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Firefox 23 set to boost open source dev tools

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:28:49 +0200

I have learned more about web dev by using Mozilla's tools and looking at the guts of website than any other source (by far).

The upcoming Firefox 23 release, currently scheduled for General Availability on August 6th is set to include a pile of developer tools that are both unique and at the same time, very familiar.

One of the improved 'familiar' tools is the Network Monitor. Chrome users already enjoy an awesome network monitor type tool that is in the 'inspect element' feature. Firefox kinda/sorta has pretended to have something similar (via Inspect element/web console) but with Firefox 23 the plan is to fully realize network visibility into page traffic

Firefox 23 is also set to enable a functional App Cache.

"If you have ever used the application cache you will probably be familiar with how easy it is to break offline functionality and how difficult it is to work out why things are broken," Mozilla developer Mike Ratcliffe, wrote in a blog post. "I guess that what I am saying is that the application cache is a douchebag."

The other interesting bit from my very narrow perspective is a small bug fix that will now make URLs clickable in the Style Inspector.

It's the little things that count after all...

Source of this information:

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/firefox-23-set-to-boost-open-source-dev-tools.html

Author: Sean Michael Kerner

Ubuntu working on new Linux application installer

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:22:02 +0200

Do you want to know how to tell real Linux geeks from people who just use it? Ask them what their favorite application packaging system is. Hardcore old-school Linux users will soon be telling you all all about RPM vs. DEB and before it's over someone is sure to chime in about going straight to source code ala Gentoo Linux's Portage.

The short version is there's a lot of Linux software application packing and installation systems out there already but Ubuntu will soon be adding another one.

Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is doing this because, as Ubuntu moves into attempting to become popular consumer operating system on smartphones and tablets, it needs a faster, easier way for independent software vendors (ISV)s to get their programs to customers. The Ubuntu developer site describes the software installation problem in these terms:

Today we face a significant challenge in Ubuntu. If an application author wants to get the latest version of their software in Ubuntu they have two options:

1. An Ubuntu developer packages the software and delivers it in the development release.

2. The app developer can submit their apps via MyApps in the stable release for review.

Neither are ideal. So it is that:

The goal here is to provide a safe, reliable means in which app developers can upload their stable releases directly into Ubuntu.

With this goal in mind we want to resolve the common bottlenecks that we have experienced with the current process for app developers:

We should not rely on manual reviews of software before inclusion. Manual reviews have been found to cause a significant bottleneck in the MyApps queue and they won’t scale effectively as we grow and open up Ubuntu to thousands of apps.

Requiring app installation into the /opt directory is significantly challenging to app developers and not well supported in Ubuntu; this should be made transparent to the developer.

We also want to enhance the platform experience for both users and developers who are building applications for Ubuntu:

Provide a standard, stable and useful platform for developers, and a rapid path to delivering their apps to Ubuntu users

Give users a safer access to the growing ecosystem of independent applications being developed for Ubuntu.

Keep the user informed and in control over who is providing the software they install, and what access to their system it will have.

Colin Watson, a long-time Canonical software engineer who's worked on both Debian and Ubuntu Linux, explained -- in an e-mail message to the Ubuntu developers mailing list -- how they're addressing these issues. The goal, Watson wrote, is "to make it quicker and easier for app developers to get their software into Ubuntu. There are several pieces … but it seems clear that one of those is some kind of simplified packaging format which we can offer to third-party application developers."

This does not mean that Ubuntu is going to dump the DEB method it currently uses. Watson wrote, "This is not aimed at changing packages that are already part of the Ubuntu archive; for the most part our existing system works well for those, and they tend to have non-trivial dependency structures. We'll continue to use dpkg and apt for building the Ubuntu operating system, syncing with Debian, and so on."

Instead, the scope of what Watson has been been working on is for a package management setup for "apps built on a fixed 'base system,' which in the case of the initial target of the Ubuntu phone/tablet work would be the runtime part of the Ubuntu SDK [Software Developer Kit]. The radically-reduced dependency structure means that most apps will be Ubuntu-SDK-specific to start with, although I'd like to make sure that the package format design includes enough support up-front to allow this to be useful for other platforms that define suitable base system profiles in future."

This is still very much a work in progress. As for the obvious objection of why not use one of the existing Linux package systems, or even borrow Android's Android application package file (APK), Watson replied, "Many of the existing app packaging systems are more of a reflection of the system they were built for than anything else. If you look at, say, Android's APK format, it's essentially a zip file with a manifest and some conventions about Dalvik class installation and the like. Most of the other mobile app formats are similar. Things like Listaller might be a reasonable fit, but I'm worried about importing things like a full dependency solver into this: much though I love dependency-based packaging systems, they necessarily involve scanning the system packaging database at some point and I would much prefer app packages to be as independent of that as possible, mainly for performance but also to be as bulletproof as possible."

That's not to say that Ubuntu is re-inventing the wheel. Watson wrote, "The proof of concept I wrote also isn't entirely new code. It's tiny due to using .deb as a container format (minus maintainer scripts, full dependencies, etc.), so I get to save effort by using dpkg to unpack things, which leaves us room to selectively use more of its features in future if we want to." As Watson added in another message, "To be clear - hi Slashdot - I'm very fond of the dpkg/apt system and have put a great deal of effort into it over the last decade or so, both on my own time and for pay; I think it's excellent and have no desire to kill it.

So, while Ubuntu will be adding yet another Linux program packaging method, it's building on what's gone before to give ISVs a quick and simple way to get their applications to Ubuntu touch device users. While it's very much a work in progress, the end result should help Ubuntu have a rich set of applications when Ubuntu smartphones and tablets start shipping later this year.

Source of this information:

http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-working-on-new-linux-application-installer-7000015174/

Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Five Star Movement urges Italian city of Bari to move to open source

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:02:49 +0200

The group earlier this month made a formal request to the city administration to list which open source solutions it is already using. "We suspect that open source is practically non-existent", explains Fabio Leli, one of the activists for the Five Star Movement in the city. "This is absolutely unacceptable, for there are municipalities much smaller than ours, that are reporting significant savings by using open source."

One example would be the city administration of Modena. It has 186 000 citizens, just over half the number of citizens in Bari (319 000 citizens) and according to Leli, Modena is saving more than one million euro a year by using open source solutions.

The Bari administration was supposed to publish its IT strategy last month, Leli says. "We are still waiting for it." Free and open source solutions are so far not included explicitly in the city's earlier IT strategies. "That is why we will present our own projects and plans. If the municipality continues to avoid open source, we will make it part of the electoral programme for next year."

The Five Star Movement has no elected representatives in the council of Bari. The group participated in the 2009 municipal elections but did not win any seats. Leli: "We had just started our local chapter that year." However, at the general elections in February this year, the party got 27 percent of the local votes. The movement now expects to win not only seats in the city council, but estimates it has a change to replace even the mayor. "In 2009, our candidate already came fourth, out of a total of nine. Until then, we will continue calling and planning for Bary to switch to open source solutions."

Source of this information:

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/five-star-movement-urges-italian-city-bari-move-open-source

Author: Gijs Hillenius

'Portugal's municipalities increasingly use open source for geoinformation'

Lotte Nielsen — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:00 +0200

The GIS specialist was one of the open source GIS pioneers in the country. In 2010 he used, among others Quantum GIS, GRASS, GVSIG and many other open source components, to produce and update a forest fire hazard and risk maps. "This open source-based approach has not been officially adopted by the national Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests, but it is being used by many municipalities."

An extensive test of open source software alternatives for wildfire risk area mapping, was published by Venâncio on the Quantum GIS project website, in October 2012. "(The open source alternatives) proved to be of enormous quality, allowing all operations recommended in the National Forest Authority technical guides, in many ways more efficiently than with proprietary software."

The GIS engineer regularly presents the open source approach by the municipality of Pinhel. In September 2012 for instance, he addressed the attendees of a conference of municipal risk specialists. He showed them how to automatically produce hazard maps and forest fire risk maps, using nothing but open source. "This is well-established in the municipality of Pinhel, after several years of testing. The whole process, to calculate and map wildfire risks, requires very little human intervention."

Promoting this approach at a conference on open source GIS, in November 2011, he concluded: "The savings, when multiplied by all of Portugal's 308 municipalities, can be huge."

Source of this information:

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/portugals-municipalities-increasingly-use-open-source-geoinformation

Author: Gijs Hillenius

Debian Linux now Google Compute Engine's default OS

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:33:59 +0200

Earlier in May, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Google site reliability engineer and Debian developer, announced that Google would not just be adding Debian 6 and 7 images to the Google's infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Google Compute Engine (GCE); it was also making Debian Linux its default server image.

Kaplowitz, one of several Debian developers who works for Google, wrote, "Today, we're adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine. Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 'wheezy' and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 'squeeze'. This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine."

This comes on the heels of Debian releasing its next major version, 7.0. On the GCE, this version, and its predecessor, 6.0, "Google is hosting a Debian package mirror for use by Google Compute Engine Debian instances". Google has also updated its operating system image documentation, and will support Debian via its usual GCE support packages.

In addition, GCE will continue to support the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone CentOS. Ubuntu, which had been supported, is no longer a primary GCE distribution. Advanced users can also set up and use their own Linux images. You cannot, however, run any non-Linux operating system on GCE.

The Google Compute Engine itself is based on Linux. It uses the KVM hypervisor to run its Linux instances. While meant as competition for Amazon Web Services (AWS), GCE is still in beta. It's currently available only to users with a Google $400-per-month Gold cloud support package.

Source of this information:

http://www.zdnet.com/debian-linux-now-google-compute-engines-default-os-7000015297/

Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

New Yorker unveils open source whistleblower system designed by activist Aaron Schwartz

Lotte Nielsen — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:27:32 +0200

The New Yorker magazine on Wednesday unveiled a new online system for anonymous whistleblower tips, based on technology developed by the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz and a former hacker.

The system called Strongbox was unveiled amid an uproar in the news media over the US government seizure of phone logs from the Associated Press, in a probe of a news leak which officials said threatened national security.

“This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity,” senior editor Amy Davidson said.

“The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.”

Swartz, an activist who committed suicide in January as he faced a potential prison sentence for breaking into a university research database, developed the system with Kevin Poulsen, a former hacker who is now an editor at Wired magazine.

The New Yorker said the system was designed to avoid putting media organizations at the center of investigations of news leaks.

“Readers and sources have long sent documents to the magazine and its reporters, from letters of complaint to classified papers,” Davidson said.

“But, over the years, it’s also become easier to trace the senders… Strongbox addresses that; as it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”

The system aims to encourage the anonymous submission of newsworthy information, in the manner of WikiLeaks and other Internet sites.

The Wall Street Journal set up its own tip system in May 2011 called SafeHouse.

Poulsen said Swartz agreed to work on the secure-submission system “with the understanding that the code would be open-source.”

“The New Yorker, which has a long history of strong investigative work, emerged as the right first home for the system,” Poulsen said in a posting on the New Yorker website.

Source of this information:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/15/new-yorker-unveils-open-source-whistleblower-system-designed-by-activist-aaron-schwartz/

Author: Agence France-Presse

Firefox 21 with social providers Cliqz, open source fonts and more

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:25:00 +0200

The new desktop version was available yesterday on the organization’s FTP servers last night, but that was just the initial release of the installers. Firefox 21 has now officially been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.

Desktop

Mozilla is expanding the list of partners using Firefox’s Social API feature. The additions include Cliqz, Mixi, and MSN Now. Weibo, which was part of the Nightly release, is notably missing.

The Social API first arrived in Firefox 17 back in November 2012. Mozilla says it developed the feature “to enable social providers to integrate directly into Firefox to make your browsing experience more social, customizable and personal.”

In other words, the integration lets you keep up with the latest social happenings without having to switch between, or open new, tabs. This is done with a Firefox sidebar featuring your content or notification buttons directly on the browser’s toolbar.

Mozilla’s first partner in its social endeavor was Facebook, not just because it’s the world’s largest social network, but also because the company helped flesh out the API. Ever since December 2012, when the two officially flipped the switch, Firefox users have been able to send Facebook messages right from the browser, no matter what site they’re on; as my colleague Ken Yeung put it, “you could be on Twitter and still send Facebook messages.”

A quick breakdown for each of the three new providers added today follows.

Cliqz delivers a real-time stream of relevant articles, stories, and videos based on your interests directly to Firefox. In the upper left of the sidebar, you can personalize your news feed by selecting categories, keywords, websites, and specific people you want to follow. Share links across your social networks or by email; preview Twitter commentary; and save articles for later without ever leaving Firefox.

Source of this information:

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/05/14/firefox-21-arrives-with-social-providers-cliqz-mixi-msn-now-open-source-fonts-and-html5-tweaks-for-android/

Author: Emil Protalinski

Open Source Software: It’s Eating the Software World

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:20:00 +0200

Going forward, we can expect more disruption from open source, new business models, and many more exciting new projects and companies.”

A recent report by North Bridge and Black Duck on the 2013 Open Source software found three main trends:

Businesses view Open Source as having high quality and as a way to avoid vendor lock-in.
Businesses are adopting Open Source because it solves their problems at a lower cost
Businesses are establishing collaborative partnerships with other businesses through their Open Source relationships. Collaboration is occurring particularly by organizations in government, healthcare and media.

Interestingly, in the ranking of characteristics important to Open Source in the North Bridge report, “Formal Commercial Vendor Support” ranked last. That would imply that businesses are less concerned with having a formal contract in place for support of the software that they use. This finding seems to be at odds with the results from a survey from Univa which found that the lack of enterprise-grade support for Open Source software is typically the biggest barrier businesses have to using Open Source.

The Univa report found that among users of Open Source, 75 percent have experienced some sort of problem. Businesses worry about the stability of Open Source software — whether there will be problems with how the software can be used. 25 percent of users said that they view the stability of the software as the biggest reason to pay for a support contract.

Source of this information:

http://www.formtek.com/blog/?p=3749

Author: Dick Weisinger

AMD'S OPEN-SOURCE SERVERS HIT THE MARKET

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:03:21 +0200

This approach to server design is non-traditional, and so is the group of vendors selling the product, which AMD bills as “the first open-source, modular platform for the masses.” The servers are built by original design manufacturers (ODMs), including Quanta Computer and Tyan, and sold by a group of distributors that includes Avnet, Hyve, Penguin Computing and ZT Systems and, notably, does not include the likes of Dell, HP or IBM, who have traditionally dominated the server market and who also have ODMs like Quanta and Tyan build their products.

Bob Ogrey, cloud evangelist and fellow at AMD, said it was difficult for global IT organizations to choose between price and performance when shopping for servers. Open 3.0 is AMD's answer, promising high performance at low cost.

“Using systems based on the AMD Open 3.0 specification – the first open-source, modular platform for the masses – enables high performance and energy efficiency at a reasonable price, making it the best choice for organizations,” he said.

Lower price has long been AMD's way to answer the question of competition with Intel, whose pricier microchips dominate the server market. But lately, with own server designs and the micro-server maker SeaMicro under its belt, the strategy for competing with the giant is taking on more dimensions.

Ogrey told us in January, when AMD demonstrated Open 3.0 systems for the first time, that the design effort stemmed from a collaboration between him and engineers from Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs. Therefore, the design was largely guided by the financial-services customers' requirements.

He said at the time that both financial firms had been evaluating the servers for use in their data centers.

AMD prefers the ODMs to manufacture its open-source servers because OEMs (original equipment manufacturers like HP, Dell and IBM) usually add their own features. With OEMs, an end user can get the exact same product from multiple manufacturers.

Open 3.0 servers available now are powered by AMD's Opteron 63000 series processors and can be installed in standard 19-inch data center racks or in the Open Rack – an open-source rack Facebook designed and contributed to Open Compute.

The 16-by-16.7-inch motherboard has two Opteron chips, each with 12 memory sockets, six Serial ATA (SATA) connections, one dual-channel gigabit Ethernet NIC (network interface card), up to four PCI Express expansion slots, one serial port, two USB ports and a mezzanine connector for custom module solutions. The motherboards are designed for 1U, 1.5U, 2U and 3U servers.

Source of this information:

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2013/05/amds-open-source-servers-hit-market

Author: Yevgeniy Sverdlik - DatacenterDynamics

Open data: Meaningful, visual information

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:56:56 +0200

One of the most important parts of Raleigh's open data initiative is that it's not just about the data. The City staff working on the data policy and the open data portal have a full and complete understanding that presenting raw data sets only gets you halfway to your open data mission. Without visualization tools or a way for the average person to understand what the data means, the job is only half done. They also understand that providing the right data sets can help spur innovation and create new businesses—which is why they are spending a lot of time trying to understand which data is most important to the Raleigh community.

Behind the scenes, there is a champion leading the effort. An open data guru and a hero to many of us on the open government frontlines. Jason Hare is the Open Data Program Manager from the City of Raleigh Information Technology department. I asked Hare to share his thoughts and to give us a better understanding of how the city is defining open data and what the future holds for Raleigh's open data platform. He provided some great insight for Raleigh's up-and-coming open data initiative.

Q: How do you define open data?

A: Open data is the information infrastructure of the City of Raleigh. When we say "data as infrastructure" we are referring to open data.

Open data, open government, and the freedom of information laws are related and have overlap, but are not the same thing. Open data follows cultural, ethical, and technical rules. Ultimately, open data is defined as data sets created by a government entity and made available to the public. The data sets that are released follow the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) guidelines that govern the machine readability, structural issues, and ethical issues of the data released. Our resolution is based on the OKFN guidelines.

Q: Why is it important that the City of Raleigh hired an open data manager?

A: The City of Raleigh wanted an open data manager to ensure that the open data program is developed in a way that is sustainable, transparent, and accessible. Having an open data manager demonstrates Raleigh's commitment to the idea of "open" in regards to data-driven policy development and community engagement.

Q: What is your vision for Raleigh's open data platform?

A: I am developing a white paper on that topic. The short answer is open data is the start of an acculturation process leading to a transparent and collaborative relationship between city government and citizens.

Open data is a necessary but not sufficient effort in that acculturation process. Open Raleigh, as a brand, will emphasize data accessibility and information usability. We are not tying ourselves to a particular technology. We are building an infrastructure using several technologies to deliver information that is the narrative of the city.

Q: What's the difference between providing an open data set and providing useful open data with visualization?

A: There is no transparency without data usability. Tabular rows of numbers and machine readable formats of GIS shape data and CSV's of budget numbers are going to be there for those that want to analyze the raw data themselves. For the other 99% of the rest of us, there will be visualizations that explain the numbers.

Q: How can Raleigh be a leader in the open data space?

A: We build on the work of the pioneers of the open data community and take lessons learned. I have spoken with most of the leaders within the open data community, with several citizen groups within Raleigh, and most of the city government leaders. We will adhere to the emerging global data standard and the ethical standards of open data as put forth by the OKFN.

We are developing our own principles that match the culture of our city. Open Raleigh will be different than most North American efforts. We are emphasizing engagement and interactivity with our data. It is important to me that the citizen experience is visually compelling and informative. Health, culture, law, economics, science, and education will all be open topics. Anything that affects the quality of life of our citizens will be reflected in the data we share through Open Raleigh.

None of this happens overnight. We start with the infrastructure and build out. This will be an iterative experience. The open data manager will not be the final arbitrator of what Open Raleigh becomes. It will be the citizens and City working together in governance over Open Raleigh.

My job is to facilitate and make the experience a positive one for our citizens.

Source of this information:

http://opensource.com/government/13/5/open-data-visual

Author: Jason Hibbets

The role of open source in cloud infrastructure

Lotte Nielsen — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:16:58 +0200

Why is it that open source wins in infrastructure software? Why do websites run on Cassandra and MongoDB? Why are the biggest clouds in the world built on Linux and open source hypervisors? How come the leading cloud management platforms are open source?

The answer is surprisingly simple. The solution has emerged over the past two decades thanks to Apache, Linux, MySQL and other enormously popular software technologies. When you provide software to people who can and want to develop or maintain software themselves, the code needs to be open. If you provide software to a consumer or to a business, it’s about the service and the business benefits, not about openness per se.

It turns out that the openness requirement by professionals is a generic phenomenon. Anyone can love chicken biryani, but those who enjoy cooking or who are professional chefs will want to know the specifics of how it is prepared and what it contains. The connoisseur and enthusiast require access to the details — not just to have the ability to do the same, but for the ability to verify the quality and modify to fit their needs. The casual consumer will just focus on the experience and the benefits.

As the world goes wild on mobile apps, social networks and Big Data deployments, the underlying infrastructure is changing. From what we had in the client/server and the web era, we are now moving to cloud infrastructures. In our existing app deployments, software is the brittle part and resilience is built into the hardware infrastructure.

In the new world, this changes. It must be assumed that infrastructure will fail every now and then, and it’s up to the app developer to build resilience into the software layer. A very concrete example of this is Netflix, where they have a deliberate process called the Chaos Monkey that brings down compute instances to push the apps (and their developers) to make sure they can survive such failures. The result is higher uptime and greater resiliency.

The shift to a cloud paradigm for hardware and software infrastructure is causing disruption across the entire landscape. We see new development frameworks, configuration management tools, databases, cloud platforms, storage solutions, networking solutions, and so on. Nearly everything is up for grabs. And nearly everything is being snatched up by open source software.

Linux and the KVM hypervisors are becoming the industry norm. Cloud platforms such as Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula are winning the IaaS battle. Storage and file systems such as Riak, Ceph and Swift are expanding their footprint. Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4J and other databases are replacing closed source rivals. In this situation, it is very difficult to bring to market a closed source product. No matter how good your technology may be, it is not exciting for the targeted users if they can’t “see under the hood,” so to speak.

But open source is also not a business panacea. Although the forefathers who wrote the open source licenses did not intend to stifle business opportunities, it so happened that business models built around open source software are a particularly tricky subject. There are numerous open source projects that reached impressive popularity among users but failed to provide a significant revenue opportunity for its creators. If that happens, it helps little that your code is open. Free code exists, but free lunches don’t. Open source developers need to be paid just like closed source developers.

Many attempts have been made to create the perfect business model for open source software. Two main categories have emerged: foundation-based open source projects with multiple productizers (think Linux, Eclipse, and OpenStack) and company-based open source projects with a singular vendor (think JBoss, MySQL, MongoDB, and Eucalyptus). Both models can work wonderfully for vendors and customers, as well as users. The foundation model tends to not provide financial reward to the original innovator nor the software developers. It rewards the corporation that becomes the leading distributor. The singular model tends to reward the original innovator and the key employees of that company.

But in the modern cloud world, it’s not enough to have open source code and a functional business model. We must also take into account interfaces. We must learn to quickly couple and decouple software, and to move workloads from one infrastructure to another. To do this successfully, we need well-defined and commonly accepted APIs. You could say that in 80s, the common standard was the x86 architecture, in 90s open source software became the common standard, and now an additional 15 years later, it is APIs that form the common standard. Young software developers develop on EC2. EC2 is of course a service of Amazon Web Services, but more importantly it represents a new API way of looking at things. It’s the new frontier of openness. And for that reason, the leading software innovations of our times will be EC2 compatible.

Source of this information:

http://www.informationweek.in/open_source/13-05-13/the_role_of_open_source_in_cloud_infrastructure.aspx

Author: Marten Mickos

Anonymous MSFT developer admits Linux is faster than Windows

Lotte Nielsen — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:13:57 +0200

This anonymous, supposed Windows kernel programmer first made his comments on a Hacker News conversation thread. He then followed up with further comments on Marc Bevand's Zorinaq blog. Bevand is a senior software engineer for Adconion, who specializes in high-performance computing (HPC).

The alleged Microsoft developer opened by saying, "Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There's almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world."

It's not that Windows developers don't want to improve their operating system's performance; the problem is that Microsoft's software development culture discourages improvements. The alleged programmer wrote:

Granted, occasionally one sees naive people try to make things better. These people almost always fail. We can and do improve performance for specific scenarios that people with the ability to allocate resources believe impact business goals, but this work is Sisyphean. There's no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business.

See, component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: If you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM [project manager] is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no", and you have very little incentive to say "yes".

There's also little incentive to create changes in the first place. On linux-kernel, if you improve the performance of directory traversal by a consistent 5 percent, you're praised and thanked. Here, if you do that and you're not on the object manager team, then even if you do get your code past the Ob owners and into the tree, your own management doesn't care. Yes, making a massive improvement will get you noticed by senior people and could be a boon for your career, but the improvement has to be very large to attract that kind of attention. Incremental improvements just annoy people and are, at best, neutral for your career. If you're unlucky and you tell your lead about how you improved performance of some other component on the system, he'll just ask you whether you can accelerate your bug glide.

From where he sits, Microsoft is also losing its top talent to the competition. He wrote, "Another reason for the quality gap is that that we've been having trouble keeping talented people. Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, and we hire youths straight from college to replace them. You find SDEs [Microsoft Software Development Engineer] and SDE IIs maintaining hugely import systems. These developers mean well, and are usually adequately intelligent, but they don't understand why certain decisions were made, don't have a thorough understanding of the intricate details of how their systems work, and most importantly, don't want to change anything that already works."

On top of that, he claimed, Microsoft "junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones. (That's literally the explanation for PowerShell. Many of us wanted to improve cmd.exe, but couldn't.)"

For sheer snark, it's hard to beat his thoughts on the NT File System (NTFS): "Oh god, the NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global recursive locks and SEH [Structured Exception Handling] for flow control. Let's write ReFs [ Resilient File System] instead. (And, hey, let's start by copying and pasting the NTFS source code and removing half the features! Then let's add checksums, because checksums are cool, right, and now with checksums we're just as good as ZFS [Z File System] ? Right? And who needs quotas anyway?)"

None of these "revelations" are really that new. Anyone who'd followed Mini-Microsoft, an anonymous insider's view of life in Microsoft's development cubicle farms, or has read comments from disgruntled ex-Microsoft developers such as Hamilton Verissmo, knows about Microsoft's development bureaucracy getting in the way of innovation. As Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, told Forbes Magazine in 2012, being a successful Microsoft software developer "was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers".

In short, Microsoft has become an "old" company. It's no surprise that today, Microsoft focuses more on playing catch-up with tablets and smartphones with misfires such as Windows 8 Metro than actually improving its fundamental software performance.

People are reacting to this new look inside Microsoft as it if were shocking. It's not. As the developer himself added, as the story began to spread through the blogosphere, it "has gotten out of control. I was much too harsh, and I didn't intend this as some kind of massive exposé. This is just grumbling".

In a particular, he semi-apologized for his NTFS comments: "NTFS does use SEH internally, but the filesystem is very solid and well tested. The people who maintain it are some of the most talented and experienced I know. (Granted, I think they maintain ugly code, but ugly code can back good, reliable components, and ugliness is inherently subjective.)"

In an attempt to spin the sum of complaints in a more positive way, he added, "Windows and Microsoft still have plenty of technical talent. We do not ship code that someone doesn't maintain and understand, even if it takes a little while for new people to ramp up sometimes. While I have read and write access to the Windows source and commit to it once in a while, so do tens and tens of thousands of other people all over the world. I am nobody special ... We almost never make decisions individually, and while I maintain that social dynamics discourage risk taking and spontaneous individual collaboration, I want to stress that we are not insane, and we are not dysfunctional. The social forces I mentioned act as a drag on innovation, and I think we should do something about the aspects of our culture that I highlighted, but we're far from crippled. The negative effects are more like those incurred by mounting an unnecessary spoiler on a car than tearing out the engine block. What's indisputable fact is that our engineering division regularly runs and releases dependable, useful software that runs all over the world. No matter what you think of the Windows 8 UI, the system underneath is rock solid, as was Windows 7, and I'm proud of having been a small part of this entire process."

Rock solid? The monthly Microsoft patch Tuesdays and the constant out of schedule zero-day fixes, such as May's IE 8 fix, leaves me doubting, as always, Windows' security and stability, but what else can a Microsoft employee say? In any case, when it comes to speed, Linux, not Windows, as he himself still admitted, remains the clear champ.

Source of this information:

http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-msft-developer-admits-linux-is-faster-than-windows-7000015236/

Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Linux still "benchmark of quality" in this year's Coverity Scan

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:20:18 +0200

The company annually brings together millions of lines of code from open source and, using the same defect-scanning technology that it uses with its enterprise customers, scans that code for problems to produce data on defect densities.

The "accepted industry standard" for defects is 1.0; one in every thousand lines of code. Linux 3.8's 7.6 million lines of code has a defect density of .59, comparing well with 2012 (7.4 million and a .66 density) and 2011 (6.8 million and a .62 density). In general, the code quality of open source code is equivalent to that of proprietary code; Coverity uses an anonymous sample of its 300 customers to give it a defect density for non-open-source code. Proprietary code has an average defect density of 0.68 whilst open source code averages 0.69 – for two years now, the Scan report has shown densities below 1.0.

An interesting element to this years scan is the comparison of proprietary and open source code quality. The analysis looked at the lines of code in projects and how that related to defect density. For small proprietary projects between 500,000 and a million lines, the density was at .98, but as projects passed a million lines the defect rate dropped down to .66. Open source projects between 500,000 and million lines had a density down at 0.44, but, once past the million line mark, that rose to 0.75.

The suggestion is that open source projects start with a dedicated specialised core of developers who create better quality code, but that as the project expands, code management slips. This is compared to a proprietary project where, as the code base expands, more management effort and control would be applied to the code base. Oddly though, at less than a 100,000 lines, the defect density for open source and proprietary is 0.40 and 0.51 respectively, and between 100,000 and 499,999 this jumps up to 0.60 and 0.66 – still quite close.

The Coverity Scan began in 2006 as a US Department of Homeland Security research project to improve quality of code. The DHS ended the project, but Coverity has continued running the service. C, C++ and Java-based open source projects can apply to be scanned and get reports on defects by registering with Coverity. LibreOffice, MariaDB, NetBSD, NGINX, Git, zsh, Thunderbird and Firefox are among the well-known projectsscanned by Coverity Scan. The full report is also available to those who register.

Source of this information:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-still-benchmark-of-quality-in-this-year-s-Coverity-Scan-1858366.html

DRIVING BETTER GOVERNANCE WITH OPEN SOURCE

Lotte Nielsen — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:08:57 +0200

“Fast forward to today. Owing not only to the benefits of the technology, but also to the benefits of the collaborative innovation model, Open Source software has by any measure become mainstream and vital to enterprise and government IT architecture.”

In the Public Sector,Bohannon notes that most governments now are more likely to engage on how open source can help them achieve the innovation they need to be able to serve their citizens today and in the years to come.

“They are increasingly more interested in becoming participants in the open source community, as opposed to simply being purchasers,” he said, adding that this strong global trend allows governments to explore the potential of using Open Source software solutions for a wide variety of infrastructure, platform and application needs.

While government procurement regimes often lag behind those in the commercial sector in terms of adaptability and efficiency,Bohannon explains that there is a growing awareness among procurement specialists of the public sector that the old way of acquiring software has to change and that lock-in is no longer acceptable.

More significantly, the use of technology, including Open Source software, is moving out of the sphere of simply ‘acquiring a product’ to ‘investing in innovation.’

“The take-up of Open Source is increasingly a corollary to the shift of focus where IT is less about inventing intellectual property and selling or licensing it, and more about widely distributing intellectual property and adding value on top of it,” he said.

According to Bohannon, this paradigm shift allowed decision-makers to go from thinking of small ‘procurement’ windows to viewing open source from a broader vantage point that highlights its broad-based benefits to an economy, jobs and innovation and in the government itself.

“One of the most exciting things I’m seeing is governments using Open Source software, as a key component of ‘digital agenda’ initiatives that include open standards and open data policies, to enhance civic engagement,” he said.

“Whether through sponsoring ‘app challenges’ and ‘hackathons’ to generate excitement around new ways of using government services and information, to modernising online web-based services, and governments actually ‘open sourcing’ the software, there is strong evidence that Open Source is indeed driving transparency and better engagement with citizens.”

One example is the work of the U.S. White House to connect citizens (and citizen developers) to government (and government data). The US “Digital Agenda” is carrying out the President’s goal of using technology to make a real difference in individuals’ daily lives. Notably, in carrying out its effort, the White House is committed to “using and contributing back to open source software as a way of making it easier for the government to share data, improve tools and services, and return value to taxpayers.”

Another example is found in Chile, where its “Gobierno Abierto” (Government Portal) initiative is leveraging Open Source software and open data to engage citizens. In addition, the ChileAtiende (Citizen Service), a portal that seeks to bring a wide range of public benefits and services directly to all citizens is also run on Open Source software.

“In addition, since Open Source solutions involve subscriptions as opposed to maintenance fees or licenses found in proprietary solutions, this results in lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).”

Bohannon notes this is consistent with the growing move toward commodity hardware and emphasis on open standards for software interoperability.

“The State of Melaka, Malaysia for example, estimates the open-source revamp of their ITinfrastructure only cost thirty per cent of what they would have spent on a comparable proprietary system.”

“Yet, it is not just cost savings that governments are citing as the unique advantages of open source software,” he notes.

Open Source software allows governments to effectively implement policies of IT reuse, modularity, and avoiding vendor lock-in. It also enables rapid deployment and adjustment as mission needs shift in today’s fast-changing times.

“I frequently hear government CIOs fixing problems in just a few days, or even hours, using Open Source software – fixes that would have taken weeks or months with proprietary or custom built software. With Open Source software, public agencies are able to achieve their goal of maximising taxpayer investment, especially in their IT infrastructure.”

“The Open Source value is increasingly about how to reposition IT infrastructure to be more agile and responsive to changes in mission focus of public agencies and the growing demand by citizens to access services and benefits anytime, anywhere,” he concluded.

Source of this information:

http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2013/may/08/driving-better-governance-open-source/

Author: Clarice Africa

UK government: 'Open source drives commoditisation of IT'

Lotte Nielsen — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:32:54 +0200

The UK government is requiring departments to effectively evaluate use open source solutions. Rashid, speaking at the Open Source, Open Standards Conference on 18 April and at the Open Gov Summit on 25 April, explains that open source helps improve competition in IT markets. The government wants to make its IT systems less monolithic and locked together, with its elements easier to interoperate with each other "For this, open standards are vital", Rashid argues.

At the Open Gov Summit Rashid provided some context of the government's focus on open source opportunities. According to Public Technology, a technology news site, Rashid wants public administrations to change their approach of the IT market. He suggests that they've previously put too much effort into trying to extract discounts from the market, asking suppliers for discounts in return for large volumes of licenses. He suggests this isn't an optimal commercial position. Instead, he recommends public bodies should aim to drive good supplier behaviour through competition, by ensuring the customer has genuine choice. Too often, he suggests, commercial negotiations are not negotiations but requests for a discount where the supplier knows the customer has little choice but to continue renewing licenses for an embedded technology.

The week before, at the Open Standards Conference, Rashid explained that public administrations should avoid 'any kind of lock-in to vendors or technology', according to Steve Parks of IT services provider Wunderkraut. On the company's blog, Park describes Rashid, explaining that over time technology moves from being special and expensive to becoming more widely used and standard. "Ultimately, good technology becomes commodity, with many suppliers and low prices."

At both conferences, Rashid reassured public administrations that open source is nothing to be afraid of and that "serious organisations are using it seriously."

In October 2011 the UK government published its Government ICT strategy. The strategy aims to level the playing field foropen source; one of the practical tools made available with the strategy is an Open Source Procurement Toolkit.

Source of this information:

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/uk-government-open-source-drives-commoditisation-it

Author: Gijs Hillenius