Linux Solutions

Red Hat has announced the arrival of the fourth version of its Enterprise Linux Distro, RHEL 5.3, which adds support for new hardware, a number of virtualisation changes and some other interesting additions. RHEL 5.3 has added over 150 new enhancements, a number of which appeared in Fedora (essentially a development release for RHEL). Some may argue that Fedora stands alone, but it’s clear that Red Hat use Fedora as the foundation for RHEL.

The most notable enhancement in RHEL 5.3 is the support for Intel’s “Nehalem” Core i7 processors – the desktop processors that launched last November and are implemented in a 45 nanometer process, have new micro-architecture and an Opteron-like interconnect called QuickPath – that will be delivered in Servers sometime in March, if all goes to plan.

RHEL 5.3 doesn’t just run on those chips, it also connects to the chip’s power management features, allowing it to save energy, and has been tweaked to take advantage of their simultaneous multi-threading. The Xeon variants of Nehalem for servers will scale up to eight cores, with two visual threads in each core. In a four socket system this will mean that an operating system and its applications will habe 64 threads.

REHL 5.3 also includes OpenJD, which is an open implementation of Jave SE6 development kit and runtime for Java. Red Hat say that the OpenJDK support combined with its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform yields the first enterprise-grade, fully open source Java stack.

The new Distro includes support for Global File System 2, and also includes support for data encryption for block devices using the Linux Unified Key Setup feature. RHEL 5.3 also includes am iSCSI boot firmware table that allows the operating system to be booted from disk arrays linked to servers over an iSCSI link.

REHL releases generally have a number of technology previews, and the new version is not any different. The ext4 file system has been included which is a bridege to the ReiserFS and ext3 file systems and a bridge to BTRFS – a future Linux system.

Other previews include eCryptfs, which is a stacked cryptographic file system that mounts on top of file systems such as ext3, and stateless Linux. The release also includes a tech preview of the GNU GCC 4.3 compiler set.

If you are already a customer with a support contract you’ll get the update for free.

FSF (the Free Software Foundation), the organisation behind the GPL open source licence, has decided to file a lawsuit against Cisco for copyright infringement, demanding an injunction against the networking company.

The FSF filed the suit yesterday at a Federal court in New York, alleging the Cisco’s Linksys consumer network equipment divisions have violated the terms of the license of programs of which the FSF holds the copyright. According to the FSF the two companies have been working together since 2003 to ensure that licensing rules are adhered to.

The FSF claim that Cisco has been distributing public copies of firmware that contains the FSF’s programs “without providing complete and corresponding source code or an offer for source code as required by the Licenses,” since May 2006, listing 13 Linksys products as the culprits.

The organisation would like the courts to stop Cisco from distributing the 13 products and are demanding damages. As well as this, the organisation wants Cisco to turn over any profits made from the products.

Licensing compliance engineer at the FSF, Brett Smith, said the organisation wants Cisco to comply with all the relevant free software licences throughout their product range, and has also requested that the company appoints a free software compliance officer that would be responsible for making sure Cisco remain compliant after this case is resolved.

Cisco have responded to the lawsuit with a statement that says the company is disappointed about the FSF’s accusations, claiming that its takes its free software obligations seriously:

“We are currently reviewing the issues raised in the suit but believe we are substantially in compliance. We have always worked very closely with the FSF and hope to reach a resolution agreeable to the company and the foundation.”

Cisco acquired Linksys back in 2003 for around $50 million, but there acquisition came with an open source problem in the Linksys WRT54G wireless “G” network router. The problems with the device stemmed from the fact the router used open source software, but they never released the software to end users – a requirement of the FSF’s open source license.

Smith said cried foul of Cisco’s non-compliance: “It’s not difficult to find ’source code’ on the Linksys site,” he said. “But you only have to dig a little deeper to find the problems. Those source code downloads are often incomplete or out-of-date. Cisco also provides written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going unfulfilled.”

“We also have serious reservations about their ability to ensure that they comply with relevant free software licenses in the future,” Smith added. “Addressing these issues is every bit as important as fixing the existing violations, but in our discussions Cisco seemed uninterested in doing so.”

On the fertile battlefield of open source vs. closed source, Nepal has signalled a change as free and open source software such as Linux has been adopted as a serious contender to commercial software, a la Microsoft.

Most people enjoy free things, the word is used by many a retailer to entice customers in to the shops - “buy one, get one free” and the like. However, free and open source software (FOSS) has struggled to make a serious impact when in the ring with commercial heavyweights like Microsoft, because there were so many pirated versions of Windows operating systems, they were cheap and often come free with hardware which making it difficult for FOSS to gain a foothold.

FOSS’s ethos was always one of freedom of use, modification and the ability to share ideas and code. If you look at examples of how well this works you need look no further than Firefox or OpenOffice, which are both community contributed entities that have made that biggest impact on the mainstream computer user.

Closed-source programs can cost and arm and a leg too. A copy of Photoshop for example will cost you a couple of hundred bucks, and as well as being un-modifiable, can only be used on one computer.

Subir Pradhananga, president of FOSS Nepal says that the rights of the software are restricted to the company and the user must comply with their policies.

However, regardless of the cost an limitations of closed software, it is still used worldwide. Pradhananga says this is due to a lack of awareness, and says that there are FOSS alternatives for almost every type of software imaginable.

In Nepal Pradhananga wants to show people the benefits of open source, free software by setting up public programs and recruiting young engineers into backing FOSS.

In southern Asia, Nepal is it the forefront of promoting FOSS. In 2005 a Nepali OS called NepaLinux was created and is currently available ion four versions. This development allowed non-English speaking people in Nepal to use computers.

Nepal has issued FOSS to several rural schools and have had enthusiasts lobby government to adopt free software in to the country’s IT set-up, and in the education curriculum.

Making a switch to FOSS would not be very hard as many of the free applications are compatible with the Windows operating system, and they could install a dual booting system on a computer.

The idea of using open source software is such an easy sell: Developers and users can share ideas across the world to find ways of modifying and improving the software, ensuring ease of use and working out problems together. Ok so open source software won’t give us world peace, but it’s a start.

In a report released at the start of this week on enterprise open source usage, Gartner’s research director Laurie Wurster made some bold statements, about companies that could face an intellectual property issue because they use software without any understanding of the IP implications of the licensing language.

The Gartner press release that announced the survey results said that 69 percent of the companies surveyed still have no formal policy for evaluating and managing open source software usage in their businesses, which Gartner claim is likely to open up “huge potential liabilities” related to intellectual property violations.

Wurster may have riffled a few feathers when she accused some businesses of having no formal policies in place: “Just because something is free doesn’t mean that it has no cost,” she cried.

“Companies must have a policy for procuring deciding which applications will be supported by and identifying the intellectual property risk or supportability risk associated with using [open source software]. Once a policy is in place, then there must be a governance process to enforce it.”

Having a policy in place is doubtless a good idea, whether you’re using open source r proprietary software, but is Wurster getting a bit over-zealous about the issue?

Pamela Jones from the Groklaw blog spoke about Wurster’s rant. “I think she’s overstating it. It’s hardly news that licenses need to be complied with, and heaven only knows the EULAs and/or agreements on proprietary licenses can be troublesome. Look at the SCO v. Novell 4-year ring-around-the-rosie on what the terms in a 1995 contract meant,” Jones said.

The Gartner survey said that a lack of governance was the biggest challenge for open source users, but Wurster believes while it’s all a bit of a headache at the moment, over time the ‘problem’ will diminish.

“Understanding when and how an alternative may be used is a frustrating process, especially when there are so many license types and forms from which to choose,” Wurster said. “As time goes by, many of these concerns will be addressed, but this continues to be a slow process. Increases in popularity and in the rate of adoption will drive the required changes.”

Pamela Jones believes that open source licenses are a lot easier to comply with that proprietary ones, and says that Wurster is causing a panic for no reason.

“The license you often see mentioned is the GPL, and it’s really quite simple to stay in compliance,” Jones said.

Jones gives good advice here: If you have concerns about open source compliance, look at a recently published GPL Compliance Guide. Problem solved.

Today’s computer users are starting to realise that if you want to save money on software, and not pay those pesky license fees, that open source is the future. Freely available on the internet, open source is answer to those who want feature rich applications, but don’t want to/can’t afford to pay the excessive price tag.

Many people believe that government organisations could save an astronomical amount of money if they changed from their (generally) Microsoft powered systems/applications to open source technology, which is more than adequate.

West Virginia state government currently spends millions of dollars per year in license fees to software developers including Microsoft. However, state chief security officer, Kyle Shafer claims that switching to open source would not be beneficial to the government.

“We haven’t done a lot with open source,” he said.

But is he right? There are many cynics around, that denounce open source as either inaccessible, incompatible, or just too much hassle, but anyone reading this should know that that is not the case. Let’s look at OpenOffice, for example. OpenOffice is a free home office software package that is pretty much an exact replica of Microsoft Office; however, the real difference is in the price tag. OpenOffice: Free, Microsoft Office: around £200. The openOffice format can even open most Microsoft documents.

Open source even applies to browsers. Firefox is the second most popular browser on the internet, to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Its constant updates are made by the open source community, and Mozilla actively try to get everyone involved in the development. Companies like Google are in on the open source act as well, offering various programs you can download an tweak/improve/totally cock-up.

There have been attempts in various state of America to mandate that state agencies use open source software. California and Oregon have both dipped their toes in the open source pool, but so far no one has jumped in.

Perhaps the reason for this slow acceptance of open source applications is because of the ‘you get what you pay for’ attitude. Wisconsin made a point of examining the benefits of open source software, but came to the conclusion that the costs of training new staff, coupled with the software’s unreliable nature made it more beneficial to stick with Microsoft products.

The software has other issues like security, and a lack of a technical support team to fix any software problems – you just have to wait for the community to develop a patch, Schafer whined.

This is generally the point that open source falls down. It’s hard to convince anyone to take a risk when you know that you don’t have a technical team on 24hr standby, and you need to rely on a relatively faceless community. The problem for most is that a failure to understand how open source software really works will hold open source down.

Search engine number two’s Yahoo! has officially introduced its “open strategy” platform to the world – Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform is made up of three development components; the Yahoo! Social platform, the Yahoo! Application platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

Yahoo! want developers to begin working with these tools, with the promise of releasing some of the newly created applications within Yahoo!’s pages.

The Yahoo! Social platform is a group of social API’s that give developers the chance to use Yahoo! Tools and data to build application for use on Yahoo! as well as on their own websites.

Yahoo! Query Language is an API that gives developers access to information across sites and web services in a way that is not to dissimilar than using SQL commands than its typical “programming” language.

Yahoo! Application platform (YAP) is the method of delivering applications, in a similar way that Google’s Code pages do. The YAP supports developer hosted app’s that work with the Yahoo! Social and Query Language APIs, as well as the OpenSocial JavaScript API. The App platform also has spam protection built in, and gives users the chance to disable the sharing of information with any connecting applications.

According to Yahoo! this is just the beginning. Over the rest of this year and next will focus on bringing more open features as well as developed applications. Yahoo! Is one of the founders of the OpenSocial Foundation, and this is its first formal implementation of Open Social support. Yahoo! plans to do more to open its platform, from developer tools to portable contacts.

OpenOffice 3.0 – the alternative to Microsoft Office – was made available for download on Monday, and already the demand was high enough to Cuse their download servers to crash.

The software is essentially the same as Microsoft Office, handling spreadsheets, word and database tools, and the new 3.0 release comes packed with new extensions to allow a more customised experience fro users.

This latest release also gives Apple users something to sing about, as for the first time OpenOffice supports Mac OS as well as Linux and Windows.

“That opens up a whole new market for us,” John McCreesh, marketing project lead for OpenOffice.org, said.

The program looks far nicer now too. The start centre, splash screen, and icons have all been updated appearance-wise, but take a look under the hood to see the real changes.

The software’s word processing tool adds a new multi-page display mode that features a slider control, meaning you can zoom in and out while editing. OpenOffice now includes an in-built utility that allows users to edit web-based Wiki documents and expanded notes options. The spreadsheet column capacity has extended to 1,024, adds multi-user collaboration options, and improved equation solving.

These are just some of the updates, but what if you don’t want/need more columns on your spreadsheet; well you don’t have to have them.

“People complain about office suites getting bigger and bloated,” McCreesh commented.

“With extensions, we allow people to add on bits of functionality that are important to them.”

The key, the OpenOffice team believes, lies in the choice.

“For people who need [those features], they’re absolutely wonderful - but for people who don’t need them, then they’re not cluttering up their hard disk,” McCreesh pointed out.

Sounds good huh, but OpenOffice.org need to maintain their servers uptime. They’ve experimented with a few options to keep the site running, and want users to remain patient.

“It’s amazing - on the one hand, we’re delighted that we’ve gotten such a huge response. On the other hand, we’d much rather all these people were successfully downloading rather than crashing the site,” McCreesh said.

You must admit, this is a sign that open source software acceptance is on the rise, with Mozilla’s Firefox breaking download records, and now this.

“It’s an unprecedented response,” McCreesh admitted. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Put a date in your diary, Yahoo has released its new dynamic calendar service powered by open source developer Zimbra. Yahoo Calendar offers standard Web 2.0 information-sharing options with an updated drag-and-drop interface and a handful of unique options. The program will be made available in beta form to Yahoo users on Wednesday.

This is the first update of Yahoo’s calendar service in a decade, two years behind Google’s calendar launch. Yahoo need not worry, as they have 8.1 million users compared to Google’s measly 5 million. Yahoo will be hoping the new update, albeit long over-due, will give them even more traffic.

Recent traffic analysis by ComScore shows that Google commands 63 percent of the US search market, compared to Yahoo’s 19.6 percent.

Zimba – who last year were acquired by Yahoo – were quick to point out the openness of the new Yahoo calendar. Like Google Calendar and other online date tools, the utility uses iCal and CalDAV standards to allow easy integration with third party services. This allows data sharing with friends on competing programs.

“With Yahoo leveraging Zimbra technology, they’re able to reach their goals of being one of the most open calendar systems in the market,” John Robb, vice president of marketing and products at Zimbra, told said. “That’s something that’s always been very important to Zimbra.”

While the basic of the calendar remain similar, there have been some interesting advancements. Image viewing site, Flickr is built into the program, allowing you to add images to the calendars background. At present you can only add Creative Commons images, but the option to use your own personal photos is planned for a future release.

The application also allows you to zoom in and out of specific dates and to drag and drop appointments. The program will also eventually be integrated with Yahoo Sports and Yahoo TV.

“[We wanted] the ability to have mash-ups with other systems - whether it be Flickr, whether it be Yahoo’s Upcoming, whether it be other third parties that might be interested in providing integration points with Yahoo Calendar and Zimbra Calendar,” Robb said.

Although the launch is overdue, many see it as a crucial step for the company’s rebuilding.

“For Yahoo to move forward, it basically needs to leverage whatever research and development projects it [has], and to either create new products and services or to match those products and services of its largest competitors,” Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-It, said.

“Google has obviously taken a lead here, and as users move more and more to match their online and offline lives, the dynamic calendar is a critical tool for most consumers and most business people,” he pointed out.

“You basically want to make sure that you do everything you can to keep your existing users and happy customers from straying off into your competitor’s territory,” King commented. “I think the larger question for Yahoo is how this new offering and future offerings will allow the company to reach out and bring perhaps former users or even new users online to the Yahoo site and get them using Yahoo’s tools.”

“I think the calendar is a good start, but there will be an awful lot of other opportunities for online applications and services further up the road,” he said.

Open Source adoption is growing rapidly, but adopters in the US are falling behind European enthusiasm, according to software providers Open Logic, who announced on Tuesday that it has discovered over 300,000 open source package and project installations in use around the worked through its Open Source Census (OSC), which began collecting data in December.

A worldwide collaborative project, the OSC’s goal is to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software. User’s volunteered to have their machines remotely scanned to contribute to the census’ findings. Also, among survey participants, Windows users were found to be some of the biggest consumers of open source.

The survey found that OpenOffice, an alternative to Microsoft Office, was installed on 73 percent of all personal computers that were involved in the survey. However, just 8 percent of enterprise machines made available for scanning contained OpenOffice.

Kim Weins, senior vice president of marketing and products at OpenLogic said, “The survey will be ongoing. Starting in year two, we will have enough data to show trends of changing use patterns of open source adopters.”

The second phase of the census began six months ago and involves gathering data from system audits contributed by voluntary participants.

Weins said that the OSC continues to uncover interesting trends on the global use of open source software as more computers are scanned.

The results so far show on average, government agencies have 123 different open source packages installed per machine and financial service companies have 117 different packages per machine.

Details from government agencies showed that in the US there is an average of 51 open source packages on machines, and in Europe it averages 68.

Windows users were found to have around 39 open source packages on their system, with Linux users having around 87 packages on average – no real surprise there.

Ubuntu was found to be the most prevalent Linux OS distro with Hardy (24%) and Gutsy (22%). Suse Linux has 12%, Gentoo Linux has 7%, Fedora Core has 6% and Debian has 13%.

According to Weins the survey shows a solid movement in foreign governments toward open source software. Similarly, the financial services industry is involved in a lot of open source development.

“Governments are very welcoming of open source. The EU initiative is fostering best practices for which open source is very supportive,” she said.

Earlier this week he GNOME desktop team officially released GNOME version 2.24, which incorporates a number of bug fixes and some funky new features, including the first release of the GNOME Mobile Platform.

The GNOME Mobile Platform will be of interest to budding developers, and the GNOME team is getting ready to make virtual machine images of various mobile platforms available for improving testing.

GNOME’s Mobile Platform is integrated with a number of mobile devices, including Maemo, Ubuntu Mobile, Moblin, and Poky Linux. The devices powered by the platform range from mobile phones to netbooks to interlocking DIY Bug Labs components.

Programmers should be comfortable with the infrastructure, libraries and toolkits used in development, but there are some device specific components, such as Matchbox, that new developer’s to mobile many have not come across yet.

Although the GNOME Mobile Platform’s libraries are natively written in C, bindings from other programming languages (C++ and Python) are available and should open up the platform to a wider range of developers.

GNOME’s Mobile site details the projects missions, as well as a number if technologies and apps that the project would like to see developed, for eventual integration in to the mobile platform.

New developers are encouraged to take part by the team, and begin tyo get themselves acquainted with the community.