System News for Sun Users

List of Free and OpenSource Software in Oracle Solaris 10, 11.1 at OTN

2012-11-29T17:00:00+01:00

Oracle Solaris 11.1 contains number of Free and Open Source packages. The Oracle has a web page which contains 230+ important FOSS packages with their versions available in this latest Oracle Solaris release.

Why Use Expensive Iron and Proprietary Software When White Boxes and FOSS Will Do?

2012-11-24T17:00:00+01:00

Generic computers and open source software are all Howard Fosdick, President of FCI, needs for his operations. He uses inexpensive stock hardware and software, which is easily replaceable and delivers 100% availability, along with high security and good privacy. Fosdick runs resource-heavy apps like enterprise DBMS and website generators with a few GB of memory and a low-end dual core processor: essentially a five year old machine; cheap enough to keep several on hand. Fosdick advises against ever keeping all one's data on a single machine, and the same with software. File interchange is the most important inter-machine demand Fosdick makes of his iron.

Bossie Awards 2012: The Best Open Source Networking and Security Software

2012-10-08T16:00:00+01:00

In its Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) 2010 awards, InfoWorld has recognized a number of tools for building a network, running a network, and ensuring that the network is secure. Nominees include:

DD, WRT, HTTPS, Everywhere, True Crypt, FreeOTFE, Eraser, Darik's Boot and Nuke, Vyatta, Open vSwitch, Elastix, Anti,Spam SMTP Proxy Server, iSpy, OpenNMS, Cacti, Wireshark, Snor, Sagan, Suricata, Snorby, Nmap, Metasploit, BackTrack, Burp Suite, dc3dd , Ophcrack, John the Ripper, GnuPG, FindBugs

Read on for details.

Bossie Awards 2012: Now for Something Completely Different

2012-10-08T16:00:00+01:00

InfoWorld's Best Of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) 2012 awards the best among open source games and geek time-wasters, jocularly labeled the "Now for something completely different category." The winners in this group include:

Open Remote, 0 A.D., XBMC, Stella, BZFlag, Calibre, Arduino, Assault Cub, Freeciv, Warzone 200, Naev, Lightworks

Read on for details.

Bossie Awards 2012: The Best Open Source Databases

2012-10-01T16:00:00+01:00

MySQL is far from the only game in town InfoWorld proclaims in its announcement of the Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) 2012 Awards for Open Source Databases. This year's 11 nominees include:

Hadoop, Cascading and Scalding, MySQL and MariaDB, Adminer, Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4j, Riak, Redis

Bossie Awards 2012: The Best Open Source Desktop Applications

2012-10-01T16:00:00+01:00

The ballots are in and InfoWorld has announced the 16 winners in BOSSIE 2012, the Best of Open Source Software awards for desktop applications:

Ubuntu, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, OpenOffice Templates, AbiWord, Scribus, Chromium, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, CamStudio, Audacity, VLC, KeePass , 7-Zip, WinDirStat

Read more for details for these winners.

Bossie Awards 2012: Best Open Source Application Development Tools

2012-09-24T16:00:00+01:00

The 18 best Open Source Application Development Tools selected by InfoWorld in Bossie Awards 2012 are these:

Node.js, PhoneGap, Titanium, Sencha Touch 2, Rhodes, WebKit, VirtualBox, Three.js, Bootstrap, Git, Jenkins, jEdit, Code::Blocks:, wxWidgets, Qt, Boost, Clang, FindBugs

Read on for details.

Bossie Awards 2012: The Best Open Source Data Center and Cloud Software

2012-09-24T16:00:00+01:00

The Bossie 2012 awards for the 16 Best Open Source Data Center and Cloud Software includes the following solutions:

OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Ganeti, Open v Switch, Cloud Foundry, JBoss AS 7, Jclouds, Puppet, Chef, Juju, GlusterFS, Ceph, FreeNAS, Openfiler, NAS4Free

Read on for details.

Attention CIOs: Shop Open Source First

2012-09-20T16:00:00+01:00

"Open for business: The value of Open Source Software in transaction processing" is a paper written by Jim Norton for Amadeus. In his ComputerWorld blog on the paper Loek Essers quotes Norton as having said, "By migrating to open source, enterprises can benefit from greater and swifter innovation, improved supplier responsiveness and enhanced systems accessibility and support." Add to that the comfort level the new generation of IT personnel have in working with open source solutions, not to mention the expected estimated 20 percent savings in licensing costs, and open source looks like a good bet to Norton, even for OLTP.

Shopping for Open Source Solutions?

2012-09-20T16:00:00+01:00

InfoWorld's Katherine Noyes summarizes the Best of Open Source Software Awards (the Bossies):

Inkscape: Vector graphics editor rivals Adobe Illustrator
Audacity: Cross-platform software for audio recording and editing
Plone: Industrial strength content management tool
KeePass: Stores passwords in a secure database with top-tier encryption
Gallery: Web-based photo album organizer
Feng Office: Web-based package that integrates project management, client relationship management, billing, and financing
Magento: An e-commerce platform
OpenEMR: Management tool for electronic health records and medical practice management
GnuCash: Personal and small-business financial-accounting software
FrontAccounting: Web-based package for managing the entire ERP chain

We will also publish articles for each of the Bossie categories.

Bossies 2012: The Herd Grows in Number

2012-09-20T16:00:00+01:00

InfoWorld's annual Best of Open Source Software Awards for 2012 (Bossie 2012) has grown in scope to include more than 100 products cited for excellence. These products are in seven categories, as Peter Wayner of InfoWorld explains, extending from application development tools to "games and other fun stuff." The categories include:

Best open source applications
Best open source application development tools
Best open source data center and cloud software
Best open source databases
Best open source desktop applications
Best open source networking and security software
Now for something completely different

Clearly, the FOSS horizons are limitless.

Bossies 2012: The Best Open Source Business Applications

2012-09-18T16:00:00+01:00

InfoWorld's Bossie Awards 2012 has picked 24 open business applications for recognition. The list includes:

Movable Type, WordPress, Plone, Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, Alfresco, Gallery, SugarCRM, vTiger, Magento, Spree, FrontAccounting, Feng Office, Gnucash, OpenERP, Openbravo, xTuple, OrangeHRM, OpenEMR, Pentaho, Bonita Open Solution, Liferay Portal, Diaspora

We will be publishing other Bossie winners over the next few weeks.

Licensing Open Source Code in the Modern, Post-revolutionary Era

2012-08-30T16:00:00+01:00

Peace reigns in the open source arena, Bryan Cantrill maintains in his post on the need to move from GPLv2 licensing to the more open-source friendly MPLv2. The experience of VLC, which recently relicensed its core software to LGPLv2 to allow it, as Cantrill writes, " ... to be more readily shared with other projects," bears this out, he explains. A new generation of developers are convinced that open source has won the battle with proprietary software. There was general agreement with his position at Forum Internacional Software Livre in Brazil, where he first voiced his thoughts.

Proprietary Vendors Finding Open Source Development an Attractive Course

2012-08-15T16:00:00+01:00

In the recent corporate behavior of VMware and even Microsoft, Jay Lyman, writing in LinuxInsider, finds a more accepting stance toward free and open source software in the proprietary community. These proprietary stalwarts, and others, says Lyman," ... talk bullishly about their integration with, contribution to, and support for open source software, which is a far cry from belittling open source as a hobby or demonizing it as not enterprise-ready." For all of that, he concludes, there remains a marked difference between VMware, for example, and Red Hat, which has been, and remains, solely open source from the start.

What's the Truth about Open Source

2012-07-09T16:00:00+01:00

On mission to dispel (or confirm) some of the current myths concerning open source, Wenjia Zhao of Forbes tackles the subject with sufficient candor to admit his own level of misinformation. Zhao consulted Karl Fogel of Open Souce Initiative, to whom he put these questions:

Open source means that the source is open to view
Open source software is free
Open source software cannot be commercial
Open source software is crowd-sourced and vice versa

Fogel confirmed that one of the "myths" is true, the other three false. Test your open source belief system against the expert.

Downloads of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 Soar

2012-07-05T16:00:00+01:00

Within six weeks of its release, downloads of Apache 3.4.0 Open Office have exceeded five million, LinuxBSDos.com reports, phenomenal for software that is no longer installed by default on Linux distros. Apache Open Office is the renamed LibreOffice, LiuxBSDos.com reminds readers, and was the first version released since it became an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubating project., and coding continues on 3.4.1, scheduled for release in late July. Following the release of 3.4.1, ASF is contemplating either a slower, more incremental merge of Symphony enhancements into OpenOffice, or a more rapid rebasing of OpenOffice on top of Symphony.

The Defensive Patent License

2012-06-18T16:00:00+01:00

Simon Phipps celebrates the introduction of the Defensive Patent License (DPL) by two UC Berkeley Law School professors, Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban. DPL was developed to counter what Phipps describes as the commoditization of patents by the venture capital industry, which enabled investors to capitalize on salable patents of a failed enterprise. DPL requires that a company agree never to use patents offensively against other signatories of the DPL, thereby rendering all patents owned by all DPL signatories "de-weaponized," as Phipps puts it. Key to the success of this proposal is the breadth of adoption by patent owners.

Make Sure Your Company's Procurement Policies Are Not Restricting FOSS Adoptions

2012-06-11T16:00:00+01:00

Indemnification should not be an issue in the procurement of open source software, writes Simon Phipps, who advises IT administrators to examine their procurement policies to determine whether they contains stipulations that might inhibit the adoption of open source solutions. The open source community does not have the same stake in such matters as source code protection or right-to-use issues as a proprietary vendor and, therefore, the protections necessary in dealing with vendors of proprietary solutions need not apply when open source is the choice.

Support for FOSS Components in Oracle Solaris

2012-04-27T16:00:00+01:00

A post on oracle.com points readers to a My Oracle Support knowledge article that provides background information concerning support of FOSS packages delivered with Oracle Solaris 11 and older Oracle Solaris releases. A subset of FOSS components delivered in Oracle Solaris are supported in terms of Oracle Premier Support for Systems. New version of a FOSS component will be delivered in Oracle Solaris 10 either as a patch or an update release, a new version of a FOSS component will be delivered in Oracle Solaris 11 either as part of a Support Repository Update (SRU) or in an update release.

Red Hat Has $1 Billion Plus in BY 2012

2012-04-02T16:00:00+01:00

Red Hat had a billion dollar plus year in FY2012, and that revenue came not just from selling software, argues Simon Phipps in his InfoWorld piece but from selling Software Freedom as well. Red Hat customers are liberated from the bonds imposed on them by vendors of proprietary software, given the freedom to experiment with open source code and to use the product for any purpose. All of this makes for an enriched business atmosphere with community members making improvements to the code even as they use it. Software freedom has put money in the bank for Red Hat.

Coverity Study Find Open Source Holds Its Own Against Proprietary Code

2012-02-28T17:00:00+01:00

In its third annual report, Coverity concludes that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software. Coverity analyzed more than 37 million lines of open source code from 45 major open source projects and over 300 million lines of proprietary software code. The open source projects were found to have an average defect density of 0.45, based on the number of defects per 1,000 lines of code, and the proprietary code was found to have 0.64 defects in every 1,000 lines of proprietary software code.

CRN.com Names the 10 Best Open-Source Products Of 2011

2011-12-21T17:00:00+01:00

The ten best open source products of 2011, as named by CRN.com are these, in reverse order:

Fedora 16
Ubuntu 11.04
OpenStack
Asterisk 10
MySQL 5.6, Beta
Android 3.xx, or "Honeycomb"
Firefox for Android
Linux Mint 12
Ubuntu 11.10
LibreOffice

(Selected by Edward F. Moltzen, CRN)

Using NexentaStor ZFS storage appliance with vSphere

2011-12-16T17:00:00+01:00

Last year, Tomi Hakala wrote an article describing how to use NexentaStor to create an NFS share on a commodity x86 box and make that share available to vSphere. Those steps with version 3.0 are still the same with version 3.1:

Install NexentaStor; obtain a unique key; enter key
Create a ZFS volume
Create a folder
Configure NFS Server (use NFS v3)
Note the mount point in which folder is available to NFS client
Open vSphere Client and mount NAS datastore

NexentaStor 3.x is a major release, with many new features, improved hardware support, and many bug fixes over the older Developer Edition including:

In-line deduplication for primary storage and backup
Free for up to 18 TB of overall raw storage capacity (i.e. sum of all ("raw") disks sizes, excepting logs, caches and spares)
Supports easy upgrade to future Community Edition releases and to Enterprise Edition licenses
Support for user and group quotas
The ability to automatically expand pools

NexentaStor 3.x Community ISO CD images can be installed on "bare-metal" x86/64 hardware. VM installed images are also available.

84 Open Source Companies Ranked By Momentum Index

2011-11-25T17:00:00+01:00

MomentumIndex.com has ranked 84 open source companies with Acquia at the top of the list, followed by talend and Jaspersoft. Others include

Automattic - WordPress.com
SugarCRM - Customer relationship management
Engine Yard - PaaS for Ruby on Rails and PHP
Appcelerator - For rapidly developing native and HTML5 mobile web apps
Kaltura - Open Source Online Video Platform
Alfresco - Enterprise CMS
Nexenta - Open source enterprise class storage solutions based on Solaris

MomentumIndex identifies exposure to cloud computing as responsible for those companies exhibiting the fastest growth.

Open Source Is Not a One Man Band

2011-11-22T17:00:00+01:00

Open source is about very much more than avoiding licensing fees, Simon Phipps contends in his blog Open Source Nurtures Innovation. He argues cogently that absence of the need for an individual or a small group of developers to maintain code libraries (a must with proprietary software) frees writers of software to concentrate on new applications. In the world of open source, " ... instead of being solely responsible for the sustaining of every innovation they add, innovators can contribute their work to the shared code commons and have the sustaining shared by everyone," according to Phipps.

Getting PostgreSQL HA to Work in vFabric Data Director

2011-11-03T16:00:00+01:00

How to set up a one-click HA setting in PostgreSQL's vFabric Data Director is illustrated in Jignesh Shah's blogspot.com post. In some cases the PostgreSQL monitor can correctly diagnose the situation and restart the database. In others the virtual machine itself will need to be shut down, enabling the vCenter Server to start the database on another server. In this instance, DHCP addresses may well be affected, which Shah solves by relying on the virtual hosts format to allow users to find their intended database without regard for which server it is running on.

Phipps Explains the Cadre Behind LibreOffice to The Document Foundation Conference

2011-10-19T16:00:00+01:00

Simon Phipps, formerly of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, now founder of the startup ForgeRock and director of the Open Source Initiative, recently addressed The Document Foundation's first LibreOffice Conference, where explained that Open Source as a movement does not require a "white knight" to foster and sustain it. Instead, he maintained. Open Source calls for " ... developers willing to collaborate, and a community willing to contribute both time and money." Fortunately, LibreOffice was brought about by the efforts of both factions.

15 Essential Open Source Tools for Windows Admins

2011-09-26T16:00:00+01:00

Despite what you may have assumed, there is an alternative to Microsoft when it comes to enhancements for Windows, and these enhancements are free and olpen source, so why call Redmond. J. Peter Bruzzese a number of these offerings in his InforWorld article "15 Essential Open Source Tools for Windows Admins." Here's a list:

Wireshark
AMANDA
MailArchiva
Exchange 2010 RBAC Manager
Core Configurator 2.0 for Server Core
AutoSPInstaller for SharePoint 2010
OCS Inventory
UltraDefrag
Nmap for Windows
Zenmap
PowerGUI
Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool
ClamWin Antivirus
Virtual Router
VirtualBox

Microsoft also hosts CodePlex, a site for open source projects.

Bossie Awards 2011: The Best Open Source Desktop and Mobile Software

2011-09-07T16:00:00+01:00

Here are the categories for which 2011 Bossie Award winners have been named:

Best Open Source Software
Best Open Source Desktop and Mobile Software
Best Open Source Application Development Software
Best Open Source Data Center and Cloud Software

VirtualBox won with this endorsement: "A free-to-use and open source virtualization solution for desktop environments, VirtualBox changed hands from Sun to Oracle when the latter bought the former. That hasn't changed the pace or tenor of its development, though, and the last few revisions -- including a major update to the left of the decimal point -- have continued to pile on reasons to ditch commercial alternatives. For anyone who even dabbles in virtualization, it's gone from useful to must-have."

The Long Road To (Software) Freedom

2011-08-31T16:00:00+01:00

Simon Phipps has devised a seven-step "path to software freedom" that he lays out for readers as follows:

Open source as enemy
Damage containment
Embrace and extend
A change of executive direction
Exploratory opening
General opening
Embrace of software freedom

Sun, Phipps says, was at stage 6 when the acquisition occurred. Where is your organization on the spectrum?