Tag Archives: foss

Study urges CIOs to choose open source first

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The study includes a checklist for customers making the transition. It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams, “or you’ll be consigning your business as usual team to the scrap heap,” Norton said.

via Study urges CIOs to choose open source first – Software – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.

“In many respects, the public cloud is an immature business. Business processes will eventually catch up with the technology, but they are not there yet.

“I would expect you would make greater cost savings by using open source internally without using a cloud-based solution.”

OpenAFS

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AFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for federated file sharing and replicated read-only content distribution, providing location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities. AFS is available for a broad range of heterogeneous systems including UNIX, Linux,  MacOS X, and Microsoft Windows

IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.

via OpenAFS.

App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride?

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App.net currently embodies a hierarchical vision, where a single top-level provider delivers the infrastructure everyone shares. This is quite unlike StatusNet, which embodies a federated vision of social data networking. If you want to run your own private instance of StatusNet you can — it’s open source, after all. Then if you want to join up with the rest of the planet, you can federate with other instances, creating a meshed data bus with many connection pathways. By contrast, App.net appears to want to maintain a commercial control point on the market it hopes to create.

via App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride? | Open Source Software – InfoWorld.

So what does App.net have going for it? A proof-of-concept Twitter clone, for sure. A torrent of great ideas, certainly. And $500,000 that’s been given as a gift? Definitely. But its main asset is 10,000 people who want an open infrastructure for digital CB enough to risk $50 to see if it works out. That initial user base is worth at least as much as the money and will be a hard taskmaster.

And then there’s this.

coreboot

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coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers. coreboot performs a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes additional boot logic, called a payload.

With the separation of hardware initialization and later boot logic, coreboot can scale from specialized applications that run directly from firmware, run operating systems in flash, load custom bootloaders, or implement firmware standards, like PC BIOS services or UEFI. This allows for systems to only include the features necessary in the target application, reducing the amount of code and flash space required

via coreboot.

Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL just become closed source?

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MySQL test cases were always an important part of the MySQL source tree. They were particularly useful for storage engine developers and for other people extending MySQL, for example, at Facebook, Twitter, and Taobao. But also for Linux distributions which add their patches to the base MySQL, and even to users, who don’t modify the sources — they still want to confirm that a particular bug was fixed or that their custom-built binary has no obvious flaws.

In May, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, Oracle had 7 representatives there, and they promised that Oracle will be more contributor- and distribution-friendly. It is sad to see that instead of that the MySQL source tree is being closed down.

via Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL just become closed source? « The MariaDB Blog.

Open Source | Twitter Developers

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Twitter is built on open source software, from the back-end to the front-end. Twitter engineers use, contribute to and release a lot of open source software. We of the Twitter Open Source Program Office support a variety of open source organizations and are grateful to the open source community for their contributions, and want to maintain our healthy, reciprocal relationship.

via Open Source | Twitter Developers.

If you’re interested in the projects we have released, check out our official organization on GitHub.

Open-source movements butt heads over logo

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The gear logo is backed by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was formally established earlier this year to promote hardware innovation and unite the fragmented community of hackers and do-it-yourselfers. The gear mark is now being increasingly used on boards and circuits to indicate that the hardware is open-source and designs can be openly shared and modified.

via Open-source movements butt heads over logo.

OSI has now informed OSHWA, which is acting on behalf of the open-source hardware community, that the logo infringes on its trademark.