Open Source Blog

The Linux Foundation was formed last year when the Open Source Development Labs merged with the Free Standards Group with the aim of pooling resources and collaboratively defending the Linux platform from fragmentation. The organization employs Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and also leads the Linux Standard Base (LSB) initiative, an effort to standardize and define the structure of the Linux platform.

At LinuxWorld earlier this month, we talked to Linux Foundation president Jim Zemlin about the organization's projects. He believes that the Linux Foundation provides an important vendor-neutral venue for driving Linux into the future. The organization has launched some cool initiatives in the past year, such as the informative Linux Weather Forecast, and also hosts important events like the recent legal summits.

The foundation has taken on the role of voice of the collective Linux community in some important public debates and has also served in an advisory role to foreign government agencies that are adopting open source.

Zemlin acknowledges that the LSB initiative—which is one of the highest priorities of the organization—hasn't gained a whole lot of traction with major Linux distributions yet. Despite the lack of widespread conformance to the LSB, he argues that it is still a valuable investment in interoperability, because the test suites and analysis tools that the Linux Foundation has developed alongside the standard are being adopted by high-profile Linux distributors.

Canonical has joined the Linux Foundation with silver status, the bottom tier of membership. Other prominent silver members include Nokia, Sun, Red Hat, Dreamworks, and Dell. Silver members contribute between $5,000 and $20,000 annually, depending on the size of the company. Canonical's decision to join the organization is a pretty strong affirmation of the foundation's relevance.

"The Linux Foundation occupies a critical, non-commercial function in the use and popularization of Linux around the world. We've always seen the Linux Foundation's value and are pleased to now become an official member and support its activities," said Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman in a statement. "We look forward to working with them to continue the march of Linux in all areas of computing."

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has seen unprecedented success and widespread adoption in the desktop Linux ecosystem. Ubuntu is also increasingly the favorite Linux distribution of major hardware vendors like Dell. This success is clearly paying off for Canonical, and it has empowered the company to take a more active role as a contributor to the broader open source community.

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The company will make its presence felt at the upcoming Astricon in Glendale, AZ, September 23–25. Presence Technology Executive Vice President Jason Goecke will participate in the conference program, presenting a session entitled Empowering he Elastic Contact Center. I asked Goecke several questions in advance of the event.

announcements at the event?

JG: We will announce a new Asterisk (News - Alert) Architecture implemented within our new version of Presence OpenGate named N + 1. This architecture allows several Asterisk Nodes to be controlled and managed by a Master Server such as a singlePBX ( News - Alert). This new architecture drastically improves Asterisk’s capacity growth, redundancy and reliability allowing us to fulfill the high capacity and up-time needs demanded by Enterprise Contact Centers.

GG: Where does your company fit in the current world of Open Source communications?

JG: Presence Technology offers a full range of solutions which manage the interaction between the Customers and the Contact Centers. Our Suite improves the Contact Center performance and simplifies management and quality control. It also provides a set of GUI tools which allow management of the Contact Center and the infrastructure without the need of complex integrations or, most importantly, deep technical knowledge. So now Management Supervisors are able to adapt the product configuration. This is very useful in those environments where flexibility and time to market are crucial – such as outsourcing companies serving several master customers.

Our Presence OpenGate Product Suite integrates with Avaya (News - Alert), Nortel and Asterisk PBXs, providing the same features for all the supported platforms.

The integration with Asterisk not only offers advantages on the overall cost reduction of the solution, it also allows us to more tightly integrate our product with the PBX software thus simplifying the administration and configuration of the solution end-to-end.
 

Hosted free through ITema's developer portal at http://www.modxdev.com, ITema's Sandbox lets modx developers field complex Web sites that end-users can easily maintain.

"Helping developers helps us in the long run," said John Slade, COO at ITema. "Many developers make their living creating Web sites. Supplying ITema's Sandbox to their clients relieves developers of content maintenance tasks and frees them to concentrate on more interesting and lucrative work," he added.

ITema's modxdev.com portal lets developers deploy modx sites, with or without Sandbox, at a free sub-domain. When site development is complete ITema's control panel offers competitive domain registration, hosting, and integrated deployment of the site with other applications such as Zimbra E-mail, SugarCRM, PHPBB Forums, MediaWiki, and Wordpress blog, on either a monthly subscription or ad-supported basis. Volume resellers will receive discounted rates.

"We're really excited that development partners like ITema are adopting the modx platform and enhancing its value to the community," said Ryan Thrash, founder of modx.

About ITema

Headquartered in Niantic, CT, ITema, Inc., is a leading provider of low-cost, dynamic Web sites and associated productivity tools for the small business owner. Dedicated to meeting the needs of often-ignored small businesses looking to more fully exploit the power and potential of the Internet but without access to internal IT resources, ITema is a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider whose focus and mission is to level the competitive playing field by making small businesses look and perform like big ones through easily deployed and managed Web sites, CRM systems, professional Web hosting and browser-based, spam-filtered E-mail -- all fully synchronized and integrated to work in perfect harmony. For additional information, see http://www.itema.com.

About modx

Winner of the 2007 "Most promising Open Source CMS" award, modx is an open source PHP Application Framework that lets developers hand off day-to-day website content maintenance chores to their clients. modx is a Content Management Framework ("CMF") that is equal parts custom web app builder and Content Management System ("CMS"). With a flexible API and a robust event override system modx allows easy control of dynamic CSS and addition of Ajax functionality. For additional information, see http://www.modxcms.com.

ITema and modxdev are trademarks of ITema, Inc. Other company, brand and product names referenced herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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We know it best through such wonders as Wikipedia, the world's biggest encyclopedia that is created by its own readers, and Firefox, the internet browser that has expanded to 19.2% of the market (compared with 73% for Microsoft's Internet Explorer). But there is also the Linux operating system for computers which, after years of development by geeks, is emerging as a real option for the new generation of cheap, compact laptops such as the Asus Eee range and the One Laptop Per Child scheme, aimed at the developing world with a target price of $100.

The cooperative spirit that infused the open source movement is now in expansive mood, as people and corporations collaborate on music, science, architecture, knowledge, video sites such as YouTube and social networks, including MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

There is now more cause for celebration, following what is regarded as a milestone victory in the US courts last week. It probably will not mean much to anyone else but it gives added legal protection to works created using open source. Professor Larry Lessig, one of the leading internet lawyers, said: "This is a very important victory." One of the interesting things about the collaborative movement is that it is probably recession-proof, though you won't see it in economic statistics because it mostly does not involve cash transactions. Wikipedia does not appear directly in GDP or inflation figures, but it adds to our wealth and has made rival encyclopedias come down in price.

If Gordon Brown is still looking for a "big idea", then he could do worse than adopt internet collaboration. That means not just bringing fast broadband internet into the home, especially the homes of poor people, but also to reverse the government's lamentable resistance to open source. Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure. At the last count, the Treasury that Mr Brown ran did less than 1% of its operations with open source. This is strange because open source combines the cooperative spirit that was at the heart of the Labour party in the past with the entrepreneurial skills needed today. No wonder David Cameron called the prime minister an analogue politician in a digital age.

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However, says Jacobson, software is seldom developed with an eye on back-end security requirements. Developers are usually under pressure to deliver on required features within tight deadlines which leave little time to check for vulnerabilities each step of the way. The result is that most software is inherently vulnerable.

“It is unfortunate that many people - business executives as well as so-called security experts - believe that the implementation of one or two security products can address security issues. There cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ approach to security as each environment is different, with its own set of vulnerabilities. And some security products themselves contain flaws which increase a network’s vulnerability rather than reduce it,” he says.

“Indeed, if businesses are serious about security, they need to understand that the only way to truly check that they are secure is to view the code. That’s one of the reasons I believe open source software is the better option for companies where security is of the utmost concern. It’s not that open source is more secure, but rather the fact that you can view the code, see any vulnerabilities yourself and even fix if necessary if you have the skills to do so,” says Jacobson.

Jacobson recommends that before implementing any application, including a security product, users should check the “pedigree” of the product.

This would include determining whether any vulnerabilities or flaws had been detected in the product; and how well or quickly the vendor had responded to these reports. Most of this information is to be found on websites like www.securityfocus.com, a vendor-neutral site that provides objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of the global IT security community.

“The SecurityFocus Vulnerability Database, for example, delivers an invaluable service by providing security professionals with the most up-to-date information on vulnerabilities for all platforms and services. Another SecurityFocus service is BugTraq, a high volume, full disclosure mailing list for the detailed discussion and announcement of computer security vulnerabilities. BugTraq is, without doubt, the cornerstone of the Internet-wide security community,” he adds.

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Creative Commons founder, Larry Lessig, has welcomed ruling, calling it a huge and important victory. Lessig also points out the significance of the ruling: “In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer.

This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.”

Mark Radcliffe on his blog, Law & Life: Silicon Valley, calls the ruling a “major victory” and Groklaw’s Pamela Jones adds her insight.

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In a ruling Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.

The decision legitimizes the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.

It also has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.

That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.

The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.

“From a practical business perspective when big companies and their legal teams look at Creative Commons there are a number of questions,” he said. “It’s been one of the things their legal teams throw at us.”

The appeals court decision reverses a San Francisco federal court ruling over the misappropriation of a software program by a company that publishes model train hobbyist software.

The free software, or open source, community has quarreled for several years with Matthew A. Katzer, a Portland, Ore., businessman who owns Kam Industries. Previously, Mr. Katzer has sued free software developers for patent infringement and the free software community has argued that he had failed to disclose earlier technology, known as prior art, in his patent filings.

A lawyer for Mr. Katzer did not return calls asking for comment.

In March 2006, Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial software program that had taken software code from the Java Model Railroad Interface project and was redistributing the program without the credits required as part of the open-source license it was distributed under.

The decision to appeal the lower court ruling, which said that the terms of the open-source contract were overly broad, was intensely debated within the free software movement. Some open-source advocates had worried that a loss before the appeals court would have been a disaster for the community, which has grown as an economic force during the last quarter century.

“I was terrified that we would lose,” Mr. Jacobsen said. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”

There has long been a link between model train hobbyists and the free software movement. During the 1950s, for example, hobbyists who worked on the wiring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club project were informally known as “hackers,” according to “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy. The term evolved to include people who developed and programmed computers and who passionately believed that software codes should be freely shared.

Mr. Jacobsen said he believed that the court’s ruling was significant for the free software movement because it had thrived not on monetary gain but on individual credit for contributions.

“We don’t charge for this and so all we really get is credit,” he said, adding that anyone is free to use and modify the programming instructions created by his group as long as they retain the credit and distribute them with the programmer’s instructions.

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IBM left the mainstream PC market in 2005 by selling its division to Lenovo for $3.5bn (£1.79bn). Slow Vista sales are behind the move to Linux.

“The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president for IBM Lotus Software.

But Eszter Morvay, senior PC market research analyst at IDC, said the move had nothing to do with Vista and that Linux PCs have traditionally had a price advantage but had not replaced Microsoft.

“The slow take-up of Vista has resulted in the extension of XP’s life, with Microsoft selling it half price to PC makers. Microsoft does not have a great product in Vista but it will not be muscled out.

“It has such dominance that even the Linux PC makers have no intention of overtaking Microsoft, they just want a little bit of market share,” she said.

Meanwhile, rumours of the breakup of Europe’s largest PC maker surfaced last week. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) is a nine-year-old joint venture but the company has struggled to succeed beyond its German and Nordic base.

“Rumours have been fuelled by FSC doing badly. It does not have strong branding across Europe. It cannot compete with HP, Acer or new entrants such as Samsung,” said Morvay.

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Here's a look at three projects that include tools to test your network performance: nepim "network pipemeter," LMbench, and nuttcp.

For this article I built each utility from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine. I used nepim version 0.51, LMbench version 3, and nuttcp version 5.5.5.

For testing, I used a network link with two Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards configured for network bonding. As you'll see from the results, however, something obviously is not functioning correctly because I was unable to achieve the 2 gigabit theoretical bandwidth. The nepim and nuttcp benchmarks below show that communication from the server is faster than sending data to the server, which might be an effect of the network interface bonding.

nepim

nepim is packaged for openSUSE 11 as a 1-Click install but is not in the Fedora or Ubuntu repositories. It requires the liboop library to be installed, and this library too is packaged for openSUSE but not Fedora and Ubuntu. You can install liboop using the procedure.
 
nepim does not use autotools to build. To compile, you change into the src directory and run make. I found that to compile nepim I had to include an additional define in the Makefile to avoid a duplicate definition of a data structure. The change is shown below, together with the installation, as there is no target in the makefile.

I doubt anyone reading this would say there aren't enough open source software licenses out there. That said, the vast majority of open source products out there use a small handful of licenses -- the GPL, the Apache license, the MIT license, the various "badgeware" licenses, and so on. The rest tend to be outriders or derivatives of varying kinds, each with their own justifications for being adopted.

It was easier to get away with a broad proliferation of licenses back when open source was still a relatively rare and exotic variety of bird in the software bestiary. Now that open source is becoming (gasp) a mainstream phenomenon, using one of the less-common licenses or coming up with one of your own works against you more often than not.

In one of the discussions I was having at the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Summit, I mentioned that picking a well-known license sends a certain signal to the communities that flock around your product. This is not about just the ideals that are reflected in the license itself (and reflected by other products that use the same license), but about what kind of future your product will have in the marketplace if you're using a license that hasn't been given a public shakedown of sorts.

Another way to put it: It's not the programmers that will determine what open source licenses are the best -- it's the software consumers. They'll be the ones narrowing down the forest of licensing to a few well-pruned and -maintained trees. The better for us all not to get lost amongst them.

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The software is web-based and designed to support all types of clinical studies in diverse research settings. From the ground up, OpenClinica is built on leading, independent standards to achieve high levels of interoperability. Its modular architecture and transparent, collaborative development model offer outstanding flexibility while supporting a robust, enterprise-quality solution.

The software is web-based and designed to support all types of clinical studies in diverse research settings. From the ground up, OpenClinica is built on leading, independent standards to achieve high levels of interoperability. Its modular architecture and transparent, collaborative development model offer outstanding flexibility while supporting a robust, enterprise-quality solution.

The software is web-based and designed to support all types of clinical studies in diverse research settings. From the ground up, OpenClinica is built on leading, independent standards to achieve high levels of interoperability. Its modular architecture and transparent, collaborative development model offer outstanding flexibility while supporting a robust, enterprise-quality solution.

The OpenClinica software platform supports:

•     Management of numerous, diverse clinical studies through a unified interface
•     Clinical data submission, validation, and annotation
•     Data filtering and extraction
•     Study oversight, auditing, and reporting
  

Within these areas, OpenClinica has a large and growing number of features.

OpenClinica is released under the LGPL open source license. The product is commercially supported by Akaza Research to facilitate enterprise-level use.

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But times are changing and Linux and open source received an honourable mention during yesterday’s opening keynote address at TechEd South Africa 2008. It was a brief mention at the tail end of an hour and a half-long opening session, but it was there.

Opening speaker, Barry Briggs, Microsoft IT’s chief IT architect and CTO, even went so far as to acknowledge that Microsoft had been “pushed” to accept the growing influence of open source software on the market and Microsoft.

Briggs talked about Microsoft’s well publicised announcements around interoperability and its recent support for the Apache Foundation.

The reason for the change, said Briggs, was because users had asked for it. “It is super important for us to work with rest of industry to ensure interoperability,” he said. “That’s what you want … what you told us you want.”

“Thank you for pushing us in this direction,” said Briggs. “It’s good for us and a big win for our users.”

Interoperability was not only on the agenda during the keynote. It was a recurring theme throughout the first day’s sessions with presenters regularly pointing out that Microsoft was serious about interoperability. It’s a very different tone from a company with a reputation for being an open source denialist.

Microsoft changing?

Over the past year Microsoft has really turned up the volume on interoperability. In the face of ongoing battles with the European Union over anti-competitive behaviour the company has announced initiatives to ensure document interoperability, it says it will now support open document formats such as ODF in its Office suite, and is even collaborating with the ODF development team to make ODF a better standard. And last week the Apache Foundation announced Microsoft was now a platinum sponsor of the project that develops the dominant open source web server Apache.

It’s about creating a “competitive ecosystem” says Briggs. That’s why putting money into funding Apache - a competitor to its own IIS web server - is good because it stimulates competition. And a competitive ecosystem is a good thing to have when anti-trust investigators come knocking on your door.

Is Microsoft changing? The answer to that is probably yes. In the company’s latest annual report Linux and open source are repeatedly mentioned as significant competitors. Microsoft is changing not because it wants to but because has to. Not because it sees the open source light but because it finally acknowledges that open source software is an equal competitor.

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There is no such thing as an entry-level position anymore, and more and more graduates are finding themselves in a catch-22 situation because of this.

Searching the numerous jobseeker Web sites, such as dice.com, will return thousands of positions available in the IT field. But when you look closely, most positions, such as an entry-level software engineer, have a minimum requirement of at least one year's work experience in a related field. The search field criterion doesn't even offer a selection for graduates with less than one year's experience.

You will find that some major companies, such as Microsoft, offer paid training courses to students pursuing a degree, but out of five positions listed at the time this article was written, only one would accept students who only had classroom coding experience. The remaining positions required one to two years of experience, and there were no positions available for recent graduates. When you consider the number of students searching for that "dream job" at a big corporation, you soon realize that your chances of getting a response to your application are slim to none -- especially if you don't have work experience. We have all heard, over and over, that there will always be a need for workers in technology, but getting your foot in the door is a whole 'nuther ballgame.

So what do you do next? Go get a job at a pizza joint, Taco Bell or Burger King until you land that dream job you are so desperately seeking? Stop right there. There are plenty of options available to you in open source technology. Developers in open source technology are always looking for someone who is going to help create the next new groundbreaking application that will take the world by storm. And the best part is, it's free and, in most cases, you can work from the comfort of your own home.

The key to being successful in the IT industry is interning while still attending college and taking some certification courses after graduation. Do some research. Find an open source technology company that will provide you with the tools and resources you will need to build your career. Open source spans platforms, middleware and applications from data centers to desktops. There are many companies that offer internship programs and certification courses.

Google and Red Hat are major contributors to Linux and open source technology. According to Google, each time you use the Google search engine, you are using open source software, which relies on the Linux kernel, GCC, Python and Samba, and commits code into each of those projects. Google maintains a healthy relationship with the open source software development community by releasing Google-created code, providing vital infrastructure, and by creating new open source software developers through programs such as the Google Summer of Code. Red Hat offers a summer intern program and certification courses for undergraduates, graduates, and candidates who hold a master's degree in business administration.

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Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project.

Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and .NET Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon.

Under increased global pressure from technology regulators and open-source competitors, Microsoft has moved toward a more open development policy for some time. In February it made its boldest move yet to support open source by promising greater transparency in both its software development and business practices, and opening up previously proprietary APIs to some of its major products, such as Windows and Office, for third-party use.

On Friday, Microsoft strengthened those efforts by becoming a platinum sponsor of Apache, a sponsorship that includes a US$100,000 donation to the organisation. According to Microsoft, it has communicated with Apache in the past but has never contributed to the foundation in this way.

Microsoft also is providing code to a project called ADOdb, which is a database abstraction library that allows PHP-based applications to communicate with a range of databases. PHP is an open-source, freely available scripting language developers widely use for web development.

Through Microsoft's contribution, ADOdb can now communicate natively with SQL Server's database driver, the company said.

Microsoft is adding to the list of protocols covered under its Open Specification Promise (OSP) as well, including protocols for technologies built into Windows Server and the .NET Framework.

The company launched OSP in September 2006 as a pledge that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against those who use certain technology APIs. Protocols released as part of OSP can be freely used by third-party developers.

In addition to its increased open-source investments, Microsoft released updates to IronRuby, an implementation of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .NET programming framework. The company said it plans to ship all standard Ruby libraries implemented in the Ruby programming language as part of its IronRuby distribution.

It's also participating in the RubySpec project, which aims to write a publishable specification for the Ruby programming language, and has created a separate open-source project under the Microsoft Public Licence called IronRuby-Contrib. That project aims to promote collaborative development of code for IronRuby.

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Using "traditional" gene therapy, you'd infect the patient with a virus containing a good copy of the gene, hoping the DNA inserts into the person's genome in a spot that doesn't trigger cancer.

"There's got to be a better way," you tell yourself--and there is. About a decade ago, researchers began developing a new strategy that relies on proteins called zinc finger nucleases that bind to a very specific place on a chromosome. The nucleases work like scissors, cutting the DNA at this precise location--say, the site of your defective gene--so that the gene can be repaired. The technique has worked in fruit fly, plant, and even human cells. But there's a hitch: The best zinc finger nucleases come from a company called Sangamo BioSciences, which until now has shared them only through chosen academic collaborations (Science, 23 December 2005, p. 1894).

That's about to change. A consortium of eight labs led by molecular biologist J. Keith Joung at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has come up with what they call an "open-source" method of making efficient zinc finger nucleases. The group created an archive of 66 "pools," or sets, of individual zinc fingers that have been selected to bind different DNA sequences. Zinc finger nucleases fashioned with these finger pools made specific edits in a plant gene and three human genes at relatively high efficiencies--1% to 50% of treated cells had the desired changes, according to a report today in Molecular Cell. That's comparable to efficiencies reported by Sangamo and by researchers using traditional gene therapy methods.

The consortium has stored the 66 pools of zinc fingers in a freezer, and any lab will be able to order them from a nonprofit distributor at a low cost of perhaps $200 per pool, says Joung. (Researchers will need at least six pools to modify a single gene.) The group also plans to make more pools--192 are needed to target all possible sites in the human genome. "I think it's a game changer. It gives academics the ability to make these proteins without going to Sangamo," says Joung. Although Sangamo has patents on using zinc finger nucleases, the company so far has not exerted any intellectual property claims against academic researchers, he says.

Other experts are excited, too. "I am delighted to see this article," say zinc finger nuclease inventor Srinivasan Chandrasegaran of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who believes Sangamo's restrictions have slowed the field. Chemist Scot Wolfe of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester says that although researchers will still need to assemble the pools of zinc fingers into nucleases and select the best ones, a postdoc or grad student in a molecular biology lab should be able to do this within 1 or 2 months.

Sangamo plans to begin selling custom-made zinc fingers nucleases this fall through the chemical supplier Sigma-Aldrich. But Wolfe says that the $25,000 per set that Sigma-Aldrich expects to charge is "a lot of money." The new open-source method "is an important step forward," he says.

Sangamo research Vice President Philip Gregory says that although using the consortium's method is a "labor-intensive process," the paper is "a powerful validation" of using zinc finger nucleases for genome engineering.

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78 percent of survey participants said "the affordable price of open source software" is motivating their customers.

The survey also revealed that open source companies are serious about collaboration. Nearly all of the survey respondents -- 97 percent -- reported that they have "active partnerships" with other open source software and services companies.

The average survey participant had 10 such partnerships.

“We knew that collaboration was important to open source companies, but this statistic was surprising,” said Dominic Sartorio, senior director of product management for SpikeSource and president of the Open Solutions Alliance.

The survey also shows that 85 percent of participants sell open source products or services that run on Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows or otherwise interoperate with Microsoft products.

In all 46 companies responded to the survey, both OSA members and non-members.

The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit, vendor neutral consortium dedicated to driving the interoperability and adoption of comprehensive open solutions.

In April the Open Solutions Alliance held its first annual board of director elections.

 The OSA, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in February, filled three vacant board positions by electing Deb Woods, vice president of product marketing at Ingres; Josep Mitjà, chief operating officer at Openbravo; andAnthony Gold ( News - Alert), vice president and general manager for the Open Source Business at Unisys.  

They join existing board members Michael Harvey, EVP and CMO at Concursive, and Dominic Sartorio, OSA President and Senior Director of Product Management at SpikeSource.

Sartorio said the OSA "will continue to capitalize on its strength of being a diverse, multilateral organization with a shared goal of better interoperability of open-source point products and further adoption of open source in the enterprise."

The board's initial focus will be setting marketing priorities for the organization, specifically around new-member recruitment and best practices through the OSA's flagship project, the Common Customer View, or CCV, which works across back-office and front-office applications to show customer interactions.

 Prior to her time at Ingres Woods was Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat (News - Alert).

Mitjà was reelected to the board for a second term and was active last year in establishing a European chapter of the OSA. Gold is a 20-year veteran atUnisys ( News - Alert) where he leads the open source business.

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These new uses have expanded the open-source database market to $850m this year, a figure Forrester sees rising to $1.2bn by 2010. The revenue figures include income from training, technical support, consulting or a commercial licence for the database.

The study found the market is led by MySQL - bought by Sun in February for $1bn, more than the total size of the market - with other popular choices including Ingres, Oracle-owned BerkeleyDB, PostgreSQL, which forms the basis for commercial systems from EnterpriseDB and Greenplum, and Apache's Derby project.

Forrester database analyst Noel Yuhanna said open-source databases can now meet about 80 per cent of existing business application needs.

Yuhanna wrote in the Forrester market update: "Open-source databases have come a long way in delivering reliable, robust and secure database platforms."

He said deployments examined by Forrester have demonstrated the level of maturity now attained by open source.

He wrote: "Some customers are running mission-critical transactional deployments with over 3TB of data on open-source databases, while others are running very large workloads that support hundreds and thousands of concurrent users."

The research found that open-source users are avoiding replacing existing proprietary systems because of the cost of migration and technical challenges in changing from proprietary SQL extensions and application programming interfaces.

While tools now exist to ease the technical side of a migration, these are only capable of handling about four-fifths of the work, the rest of which must be done manually, Yuhanna noted.

The effort of rewriting stored procedures, applications and queries also adds to the complexity of migration, he wrote.

Nonetheless, Forrester found many companies are staying away from proprietary vendors for new projects, largely in order to avoid licence fees, and or are going with open source for particular applications such as development and testing environments.

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Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community. When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that's a lost opportunity for open-source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users.

So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. for the OpenOffice.org open-source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

"Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say, 'Why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,'" Suarez-Potts said.

Around the world, he said, many national governments are realizing that this hurts them, too, because their citizens are then consumers of stolen technology rather than active participants in open-source communities that can help people gain technology skills that benefit workforces and nations.

By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity -- as well as job growth and richer economies -- through open-source development, he said.

"China wants to create workers who can do this and create and sustain wealth," rather than just sell pirated software that doesn't improve the lives of the country's people, Suarez-Potts said. "We will all benefit if they are creating interesting things."

Other nations, including India, are making similar discoveries, he said. "They really quite clearly see that they should have their own intellectual ecosystems. China is now embracing open source and is asking how they can work with the international communities; likewise in India and Latin America."

In a report last week, Washington-based software trade association the Business Software Alliance (BSA) found that six U.S. states -- California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio and Texas -- make up $3.93 billion in pirated software losses in the U.S., or almost half of the $8.04 billion in national losses to software vendors from pirated software last year.

The BSA also conducts annual studies of piracy in countries around the world (download PDF).

The latest version of the OpenOffice suite, Version 3.0, is in its second beta version but is expected to be released in final Version 3.0 form by early fall, Suarez-Potts said, noting that so far, the beta version is generating about 2 million downloads each week.

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Sun also announced that it is open sourcing core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy technologies under a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license in the Web Stack sub-project of the OpenSolaris community. The Web and Proxy source code will be available later this year.

Sun will provide version control for its supported Web Stack across multiple operating systems so that applications developed for one operating system can be deployed on another with minimal changes. Enterprise support is planned to be available for Solaris later in the year, followed by Linux (LAMP), Windows, and other OS support to follow.

The Web stack consists of Web and proxy servers, scripting languages and a database that enables developers to deploy Web applications quickly and easily. The primary components in the Web Stack include (partial list) the Apache HTTP Web server version 2.2.8, Apache Modules Memcached 1.2.5 (distributed memory object system), MySQL 5.1 Database, lighttpd Web server v 1.4.18, Tomcat Servlet engine 6.0.16, PHP 5.2.5, Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, RubyGems 0.9.0, Mongrel 1.0.1, fcgi package, RedCloth (text parsing), Perl 5.8.8 and extensions, Squid proxy server 2.16.x.

Sun also announced that, in conjunction with Joyent, that it will be providing up to 12 months free web hosting on Joyent's Cloud for the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial. Joyent's Cloud is a flexible first-class infrastructure powered by OpenSolaris on Sun's servers. They will also be providing training on web-scale application development, so that developers can deploy their social applications on an open infrastructure at no initial cost.

"Social applications are one of the fastest growing software categories and will continue momentum with the promise of monetization offered by Hi5, Facebook, Myspace, Google's Orkut, LinkedIn Glam and other social networking sites with memberships that number in the millions," said Sun's Juan Carlos Soto,. "With this new program, Sun can provide social application developers access to Sun's technology and expertise in building large-scale applications with Joyent helping them to deploy on a highly scalable and reliable platform."

Additionally, Sun announced the availability of Sun http://wiki.opensso.orgOpenSSO Express, an offering that provides enterprise support and indemnification for the technologies available in the OpenSSO project. OpenSSO is the world's largest open source, identity management project, providing highly scalable, high-performance single sign-on, access management, federation, and secure web services capabilities.

New versions of Sun OpenSSO Expresswill be released approximately every three months to provide fast moving organizations with early access to the latest technologies available in the OpenSSO community.

Founded 18 months ago, the OpenSSO community includes members from companies like Audi, Medavie Blue Cross, Telenet and France Telecom. Started as a Sun-sponsored open source project, the OpenSSO community provides core identity functionality, such as: single sign-on, access management, federation and secure web services in a single Java technology-based distribution. The community also bases their development on enterprise-focused standards, including SAML 2.0, XACML, and WS-Federation, in addition to creating extensions to OpenSSO through sub-projects around other protocols like OpenID and Information Cards.

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