U.K. report cites merits of open-source
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Open-source software advocates got a potential boost from a report by the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce, which cited advantages on the server side and a growing maturity on the desktop front.
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headisdead writes &quot;This BBC report has details of the IOSN&#39;s (International Open Source Network) role in yesterday&#39;s Software Freedom Day.
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Blog: It's true that open source applications and infrastructure don't necessarily play well together today, as Microsoft suggests.  But it's also true that more than enough integration is in place for current market demand.
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Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.The project stems from governance work done in-house at HP, according to the Web site set up for the project.&quot;We needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open-source project was licensed,&quot; a statement on the site reads. &quot;Rather than simply collecting a project&#39;s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.&quot;FOSSology is available under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2 and currently has support on most GNU/Linux platforms, according to the site.It is not clear from the site how HP plans to make money through the initiative. A company spokeswoman declined comment and said Friday that more details will be announced next week.Companies like Black Duck Software are already in the FOSS-tracking business.HP&#39;s entry brought a warm welcome from Black Duck CEO Doug Levin. Levin may feel HP&#39;s involvement will help the market expand overall. &quot;We can now officially welcome HP to our market,&quot; Levin wrote on his blog . &quot;FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.&quot;Right now, the FOSSology project has modules for license analysis, MIME type identification and for extracting metadata, according to the site.The site said the tool already generates detailed results: &quot;More than simply reporting, &#39;Package X uses license Y,&#39; the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package.&quot;FOSSology&#39;s analyses aren&#39;t foolproof, however, a statement on the site concedes: &quot;In general, the analysis results are very good guesses but should not be considered authoritative. (Or to say it simply: We&#39;re not lawyers. The code tries its best, but leave the legal decisions up to your own attorneys.)&quot;Over time, FOSSology is meant to be far more than an open-source license tracker, according to the site. Future capabilities could address bug fixes and patches, security alerts, and code reuse, as well as analysis of all types of software.The effort prompted praise on Friday from Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;It&#39;s free and open source, which is nice,&quot; Cote said. &quot;So if the data is reliable and well-fed, it could be of help for people who don&#39;t want to work with Black Duck ... and others who have commercial ways to scan for open-source licenses.&quot;&quot;The interesting thing will be to see how open the resulting data is and how much reporting people do with it,&quot; he added. &quot;There&#39;s a sort of cloudy idea of how much open source is used in the enterprise, and having more accurate, free numbers would be great for the community, and more importantly, enterprises that want to get a feel for how widely used open source software is.&quot;The availability of free open-source usage data &quot;will help people make much better -- and affordable -- decisions about what open source to use and not use,&quot; Cote said.
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A U.K. survey finds that little money is left over for new IT investment and that Linux is not leaving its mark on the desktop.
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A U.K. survey finds little money left over for new investment, and that Linux is not leaving its mark on the desktop.
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Movin' on up A European Commission report says the UK's online services show a marked improvement since last year.â¦
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This week, automated source-code analysis tool developer Coverity announced a list of open-source projects it has certified as secure and defect-free.
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Christopher Lydon's RadioOpenSource is one of the best programs on radio. It's not about open source code, but about radio modeled on open source values and methods. As the show puts it, Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media &#151; a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.  \
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The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), UK, has finally given the green signal persuading governments to consider the deployment of open source while implementing new systems.
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Consortium of companies working on software interoperability cites Europe's abundant open-source projects.
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Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Open source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census -- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.The number of licenses sold gives vendors of proprietary software a pretty good idea of how many people are using their code, assuming there are not too many pirated copies in use, or licensed copies gathering dust on shelves. They can also draw on information about paid upgrades or service contracts, or sell unique license keys, verified by a central server each time the software is installed -- or even used.Open source software developers have no such luck; the very nature of open source licenses makes such verification methods impossible. One clue they have is a count of how many people have downloaded the software from their Web sites. Reaching 1 million downloads is a rite of passage for open source projects.&#160;SugarCRM, for example, passed that landmark in May.Such counts, though, may underestimate the number of users, as anyone who obtains open source software is free to redistribute it by any other means they choose -- as long as they accompany it with a copy of the open source license and make the source code readily available.On the other hand, they may wildly overestimate the number; people may download the software with no intention of using it, since there is no financial disincentive to doing so, or they may download it multiple times if they upgrade it, wipe and reinstall their system, or have several computers.To come up with an accurate figure for the number of users of various open source applications in the enterprise, OpenLogic has released an automated census tool, OSS Discovery, itself available under an open source license.It hopes that businesses will scan their machines using the tool and contribute the data about the applications they are using to an open database.The tool could offer advantages to IT managers too, said OpenLogic, enabling them to build up a picture of the software installed on desktops and servers around their business and compare it with that used in other enterprises.OpenLogic is looking for partners to distribute or deploy the software and wants open source software developers to contribute digital &quot;fingerprints&quot; of their applications that will enable the discovery tool to identify them. Those who help with the project will be offered access to the anonymous data gathered.OSS Discovery 2.0 is based on the company&#39;s OpenLogic Discovery tool and is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. This recently introduced license extends the GPL license to ensure that changes to software used to power publicly available services will be contributed to the free software community, even if the modified software is not itself distributed.OpenLogic hopes to begin collecting census data early next year.
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An analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code shows that it contains fewer bugs per thousand lines of code than commercial counterparts. By Michelle Delio.
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High rate of patents, open-source age increase importance of intellectual property issues.
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Researchers in Europe have received EU funding to develop tools for building complex open-source systems.