon Institute conducted on behalf of Zimbra Inc., the enterprise collaboration provider. That mirrors a similar pattern among enterprise developers, over 80 percent of whom share that sentiment according to an earlier Forrester Research report.

The respondents to the two surveys pointed to many of the same reasons for their preference, most notably trust, with over 70 percent of software engineers and administrators believing open source and open core software, respectively, to be more reliable than proprietary products. Open-core software is commercially licensed software built on an open source base. Another area on which the two groups agree is that cost is no longer the primary differentiation between community-led and proprietary solutions. Its now quality.

At the same time, Ponemon found that 66 percent of US-based practitioners believe that commercial versions of open-source software typically suffer from fewer bugs than the upstream project from which theyre derived. A similar percentage of their counterparts in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) agrees with that assessment, although the research institute found that they disagree on the risks. EMEA respondents favored privacy over security whereas their American peers tend to have it the other way around.

That fits into a broader picture of governance conflicts that the report reveals occur at alarmingly high rates. Nearly three quarters of the U.S.-based respondents acknowledged not following company policy on sharing sensitive documents and 80 percent admitted to accessing files not intended for them, part of which is because 74 percent of employees use collaboration applications that have not been vetted by IT.

That, in turn, is the result of what Ponemon and Zimbra present as dissatisfaction with proprietary messaging and sharing solutions. More than half of the American practitioners who participated in the study said theyre not content or only somewhat content with the current collaboration products used at their organizations, which are mostly closed-source. A proportionate percentage reported that they intend to replace their existing software within two years.

Zimbra sees that as an opportunity to drive adoption of its namesake communications and file sharing platform, which it offers in an open-source edition and a commercial version that layers proprietary features over the free core. With 65 percent of the American IT professionals who partook in the survey ranking ease of use as their most important consideration when choosing a collaboration solution, its not hard to guess what where the company will be focusing its value proposition going forward.

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Survey: 70 percent of IT pros prefer open source to proprietary software

Apache Software Foundation reels from software development problems laid bare

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When Linux and the open source software movement started making great strides 15 years ago, many detractors claimed open source would be a risky bet in the enterprise space, having to rely on a "community" to iron out bugs and advance features in software.

Those same detractors may have had worn a wry smile if they had attended one of the main keynotes at this week's ApacheCon event in Budapest, where the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) laid bare the problems it is now facing in driving open source software development forward.

The fact that Apache servers still underpin most of the internet infrastructure, that Linux owns a huge chunk in the server operating system market, and that CloudStack is carving out a niche for itself as a cloud orchestration tool, may well become slightly sullied if the ASF cannot straighten itself out.

Delegates at the keynote heard about a litany of failures and shortcomings at the ASF, seemingly mainly caused by the fact that the organisation remains a community organisation that relies on volunteers - who are rapidly disappearing.

David Nalley, VP of infrastructure at the ASF, outlined to delegates the problems the organisation is facing in his keynote titled 'Where is Apache Infrastructure Going?'

He said: "There are cultural issues and attitudes that need to change. We are the service provider and not the Foundation's policemen, we are there to simply serve the projects."

Nalley said his team could not be responsible for carefully overseeing everything and called for more automation and simplicity in developing and approving new open source software.

He said: "We attended a CIO and CTO event recently and they said to us they would have expected our budget to be 10 times what it was for developing the infrastructure we are involved in, that's why we are moving to more automation in publishing releases and other contributions."

He explained that the ASF's own infrastructure was creaking under the pressure from being responsible for a burgeoning number of software projects. The ASF is still struggling to recover from a major network and email outage this year, which Nalley said would still take months to fully rectify through the use of a contractor.

He said: "We have 10-year-old services that were built by people who for one reason or another are no longer with us, and that infrastructure was designed to support about 10 projects, not the 150 we are now dealing with, and the 200 I expect we'll have to deal with soon."

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Apache Software Foundation reels from software development problems laid bare

All Things Open 2014 | Karen Sandler | Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project – Video

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All Things Open 2014 | Karen Sandler | Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project
All Things Open 2014 - Day 1 Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014 Karen Sandler CEO of Software Freedom Conservancy Business Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project.

By: All Things Open

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All Things Open 2014 | Karen Sandler | Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project - Video

Is Your Cloud Open by Design, and Open for Business?

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While the official attendance is not in yet for the OpenStack Design Summit Paris, the final figure will likely be near 5,000 with representatives from 60 nations.

During his keynote speech, OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Colliersaid attendance was very impressive growth for an open source software community that is only four years old. What fuels all this interest? Is it just a group of software programmers getting their geek on? Whats driving all the rapid growth of engagement and deployment of OpenStack-based cloud solutions? Whats the business value of open cloud technologies?

When an enterprise CIO initially embarks on starting to move an organizations computing processes to the cloud, he or she is likely to begin with a focus on cost reduction. Early messages about the value of Cloud were about the ability to cut costs. However, many early cloud solutions were extensions of proprietary, vendor-specific solutions with closed architectures. At the same time, there was a lot of debate about whether a Public vs. Private cloud was the best way to begin developing your cloud solution approach. I addressed these issues in a prior blog post herein Wired.

Increasingly, the CIO and senior IT leaders have come to understand that its more important to consider the near-term business implications of their cloud strategy, even as they continue to evolve their existing cloud architecture to drive greater value from their current IT infrastructure. They need to understand the strategic implications of selecting their cloud vendor/provider(s), so they can balance the short- and long-term requirements and obtain greater flexibility without locking their organization into a technology straitjacket.

What are the elements of truly open cloud architecture? It has to be a multi-faceted approach to ensure that you dont simply check the open box and miss the point. The fundamental elements of an open cloud architecture are:

By ensuring that your cloud strategy incorporates most of all three of these elements of an open cloud platform, you canbe sure that you are not building a dead-end cloudinfrastructure.

OK, that was a focus on the technology, but what are the net benefits to your organizations bottom line?

Open cloud technologies are not simply important for the CIO and their IT departments. Open cloud technologies provide tangible value to their business. Some of the key areas of value are:

To learn more, visit ibm.com/cloud or join the conversation at #ibmcloud.

Jeff Borek is Worldwide Program Director for Cloud Computing at IBM. You can follow him @jeffborek

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Is Your Cloud Open by Design, and Open for Business?