US Navy CIO tells purchasers to consider open source
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Pentagon picks up a Penguin The US Navy has recently affirmed support for open source software, in pursuit of "an interoperable net-centric environment...which will improve the warfighter's effectiveness through seamless access to critical information".â¦
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One great way to determine whether your digital product is destined for greatness is how many people want to steal it. The same goes for open source.
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The server virtualization trend continues, according to data center managers and analysts at this week's Infrastructure Management World. But  some users were skeptical about trying open source virtualization options.
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They are curious about the growing number of open source database products on the market, but some SQL Server DBAs say they remain doubtful that companies will adopt it for the long haul.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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With its open-source model, the company has the potential to shake up the industry, one analyst says.
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(InfoWorld) - If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes. For Bill Karpovich, co-founder and CEO of Zenoss, dissatisfaction with the leading management frameworks is a business model. In fact, Karpovich notes, Zenoss' open source network and system monitoring solution was born from the failure of IBM Tivoli at USi, an application service provider (and now a subsidiary of AT&T) where he and Zenoss inventor and CTO Erik Dahl used to work. "At USi we had spent millions on IBM Tivoli, and like many people we were very unhappy that it didn't work," Karpovich recalls. "Erik was the architect that was brought in to help us figure out our management platform. Erik's recommendation was to throw out Tivoli and build our own." And so USi built its own management infrastructure, which included both commercial off-the-shelf products and open source software, bringing all of the pieces together into a framework called USi Oasis. The experience led Dahl to realize there was a big opportunity to build a next-generation network and systems management product on the open source stack. He left USi to do just that. The difference between Dahl's "next-generation" approach and the traditional tools, Karpovich says, is the focus on relationships among network devices, servers, and applications rather than on individual systems. "Model-based management has been Erik's philosophy from day one, and today that is called a CMDB basically," Karpovich says. "So that was at the core of the product from the start, building that model in an object way that is extensible and supports complex relationships." According to Karpovich, the Big Four, built back in the client/server era, simply didn't have the right data model to account for these relationships, or to provide the different views into the IT environment that enterprises need today. And their way of doing business is outdated too, he adds. "They're living off an old version of the enterprise software model that doesn't exist today, which is selling software for a million dollars and having it take a year to deploy," Karpovich says. "We're just beyond that." As Zenoss Core approaches its 2.0 release in June, the open source project boasts more than 13,000 registered downloads from SourceForge.Net. Among the additions in the new release are discovery of configuration policy violations and a plug-in framework for application monitoring packs called ZenPacks. ZenPacks for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server will be immediately available to enterprise subscribers from Zenoss, with more ZenPacks to follow from the company and the community in coming months. The enterprise edition also features a WYSIWYG environment for running synthetic transactions against Web applications, providing a way to monitor a Web site from the user's point of view. "You can correlate the end-user experience with all of the element level views," Karpovich explains. "So I can say, Wow, I broke my 8-second rule on adding an item to the shopping cart, and I wonder what was happening on my network at the time, I wonder what was happening with memory and disk? Were there any processes that were taking up too much CPU?" Zenoss' business model is based on selling professional services, support, and value-added functionality to enterprise subscribers. But Karpovich believes the company's success depends on leveraging the community to improve the product, build out the library of ZenPacks, and most of all, help Zenoss keep up with rapidly changing needs. "That's where the Big Four struggled in the past, right?" asks Karpovich, suggesting one last lesson from history. "A technology trend occurs, and a year later you get a management tool for it. It's just too slow. The world moves too quickly. "IT management is the infinite problem, so it's perfect for open source," Karpovich concludes. "One company simply can't generate enough ideas or enough R&D to stay on top of managing all of IT."
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NOVEMBER 12, 2004  - In a deal aimed at helping corporate IT decision-makers feel more comfortable about moving to open-source software offerings, Hewlett-Packard Co.
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I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project.  An upfront caveat -- this is not an actual offer. It's totally hypothetical. If I make the offer it will be done in some other more formal way.  The project: I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux. I don't want to hire someone to do this project, rather I want to offer a reward when the project is completed.  The source code is already released under the GPL, in versions for Mac OS X and Windows. Of course Mac OS is a flavor of Unix, but the internal API is quite different, I imagine, from Linux. I'm not looking for elegance, I'm looking for functionality. I don't care how the port is done, just that it be maintainable, and then be released (of course) under the GPL.  Personally, I think the most likely way to get this done quickly is to compile the code under WINE, using the Windows version of the code, and then go back and connect up the Unix system calls, so that all the Unix related verbs work. (Note the OPML Editor is actually a rich programming environment, despite its diminutive name. It's an instance of UserLand Frontier, which goes back to 1988.) To me, it would be worth $10,000 to have the OPML Editor running reliably on Linux, because then all the projects I've built and am building would then automatically run on Linux. Now I'm not saying that the project can be done for that amount of money (it's possible that it can), but I also don't feel I should be the only person funding the project. And maybe it's enough of a prize to incentivize someone or a group to do it. Now, of course, I see problems. Since it's an open source project, how will I know who to give the reward to if the goal is met. It might be the result of the work of a group of people. If so, I think they would have to figure out among themselves how to split the reward. On the other hand, I don't see any movement right now to port the codebase to Linux, so maybe if someone is interested in the project, you should do it on your own, and just present the results. If it works, then it seems you would be entitled to the reward. I seem to remember people proposing groupware systems for creating these kinds of projects, a few years ago. Not sure if they came to fruition, for all I know there could be an eBay for open source programming projects. If you have any information to share on this, please post a comment here, and thanks in advance.
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Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing.  Should they?
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PC Magazine - Opinion: Microsoft's open-source pledge is a good step.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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Under contract with the Department of Homeland Security, Coverity seeks to establish a new security baseline for open-source applications.
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s recent announcement regarding a pair of free and open source software projects has irked one of its co-sponsors, OpenLogic.FOSSology is a tool for tracking the use of open source software in an enterprise, and is based on technology developed in-house at HP, the company has said. FOSSBazaar is an accompanying Web site housing best practices and other information concerning FOSS governance.OpenLogic&#39;s CEO, Steven Grandchamp, said in a blog post Tuesday that HP&#39;s media release essentially hogged the limelight, downplaying the fact that many other companies are backing FOSSBazaar, including Google and Novell.&quot;Although this initiative was started and led by HP, it is designed to be backed and supported by many in the open source ecosystem,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Just as no single member of a large open source community would claim responsibility for all the results, FOSSBazaar will need to follow these same open source community norms. In HP&#39;s desire to talk about their leadership on FOSSBazaar, they may have lost sight of the open and community aspects.&quot;In addition, the HP announcement mixed together news of the free information housed at FOSSBazaar and&#160;the&#160;company&#39;s&#160;new set of commercial services, he noted. &quot;Those details of HP&#39;s open source services may have been better left for a different forum or separate press release.&quot;Grandchamp also said he has received phone calls and e-mail regarding whether HP is now competing with OpenLogic, which makes a tool called OSS Discovery.Describing the two tools as &quot;complementary,&quot; he wrote, &quot;OSS Discovery can be used to discover which open source packages are installed on your machines (providing package names and versions), regardless of license. FOSSology can be used to search for open source licenses in a set of source or binary code.&quot;But Grandchamp extended an olive branch to HP even as he chided its actions. &quot;Bottom line, we think that FOSSBazaar can be a valuable resource for enterprises, despite some confusion around the announcement. Our intention is to work with all of the participants in FOSSBazaar to ensure that it is a valuable resource helping enterprises to become more knowledgeable about open source governance issues and therefore more comfortable in using open source software.&quot;HP could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.
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What are the open-source implications, if the software giant is successful in acquiring Yahoo? Matt Asay offers his opinion.
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Red Hat has announced plans to acquire network security software from Netscape&#39;s Enterprise Suite, adding it to its Open Source Architecture, The company says they will distribute it as open-source software, according to statements from company executives