JPL Engineer: Open Source Helps Fix Govt. Procurement
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In an article published today for CIO Magazine, Jet Propulsion Laboratory software engineer D. J. Byrne writes that the cultural synergies between open source software developers and space technology engineers have made it possible for his team to execute complex software projects without the hassle of all that government oversight and procurement paperwork.
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Cobra, a .Net-based programming language, is being readied for open source release as an all-in-one solution to address multiple needs in software development.Now in a beta stage of development, plans call for offering the language as an open source offering later this month under the MIT license and having a general, 1.0 release ready some time this year, said Chuck Esterbrook, the author of Cobra. Cobra runs on .Net and Novell's Mono, which enables .Net applications to run on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS, and Windows."The idea is to take productivity boosters that are currently scattered among different languages and bring them together in one language so you can get the benefits of all of them at the same time," Esterbrook said. Cobra is intended as a general-purpose language for building any type of application.Users would get static and dynamic binding, which is featured in Objective-C and Boo; the expressiveness and quick coding of Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk; and the runtime performance of C#, Java, and C++, the Cobra Web site says. First-class language support for unit tests, now highlighted in D, also would be part of Cobra.Also featured is a software contracts capability for object-oriented programming. Software contracts serve as an interface to the methods they describe, Esterbrook said. This capability currently is featured in the Eiffel and D platforms.Cobra could save developers work. Citing the example of a program developed in Python and then ported to C++ for performance reasons, Esterbrook said Cobra is different in that it offers both rapid development and performance.Cobra serves as a compiled language that has optional dynamic binding, providing improved error messages and performance, Esterbrook said. Development of Cobra is being done on both Macintosh and Windows; it also is being tested on Linux.Additional refinements in Cobra include defaulting to accurate decimal math and detailed postmortem exception reports. Cobra offers "a practical synthesis of already-proven features that are currently scattered across multiple languages," the Cobra site states.Cobra's naming was derived from its taking its syntax from Python. Until Microsoft's Lang.Net Symposium in Redmond, Wash., last week, the project was in a stealth mode, with fewer than 10 serious users.
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Open source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census -- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.The number of licenses sold gives vendors of proprietary software a pretty good idea of how many people are using their code, assuming there are not too many pirated copies in use, or licensed copies gathering dust on shelves. They can also draw on information about paid upgrades or service contracts, or sell unique license keys, verified by a central server each time the software is installed -- or even used.Open source software developers have no such luck; the very nature of open source licenses makes such verification methods impossible. One clue they have is a count of how many people have downloaded the software from their Web sites. Reaching 1 million downloads is a rite of passage for open source projects.&#160;SugarCRM, for example, passed that landmark in May.Such counts, though, may underestimate the number of users, as anyone who obtains open source software is free to redistribute it by any other means they choose -- as long as they accompany it with a copy of the open source license and make the source code readily available.On the other hand, they may wildly overestimate the number; people may download the software with no intention of using it, since there is no financial disincentive to doing so, or they may download it multiple times if they upgrade it, wipe and reinstall their system, or have several computers.To come up with an accurate figure for the number of users of various open source applications in the enterprise, OpenLogic has released an automated census tool, OSS Discovery, itself available under an open source license.It hopes that businesses will scan their machines using the tool and contribute the data about the applications they are using to an open database.The tool could offer advantages to IT managers too, said OpenLogic, enabling them to build up a picture of the software installed on desktops and servers around their business and compare it with that used in other enterprises.OpenLogic is looking for partners to distribute or deploy the software and wants open source software developers to contribute digital &quot;fingerprints&quot; of their applications that will enable the discovery tool to identify them. Those who help with the project will be offered access to the anonymous data gathered.OSS Discovery 2.0 is based on the company&#39;s OpenLogic Discovery tool and is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. This recently introduced license extends the GPL license to ensure that changes to software used to power publicly available services will be contributed to the free software community, even if the modified software is not itself distributed.OpenLogic hopes to begin collecting census data early next year.
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Hoping to put in place the last missing piece of the Java stack, Gluecode Software and the Apache Software Foundation this week unwrapped Project Agila, which the companies claim is the first embeddable open source BPM engine.
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Up against competition for markets and for hiring staff, Indian software outsourcers are focusing on building reusable software that automates specific business processes. These software components can in turn be used across a number of clients, saving costs, and time.
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Blog: It's true that open-source applications and infrastructure don't necessarily play well together today, as Microsoft suggests.  But it's also true that more than enough integration is in place for current market demand.
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Still in stealth mode, a company looks to use open source to make it easier to build social applications on the Web.
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Company's third open-source contribution is the first time it has shared code for actual application.
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Open-source backers plan to launch a "census" project next year that would allow companies -- using a tool devised by OpenLogic -- to figure out how extensively they use open-source software.
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Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
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The US Dept. of Homeland Security and two research partners have detected significant flaws in Samba, Python, Perl, and about 180 other open source projects -- but fixes are on the way.
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In areas such as CRM software and portals, open source gained a foothold because users were willing to compromise -- less could be more, because the price was right. In security, open source rushed in because commercial vendors fell down on the job. As security problems in the enterprise outstripped the capabilities of commercial solutions, a number of talented security researchers stepped into the breach via the open source model.
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(InfoWorld) - The open-source community doesn't always deliver software that customers want, according to Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems Inc. "The community builds what it thinks is good, but it is not always the same as what the customer thinks is good,â Levy said this week in Bangalore, India, where he visited BEA's R&D (research and development) center. The Apache Tomcat servlet container, for example, is not strong on management, because management features weren't seen as very important by the community, although BEA customers wanted it, Levy said. So BEA had to build a Tomcat management console for its WebLogic Java server platform, he said. BEA has adopted what it calls a "blended strategy" on open source. It has put products in open source, to take advantage of the innovation that comes from community development, and also supports open-source technologies like Spring and Hibernate on its own products, Levy said. BEA announced earlier this year that it will put in open source a significant portion of BEA Kodo, its persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. BEA acquired Kodo after purchasing SolarMetric Inc. last November. Open JPA is a set of Java persistence APIs (application programming interfaces) that are based on the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB 3) standard. "We pushed Kodo out in open source and we now have 2,000 people working on it, as against 50 people when we bought the company," Levy said. But there are other products that BEA will not release as open source so that it can retain full control over their development, Levy said. "The reality of life, specially businesses, is that you have to be a good corporate citizen, you want to know where a piece of code came from, because if you donât control it, how do you know there is nothing malicious in it," he added. BEA has bet the farm on SOA (service-oriented architecture) because it will be fundamental to the way businesses are run, Levy said. Industry and users can easily get taken in by the hype that SOA is going to halve IT costs, Levy said. There are some cost savings in deploying SOA, but the technology's real benefit is the agility and competitive advantage it gives companies to think up and add business services quickly, he added. Without SOA, adding a service involved a time-consuming process to integrate it with the company's existing services, Levy said. With SOA, a company can add a service without making any system changes, Levy said. Deploying SOA will also free company resources to focus on business processes, rather than the underlying IT infrastructure. "If you look at the total effort that is being used from business needs to applications and production, today it is very skewed towards IT," Levy said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), UK, has finally given the green signal persuading governments to consider the deployment of open source while implementing new systems.
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Blog: As an industry we are terrible at working on interoperability.  The open source world should be the one to fix this.
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The Open Solutions Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by a number of commercial open source vendors, released a survey on Wednesday that found interoperability is a foremost concern among open source software customers.The group, which includes CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, and others, contended in a statement that if its members overcome interoperability challenges, they stand to &quot;out-Microsoft Microsoft by offering a fully interoperable suite of business tools.&quot;&quot;We think interoperability has to be a core feature [of open source software] from the very beginning,&quot; OSA&#39;s president, Dominic Sartorio, said in an interview. &quot;Most commercial open source companies are finding a good amount of success. But how many opportunities are they leaving on the table because they&#39;re not interoperable?&quot;The OSA singled out Microsoft, as opposed to Oracle or SAP, because its member companies mostly target midmarket customers, according to Sartorio. &quot;We have one common competitor: Microsoft.&quot;OSA derived the study&#39;s findings from a series of forums it held this year in Europe and the United States. It said some 100 people attended the events.Participants cited a variety of interoperability scenarios and concerns, including single sign-on for identity management.Another involved user interface interoperability. &quot;A lot of people try to plug open source projects into an enterprise portal, and they want a unified look and feel,&quot; Sartorio said.Customers also cited cross-platform portability and data integration challenges.In addition, the study found that:-- Lower up-front cost was the most important driver for adoption of open source products, but this was tempered by concerns that spending on support and services would be greater. That feeling in turn was mitigated by a belief among respondents that open source products will become more mature over time and easier to support.-- Few customers cited the ability to customize source code as a selling point for open source applications, preferring instead that it handle their needs out of the box.Sartorio said OSA&#39;s work will continue in 2008. &quot;This is going to be an ongoing effort. We&#39;re scratching the surface here with issues customers brought up in these forums,&quot; he said.
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(InfoWorld) - Up against competition for markets and for hiring staff, Indian software outsourcers are focusing on building reusable software that automates specific business processes. These software components can in turn be used across a number of clients, saving costs, and time. Top Indian outsourcers such as Infosys Technologies Ltd. and HCL Technologies Ltd. for example, have developed a variety of components including an RFID (radio frequency ID) component for supply chain applications, according to Forrester Research Inc. senior analyst Sudin Apte. Currently, outsourcers' business models are largely based on a cost-plus model where they add more staff to a project to get more revenue. "They are trying to break out of this linearity and dependence on low-cost staff alone," Apte said. Midsize outsourcers are also investing in creating reusable components, consisting of business applications or middleware. "If you look at the applications we develop, about 30 to 35 percent are common across various applications, so there is an opportunity to make them reusable," said Bala Variyam, vice president for IT delivery at iGate Global Solutions Ltd., an outsourcing company in Bangalore. The company develops prebuilt components that can be used across a variety of industries, as well as business components for banking and financial services that are quickly configured and deployed for customers, Variyam said. Besides developing components in-house, iGate is also looking at open-source components. "We are looking, for example, at an open-source trading platform that can be used for capital markets and investment banking applications," Variyam said. Among multinational services companies, IBM Corp., for example, set up last year in India a Global Business Solutions Center as the company's global hub for the management and creation of reusable software components. IBM also set up last year development centers in Beijing, China, and Pune, India, that focus on developing industry-specific SOA (service-oriented architecture) services that are reusable across various customers. In the short term, this strategy will require Indian companies to invest in top quality staff to understand the business problem and the technology and develop the software. Most Indian companies like Infosys and HCL that are developing reusable components have large teams that are not immediately billable, so they don't earn direct revenue for their companies, Apte said. In the long term, though, these companies could probably have less demand for new staff as they reuse software across a large number of customers, according to Apte. IGate is already seeing dramatic time savings of up to 30 percent on applications development, though time taken on the design and testing phases does not change, Variyam said. Customers are also demanding components that have already been proven across other deployments, Variyam added.