One great irony of proprietary software is that you pay to have less freedom and flexibility than you would get if you downloaded free open source software.

That's particularly true when you consider support. If you buy a commercial software package, you're usually able to get different levels of support from the software vendor. This may be included in the license fee, or you may have to pay extra for it.

In almost all circumstances, though, you're restricted to whatever the vendor offers. If you don't like what's offered, that's just too bad.

Free Software, Free Market Dynamic

The situation is quite different with open source software, as the source code is freely available for anyone to examine and modify. Support may not be available from a vendor in the way that it is with proprietary software - although vendors such as Red Hat do provide support as part of their subscription offering - but that certainly doesn't mean it isn't available at all.

Far from it. "The way to think about it is that support is unbundled (from the software) but widely available," says Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative and founder of open source management consultancy Meshed Insights.

If you're an Oracle customer, for example, you're effectively locked in to Oracle support. If you use Apache software, on the other hand, a number of support suppliers compete on quality and price.

[ Tips: How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software ][ Counterpoint: 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software ]

It's hard, then, to avoid the fact that commercial software companies that restrict access to their source code have a monopoly on the provision of support. With open source software the polar opposite is true. "With open source, there's a free market dynamic to support," Phipps says, "and prices are controlled by the market."

This is a theme taken up by Simon Bowring, a director at open source support provider Transitiv Technologies. "We have customers who were previously using proprietary software and they were locked in. If they needed new features they had no option but to wait for the vendor to write them," he says. "With open source software, we can write code for our customers very quickly, and contribute it back to the community, if the customer agrees."

Read the rest here:
5 Ways to Get Open Source Software Support

OpenSSL is an open source project, meaning its original source code is freely available for developers to use and modify. This brings plenty of benefits a wider pool of talent creating and enhancing code which is available for free but also negatives while many might be involved in the development of the code, very few are scrutinising it for flaws.

There was common consensus that, because the OpenSSL code had been reviewed so many times, it must be secure. In reality, however, it was during one of these review cycles that the Heartbleed bug was introduced.

This is not unique to open source code, the same could have occurred in a commercial development environment, as even the best developers cannot spot all the issues that lie in their code.

However, the inherent problem with open source projects is that there are thousands of passionate developers but a real lack of passionate testers as American writer Kurt Vonnegut says, Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

So how do we prevent this in the future? The answer is not necessarily to stop using open source code but instead to realise measuring the code quality of a program is as important as the development of the program itself.

The received wisdom is that open source software is often regarded as more secure than close source because in theory, the more people who contribute to and edit the software, the higher the quality. In reality the security from open source projects will come from not just a wealth of contributors, but from offering an unbiased way to measure the quality of the code being used across so many of our critical applications.

Some programs are so critical to the world that their quality and security is paramount, and more needs to be done to ensure that they not only function correctly, but the code they are based on is well written and free of flaws.

Google, Facebook and Amazon all rely on open source projects, like OpenSSL, for their success and need to take responsibility to ensure that any code they use is checked and measured. Those who benefit most from the gift of the web should also serve as guardians, making sure it can be used safely for mutual benefit.

Damien Choizit is solutions engineer at software analysis and measurement company CAST.

Continued here:
Heartbleed: the beginning of the end for open source?

The open source revolution is spilling over to the cloud as more and more incumbent data center vendors rally behind OpenStack in response to Amazons growing enterprise gains. Sam Greenblatt, the vice president of technology and architecture and CTO for Dells core Enterprise Solutions Group, returned to theCUBE at the recently concluded Red Hat Summit to give us an update on his companys role in driving this industry-wide shift.

The conference saw the announcement of several milestones in a landmark partnership between Red Hat and Dell, originally signed last December, centering on the joint development of hybrid cloud products based on open source software. These so-called co-engineered solutions serve different purposes but utilize the same underlying technologies, combining Dell hardware with the Linux distributors flagship platform, its OpenShift platform-as-a-service stack, OpenStack and the Docker container engine. The goal of the collaboration is to abstract away infrastructure and allow customers to focus entirely on application logic, an objective that Dell is also been pursuing independently.

Greenblatt tells theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman that his company is currently working to provide integration for the Swift object and Cinder block store components of OpenStack throughout its EqualLogic and Compellent portfolios, as well as support for the Ceph unified storage backend. The effort aims to enable the high level of scalability required by Dells biggest customers, he says, a large number of whom are in the financial services sector.

On the network side, the company sells top-of-rack switches loaded with a software-defined networking platform from an emerging startup called Cumulus and counts itself as a bronze sponsor of the OpenDaylight project, a collaborative effort led by The Linux Foundation to develop a set of common standards for SDN. Dell also participates in Junipers OpenContrail initiative, Greenblatt points out, although to a lesser extent.

Lastly, the vendor is developing tools that simplify the management of OpenStack environments. Its arguably most important contribution is the Crowbar deployment and operations tool, but its far from being the only one. Dell has released several reference architectures and a rules engine for the project, Greenblatt details, and also published a number of enhancements to the Nova compute component and the complementary open source Puppet Razor hardware provisioning tool.

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While Dell is taking the open source road to the software-defined data center, some of its rivals are choosing to go it alone. One of the biggest threats facing the company is EMCs ViPR, a storage abstraction platform that Greenblatt sees as the vendors attempt to unify its six primary product lines under a single management layer. It has potential, he admits, but insists that his company does it better.

We believe that how you should do it is the way were doing it with EqualLogic and Compellent, the executive elaborates. Were merging the stacks into what we call next-gen, and were gonna keep alive both products but working on a single stack. ViPR is an abstraction layer above it and what we find with abstraction layers is, when youre dealing with storage, you gotta build a software hypervisor thats able to work with the hardware much more efficiently.

Although certainly a critical component, storage abstraction is but one aspect of the software-defined vision. Greenblatt believes that Linux containers, which provide a lightweight alternative to traditional virtualization, are emerging as an equally important piece of the puzzle.

We think that containers are going to be the next form of virtualization. Will it replace it? Absolutely not. Youre not gonna see SAP virtualize into a container. But what you will see is applications that you want to put into a PC, into a mobile device, into the Internet of Things, he says. Bringing the technology into the enterprise mainstream is one of the primary goals of Dells partnership with Red Hat.

Original post:
Straight from the source: Dell CTO details cloud roadmap | #RHSummit

April 21, 2014, 12:26 PM It's hard to imagine a company these days that isn't using open source software somewhere, whether it's Linux running a company's print and web servers, the Firefox browser on user desktops, or the Android operating system on mobile devices.

In, fact, there are now more than a million different open source projects, according to Black Duck Software, a maker of open source management tools and owner of the Ohloh open source software directory. And open source continues to grow. According to an SAP research report, the number of open source projects roughly doubles every 14 months.

But not all open source projects are created equal. According to Ohloh, for the 100,375 projects for which activity information is available, around 80 percent were listed as having low activity, very low activity or were completely inactive.

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Open source pitfalls -- and how to avoid them