A software startup debuted this week proposing software-defined networking to Docker, the open source software for creating Linux application virtualization containers.

A software startup debuted this week proposing software-defined networking to Docker, the open source software for creating Linux application virtualization containers.

SocketPlane was founded by former Cisco, Red Hat, HP, OpenDaylight and Dell officials. In the open source world, their names are well known: Madhu Venugopal, John Willis, Brent Salisbury and Dave Tucker.

+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Six Docker services making serious waves +

The team is looking to bring enterprise-grade networking to the Docker ecosystem by developing a native networking stack called SocketPlane -- for Docker software. The SocketPlane software will be designed to address the performance, availability and scale requirements of networking in large, container-based cloud deployments.

The software will employ a DevOps model and tools to enable scale, programmable agility, and policy-driven automation, SocketPlane officials say. It will also provide network virtualization to mask network configuration complexity, they say.

The SocketPlane team calls their strategy DevOps-defined networking. No other vendor offering SDN products has adopted this model, company officials claim, but Google, Facebook and Twitter have done so internally.

The SocketPlane software will be available early next year.

SocketPlane is funded by LightSpeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that has also funded Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, Fusionio, Nest Labs, Nicira, Nimble Storage and SnapChat.

SocketPlane's headquarters will be in Santa Clara, Calif. Currently, the company employs its four founders.

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Open source startup targeting DevOps-defined networking

To really grasp a free/open source software project, you need to know how the community that develops and supports it is evolving. Attracting lots of new members will be a reason for celebrating success in a young project but you should also check whether they stick around for a long time. In mature projects, however, you can afford not attracting many new members, as long as you are retaining old ones. The ratio of experienced, long-term members to recent ones also tells you about the quality of the code and need to support members.

Of the many aspects to explore, two important metrics are:

Together, both metrics can be used to estimate engagement, to predict the future structure and size of the community, and to detect early potential problems that could prevent a healthy growth.

Both turnover and age structure can be estimated from data in software development repositories. The main source of this information is the source code management repository (such as Git), which provides information about active developers authoring the software. The issue tracking system and the mailing list archives are interesting sources of information as well.

A single chart can be used to visualize turnover and age structure data obtained from these repositories: the community aging chart. This chart resembles to some extent the population pyramid used to learn about the age of populations. It represents the age of developers in the project, in a way that provides insight on its structure. For instance, Figure 1 shows the community aging chart for contributors in Git repositories of the OpenStack project in July 2014.

Figure 1. Community aging chart for authors of code

In Figure 1, the Y axis shows different generations of project members. The chart is divided into periods of six months, with the oldest generation at the top and the youngest at the bottom. For each generation, the green bar (Attracted) represents the number of people that joined it. In other words, how many people were attracted to the community during the corresponding period say, first semester of 2010. Meanwhile, the blue bar (Retained) represents how many people in that generation are still active in the community. In other words, how many of those that were attracted are still retained.

The aging chart can provide insights on many different aspects of the community. Lets review some of them.

The ratio of the pair of bars for each generation is its retention ratio. By comparing the lengths of each pair of bars, we can quickly learn which generations were most successfully retained, and which ones mostly abandoned the project. For the newest generation, retention will always be 100%, since people recently entering the community are still considered to be active (but that depends on the inactivity period, as Ill explain in a moment). A ratio of 50% means that half the people in the generation are still retained.

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Measure your open source communitys age to keep it healthy

Open source developers apparently don't adhere to best practices such as using static analysis and conducting regular security audits, found Coverity's Spotlight report, released Wednesday.

The Coverity Scan service, which is available at no charge to open source projects, helped devs find and fix about 50,000 quality and security defects in code last year.

That number can be attributed in part to continuous improvement, which lets users find previously undetected defects. Also, as projects mature, devs can focus on rooting out new defects. Another factor is that user registration for the Coverity service was quadruple that of 2012, noted Zach Samocha, senior director of products at Coverity.

Coverity in June added its Security Advisor to the Coverity Scan service, which resulted in the discovery of almost 4,000 defects. The Security Advisor includes sophisticated analysis algorithms that help developers find and fix critical Web application security issues.

Of the 4,000 discoveries, almost 2,400 of these were high-severity defects, while 1,330 were low severity, and the remaining 260 or so were medium severity.

There have been several highly publicized open source vulnerabilities this year alone, including Heartbleed and Shellshock.

Those two flaws impacted a large number of users because of the widespread implementation of open source software.

"We would like to see more open source projects sign up for the [Coverity Scan] service and incorporate the finding and fixing of defects into their standard process," Samocha told TechNewsWorld. More than 3,000 open source projects have signed up for the service, but "there are many more."

Security Advisor can find quality defects in C#, Java, C and C++ code, and it can spot security defects in Java, C and C++, Samocha said.

Since June, Security Advisor has identified 688 OWASP Top 10 issues in 37 open source projects, including big data, network management and blog server projects.

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Report: Open Source Needs to Get With the Security Program

Linux Authors: Pat Romanski, Trevor Parsons, Shahbaz Ali, Carmen Gonzalez, Elizabeth White

Related Topics: SOA & WOA, Java, Linux, Open Source, Eclipse, Cloud Expo, Apache

SOA & WOA: Article

Storage, networking (OpenDaylight), compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) orchestration (Apache CloudStack, OpenStack)

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In hissession at 15thCloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment.

Mark will include information on storage, networking (e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration (Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.

Contact@CitrixCloud for your FREE@CloudExpo pass.

Speaker Bio:Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix Systems Inc. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix open source efforts around the open source cloud computing platform, Apache CloudStack and the Xen Hypervisor. Previously he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 100,000 users and 20,000 organizations on all seven continents. He also is a longtime open source expert and author having served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. His blog on open source, technology, and new media can be found athttp://www.socializedsoftware.com.

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Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing By @CitrixCloud | @CloudExpo

Using Open Source Software for Mobile Data Collection
Presented by Andy Faust, North Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

By: Wisconsin Land Information Association

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Using Open Source Software for Mobile Data Collection - Video

DBB // The Lady and the Rose
design by beck // edited with 100% Free and Open Source Software // Ubuntu Linux 14.04 http://ubuntu.com/ // Blender 3D http://blender.org // Darktablehttp:/...

By: Brian Beck

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DBB // The Lady and the Rose - Video

Several top aerial drone companies joined electronics giants Intel and Qualcomm on Monday to back a new open source software project for running unmanned aerial drones.

The Dronecode Project, administered by the nonprofit Linux Foundation, aims to establish common technology for use across the industry. Drones are rapidly expanding beyond their military base for use in agriculture, filmmaking, environmental research and other fields.

In addition to Intel, Dronecode backers include SkyWard, a Portland startup developing management tools to help drone companies comply with flight rules and insurance standards.

"Commercialdroneoperators need reliable, effective technologies and infrastructure to support their work," said Jonathan Evans, SkyWard's chief executive officer, in a written statement. "Open source projects serve to cultivate an ecosystem of collaborative intelligence at a global scale, and are the foundation for enabling the Aerial Robotics Network."

"For any new technology to become mainstream, it's important for theindustryplayers tocollaborate, said a written statement from Imad Sousou,an Intel vice president and general manager of the chipmaker's , Open Source Technology Center."Open source contributions to the Dronecode Project can help accelerateinnovation in a new marketsuch as this."

Oregon and southern Washington are home to a cluster of drone companies and research efforts, including Boeing subsidiary Insitu and test ranges in central, eastern and coastal Oregon.

Dronecode backers announced the project Monday at the Embedded Linux Conference in Germany.

--Mike Rogoway; twitter:@rogoway; 503-294-7699

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Intel, SkyWard and others back open source software for aerial drones

OSSA, Open Source Software Assurance
This is an industrialized support service of LINAGORA. We support over 400 open source software. Learn more about this service on http://www.linagora.com and follow...

By: Linagora group

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OSSA, Open Source Software Assurance - Video

Open Broadcaster Software for Linux: Free, open source software for live streaming and recording
Available from http://OBSProject.com First Recording: http://youtu.be/7J0oXZGWPes First Stream: http://youtu.be/Uu-79g3etCw Linux Mint: http://LinuxMint.com ...

By: Chris Were Digital

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Open Broadcaster Software for Linux: Free, open source software for live streaming and recording - Video

We're hearing more from vendors about how new features, functionality, rewrites and releases are being driven by customers -- by their direct experience using the software and competing in their various industries.

We're also hearing from customers and users, including the enterprise market, that increasingly they are involved and thus empowered in open source software communities, where they are collaborating on code and road maps and collectively requiring flexibility and openness, including that code and improvements be contributed upstream.

These perspectives on the sell-side and now the buy-side seem to indicate we have arrived at Open Source 2.0.

This newer open source software trend is a natural progression and evolution of the movement away from developer-centric communities toward communities that have had a higher regard and respect for the user -- particularly in the enterprise, where getting more participants to a project can translate to dollars.

Open Source 2.0 is characterized by a higher level of involvement and participation by users and customers, given the wide range of commercial vendors providing support. Today's successful open source communities also are characterized by a higher level of collaboration among users and customers, whereby they pool resources and team up for a number of reasons: to avoid vendor lock-in; to negotiate better terms or prices; or to require that contributions be routed upstream.

In turn, these users and customers are empowered to further drive and steer open source projects and communities, as well as to share their knowledge and experience with others, further expanding open source ecosystems.

There has been an evolution of user and customer thinking and behavior with respect to open source cloud software, for instance, as noted in 451 Research's recent report on the OpenStack cloud computing project and market.

Previously, some large-scale users were directly involved in collaboration in terms of dealing with and resolving OpenStack issues, particularly for enterprises and at large scale, as noted in 451 Research's 00000 on OpenStack in 2013.

However, that customer community, like the OpenStack code, also has been evolving and maturing -- to the point where OpenStack customers now are banding together on requirements for multiple vendors and service-level expectations, as 451 Research's recent report found. This customer side of the community will continue to play an important role in OpenStack's ongoing evolution.

Another area where open source software has evolved is DevOps, a reference to more agile, rapid and efficient methodologies, technologies and processes in managing IT infrastructure, application development and deployments.

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What's Driving Open Source 2.0?