On the open source implications of Dell's rodent abuse
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Hamster meet penguin Radio Reg Does Dell making hamsters cry have anything at all to do with open source software? Not really. Still, the Open Season crew gathered for Episode 11 to draw any connection between Dell, rodent torture and open source code that we could.â¦
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New line of attack? Security professionals warned developers on Thursday that they need to be aware that their open-source repositories can now be easily mined, allowing attackers to target programs that are likely to be flawed. While Google could previously be used to look for specific strings, now the search engine riffles through code that much better.â¦
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Well, maybe not yet. But what does the future hold for those who consider their source code an important proprietary asset? Halloween this year featured more scary stuff than just ghosts and ghouls.
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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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Letter Can collective database licensing cure this tragedy of the commons?
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Backdoor drafts, security moms and up-armoring
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Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.
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Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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Memory space on components such as graphics cards, DVD drives and batteries can be used by miscreants to load malicious code onto PCs.
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Linux and open source technologies are the features an overwhelming number of users would like to see Dell Inc offering if the early responses to the company's IdeaStorm site are to be believed.
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Microsoft Corp. is facing growing pressure from open-source software across every segment of its businessâa competitive threat that could have significant consequences for its financial future going forward
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The dangers of software patents for free software have always been a hot issue.  But with the news that Red Hat and Novell are being sued for alleged patent infringement by IP Innovation, the matter has moved from theory into practice.  In fact, in the battle against software patents, it turns out that the open source world already has a rather powerful weapon in its armoury â even if it's one that few people know about. read more
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In the age old battle between open source and closed source operating systems and applications, can either of them really be considered more secure than the other?
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Chapter 14: Kernel Debugging Techniques, reprinted with permission from Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach By Christopher Hallinan, Published by Prentice Hall
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Snort, the popular open-course intrusion detection system, has a stack buffer overflow that could be used by attackers to run malicious code on vulnerable machines.
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HP is giving away a lot of value related to open source adoption.  Here's why this is a good strategy.