Tag Archives: foss

How to prevent hidden cost of open source software

Posted on by

Following list contains criteria we use to evaluate whether we use an open source or not

  1. Is product sponsored by a company? It is a critical criterion if a product plays a critical role in your application and you do not have an alternative choice for it.
  2. Is open source license suitable for your product? It is illegal for you to deliver a commercial and closed source product include an open source library has a license is GPL
  3. Does open source product has good quality?
  4. Is open source product still be supported by adding new features, bug fix?

via How to prevent hidden cost of open source software – VietNam Software Outsourcing Service Company.

Grammar a bit bad but advice seems well grounded.  All the above answers should be Yes.

Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network

Posted on by

Today, OpenDaylight is an open source platform for network programmability to enable SDN and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for networks at any size and scale. OpenDaylight software is a combination of components including a fully pluggable controller, interfaces, protocol plug-ins, and applications. The Northbound (programmatic) and Southbound (implementation) interfaces are meant to be clearly defined and documented APIs for network applications.

via OpenDaylight: Open Source Programming to the Software-Defined Network.

OpenDaylight delivered its first developer release, Hydrogen, on February 5th, 2014.

Blogs from the Outercurve Foundation

Posted on by

Patent lawyers may be surprised to know that while today, most companies today use open source software, most of them struggle greatly with implementing the internal controls to coordinate their use of open source software with their patent portfolio management. This means it is quite possible that a company is seeking patent protection, or seeking to enforce patents, that read on open source software the company is using or developing — a combination of activities that would often not be considered economically rational.

via Blogs from the Outercurve Foundation – Open Source — The Last Patent Defense?.

The drafters of open source licenses intended to use the terms of those licenses to win a war against software patents, and whether they can do that remains to be seen, but in the meantime, don’t pass up the opportunity to use the principles of open source licensing to win your battles as well.

Patent assertion entities (patent trolls) typically do not make any kind of product for the above advise to be of any use.

Docker: the Linux container engine

Posted on by

Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.

Docker containers can encapsulate any payload, and will run consistently on and between virtually any server. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop will run at scale, in production*, on VMs, bare-metal servers, OpenStack clusters, public instances, or combinations of the above.

Common use cases for Docker include:

  • Automating the packaging and deployment of applications
  • Creation of lightweight, private PAAS environments
  • Automated testing and continuous integration/deployment
  • Deploying and scaling web apps, databases and backend services

via About Docker – Docker: the Linux container engine.

Munich open source switch ‘completed successfully’

Posted on by

In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options.

Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said in a document published

via Munich open source switch ‘completed successfully’.

Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%

Posted on by

In 2011, the Gendarmerie added 20,000 Ubuntu desktops, and in 2012 added another 10,000. This year, it added 2000 so far. Between March and June of 2013, the police force also performed an update of Ubuntu, upgrading to version 12.04 from 10.04, over its network. “This January, the last constraints will disappear, and we will replace the last proprietary desktop PCs by Ubuntu.”

via French Gendarmerie: “Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%” | Joinup.

Solr: The Most Important Open Source Project You’ve Never Heard Of

Posted on by

Lucene is used by many companies and groups as the foundation for their search engines. These organizations include AOL, Disney, and Eclipse. Lucene’s chief selling point is that the indexing engine, with a footprint of a mere megabyte of RAM, can index up to 150GBs per hour of text on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. That’s darn good!

Solr comes into the picture as the search platform front-end for Lucene. It provides full-text search, including the ability to handle such formats as Microsoft Word and PDF with Apache Tika; hit test highlighting; and faceted search, which incorporates free text searching with topic taxonomy indexing.

via Solr: The Most Important Open Source Project You’ve Never Heard Of.

Under the hood, Solr is written in Java and it relies on Lucene for its core functionality.  It usually runs within a servlet container such as the Jetty HTTP server and Javax.servlet.

The Best of Open Source Software Awards

Posted on by

via Bossies 2013: The Best of Open Source Software Awards | Open Source Software – InfoWorld.

Gear up for the school year with these open source applications

Posted on by

Here are five great open source applications for learning. Share this list to your favorite student or teacher!

via Gear up for the school year with these open source applications | opensource.com.

Play with math, programming, music, and art in the powerful Kojo Learning environment. Based on ideas derived from innovative programs such as Logo and Geometers Sketchpad, Kojo offers a rich platform for students to explore the synthesis of mathematical ideas, coding, creative thinking, and learning.