Open Source Insider

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst used his company's Boston user summit this June to explain the core concept behind open source innovation and Computer Weekly reported on the former Delta Airlines chief's comments at that time.

Whitehurst reminded us that it was only 100 years between the invention of the 'autolathe' machine to manufacture "standard components parts" in physical engineering such as the standard screw and, then, subsequently, the invention of the combustion engine and the jet plane.

Standard component parts in the form of nuts, bolts and screws opened the door to innovation in this case.

Open computing standards equally open the door to software and hardware innovation in the field of information technology.

But we can take this concept back even further than the industrial revolution.

A new video to explain this suggestion has been hosted on OSS Watch, an advisory service for issues relating to free and open source software in the Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) sectors.

Open source and the bicycle

The first iteration of the bicycle dates back to 1817 and the invention of the Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") or Draisine (English).

This all wood construction basic "bike without pedals" was later to be innovated upon (in an open source fashion) all the way through to it becoming the bicycle as we know it.

The OSS Watch video below suggests that this great invention was taken up by lots of individuals... who all saw the potential in the device -- and so the innovation curve was started.

Over the next 200 years we added brakes, pedals etc. and we've never looked back.

This collaboration is what the open source model of open contribution is all about i.e. it's a level playing field fuelled by community input.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) has recently been established in the San Francisco "bay area" as an independent non-profit org to promote the development, distribution and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education and product development.

The OSRF's self-confessed mission is to establish a "worldwide collection of educators" as well as leaders and visionaries in the field of robotics.

Reports suggest that much of the most interesting work in the field of robotics has come from the open source community over the last decade.

As a discipline, "robotics" is also becoming a more popular school and university subject too.

The OSRF has been formed out of a group of robotics developers working on a robotics project that originated out of at Stanford University called Willow Garage.

Current projects in development at the OSRF include Gazebo, 3D multi-robot simulator with dynamics.

"[Gazebo] is capable of simulating a population of robots, sensors and objects in a three-dimensional world. It generates both realistic sensor feedback and physically plausible interactions between objects (it includes an accurate simulation of rigid-body physics).

NOTE: According to ROS.org the ROS (Robot Operating System) is licensed under an open source, BSD license to provide libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management and more.

HSR - Human Support Robot

From the OSRF blog we learn the following:

"Toyota's Human Support Robot, or HSR, will provide assistance to older adults and people with disabilities. A one-armed mobile robot with a telescoping spine, the HSR is designed to operate in indoor environments around people. It can reach the floor, tabletops, and high counters, allowing it to do things like retrieve a dropped object or put something away in its rightful place. An exemplar of the next generation of robot manipulators, the arm is low-power and slow-moving, reducing the chance of accident or injury as it interacts with people."

Football playing robot

Other projects the OSRF has its eye on include Team NimbRo, an open source Linux-based open platform that supports ball perception, walking, kicking and getting-up of the floor motions.

You can watch a video of the robot playing football (soccer) here and see its lifelike motions.

A New Hampshire based software application designer has produced a free font designed to provide "weight and gravity" to the letters it presents in order to solidify their position in readers' minds.

Abelardo Gonzalez's http://dyslexicfonts.com/ project has gained extra recognition today as Dyslexia Awareness Week (DAW12) starts Monday 8th and runs through to Sunday 14th October.

According to Gonzalez, "OpenDyslexic is a new open sourced font created to increase readability for readers with dyslexia. The typefaces includes regular, bold, italic and bold-italic styles. It is being updated continually and improved based on input from dyslexic users. There are no restrictions on using OpenDyslexic outside of attribution."

NOTE: http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/ defines the condition as a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling - it occurs across the range of intellectual abilities. "Co-occurring difficulties may be seen in aspects of language, motor co-ordination, mental calculation, concentration and personal organisation," says the organisation.

"Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters.OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening. Letters have heavy weighted bottoms to add a kind of "gravity" to each letter, helping to keep your brain from rotating them around in ways that can make them look like other letters. Consistently weighted bottoms can also help reinforce the line of text. The unique shapes of each letter can help prevent flipping and swapping," explains Gonzalez.

Gonzalez's font is free and can be downloaded from github and dafont.

Instapaper has recently added OpenDyslexic to the list of fonts it supports. Instapaper is a free to subscribe web service that saves articles for later reading on web browsers, Apple iOS and Android devices and Amazon Kindle.

Gonzalez has told the BBC that he had seen this style of "heavy bottomed" font before, but that other examples were prohibitively expensive. His mission was to create an open source version that everyone could download and/or contribute to and augment over time.

Quoted on the BBC news website, Gonzalez has said that the user response has been great and that dyslexia sufferers have been able to read text without it "looking wiggly".

So far, both Safari and Chrome extensions with an "off-white background" and "alternate paragraph shading" have been produced.

It is estimated by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA) that somewhere around 4% of UK's population currently suffers from what can be classified as a "severe form" of the disability itself.

The British Dyslexia Association proposes that Initial Teacher Training course providers should be required to deliver mandatory and consistent dyslexia awareness sessions

You can download OpenDyslexic here and you can support the UK's Dyslexia Awareness week by signing this government e-petition to propose that all teachers should be trained to understand dyslexia here too.

Unified IT operations software vendors Zenoss has produced a new survey with the aim of determining what it calls "the prevailing sentiments" concerning open source cloud deployment.

Based in the US state of Maryland, Zenoss develops free and open source IT monitoring tools for what it calls "cross-domain monitoring with deep analytics and automated remediation" -- it charges its customers for the proprietary enterprise versions of its software.

The firm's survey polled more than 100,000 community members and drew responses from 600 IT professionals including system administrators and architects, developers, network engineers and CIOs.

"There has been a flurry of activity surrounding the state and adoption of open source cloud deployments," said Floyd Strimling, VP of community and technical evangelist at Zenoss.

A three horse race

"While much of the open cloud excitement has been centred on the newly launched OpenStack Foundation, the vast majority of our survey respondents have not yet deployed a solution. The survey indicates there is a three horse race between OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus with many challenges needing to be solved before full open source cloud adoption will take place."

A pending wave

The survey findings reveal what Zenoss has labelled as a "pending wave" of open source cloud adoption, despite the current pervasive sense that open source cloud is simply not yet ready.

Highlights include:

• 82.9% of respondents said they are not using an open cloud.
• Maturity (38.5%), lack of support (30.7%), and security (28.9%) were most commonly selected as reasons why respondents are not using an open source cloud.

OpenStack dominates adoption plans but CloudStack and Eucalyptus are "in the hunt" at this time.

• Of those considering deploying an open cloud 62.8% are looking at OpenStack, 46.8% are looking at CloudStack, and 23.8% are looking at Eucalyptus.

Open Cloud's future is bright

• 56.9% of respondents said they are thinking of deploying an open source cloud in the future, 41.6% of these expect to do so in 1 - 2 years.

There is so much talk of big data and cloud these days that you can barely read a single tech story without hitting a slew of descriptive adjectives usually featuring the terms 'scalability' and 'flexibility'.

If you're not scalable today, then you're not going forward. But the cloud is all about flexibility with open ended scalability isn't it?

Yes it is, but scalability inside a database is not an open and shut case.

Enhanced linear scalability

Even less so is "enhanced linear scalability" and this is the goal of relational database management systems now moving to keep in line with cloud-scale enterprise-scale deployments.

In this zone this week we see that Oracle used its OpenWorld 2012 and JavaOne 2012 conference to host its MySQL Connect event.

As the "database of choice" for a applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python), news of this week's release candidate for MySQL 5.6 has been met with interest by developers focused on web, cloud-based and embedded application environments.

NOTE: MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) based upon the SQL (Structured Query Language). Owned and sponsored (as a result of corporate acquisition) by Oracle, MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Solaris and IBM AIX.

MySQL 5.6 RC does indeed provide enhanced linear scalability according Oracle's announcements this week - and this technology is present to "leverage" modern hardware capabilities.

This linear scalability... once engineered into an IT stack and fully brought to bear, should(in theory) help provide simplified database query execution, give better transactional throughput and also improve application availability.

But what is enhanced linear scalability?

Vendors like to use the term scalability as something of a cure-all term to suggest that wide-ranging improvements have been made to applications, databases and other defining elements of a given IT system.

But better scalability does not just mean better performance.

Oracle is also suggesting that scalability here means that MySQL 5.6 RC has now been engineered to use more processing power across more cores and so work faster and this is why we hear the term "optimisation" so often.

What Oracle may also be suggesting by using the term linear scalability is that the database can be fuelled by more cores (or machines) without any changes to its core functional code or the code of any applications that run within it or from it.

This is where we then start to see the true definition of scalability emerge i.e. linear scalability is achieved when the database has the capability to uphold and sustain its level of performance even under "increasing loads" -- and this aspect, in the cloud arena will be especially important.

"The evolution of web applications and cloud adoption has introduced new performance, scalability and reliability challenges for IT," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL engineering, Oracle. "New features in the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate help address these challenges and deliver a wide array of innovations to the MySQL community."

The Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conference and exhibition is big business.

The company gets to close down a couple of streets and the area around San Francisco's Moscone centre is awash with banners, branded helper staff and every Oracle logo and graphic you can imagine.

Short of an effigy of Larry "did I tell you I won the America's Cup" Ellison, a whole corner of the city is given over to this mega conference.

So just how big is it and what kind of fun facts can we glean from the hosting of this event?

With 457 partner exhibits and 3570 speakers in town, it's perhaps no surprise that 97,907 hotel room nights are racked up over the course of the event.

A grand total of 40,942 sets of buttocks sit on the same number of seats during the sessions for this event and those users get through 142,000 cups of coffee, 95,000 "sodas" (they mean fizzy drinks), 63,000 lunches and 42,000 gallons of filtered tap water. Oracle did not supply information relating to use of the toilet facilities however.

The event is green and eco-aware too by all accounts. A total of 100,000 watts of power has been saved as a result of installing LED lighting fixtures.

But here's the real eco-fact for you...

... since 2008, onsite use of printed paper has dropped from 112 tons to 6 tons in 2011 with 2012 no doubt expected to record an even better figure.

The most exhibition-centric fact of the whole week is perhaps news of the 11,970 lanyards that were reused in 2011 due to attendees "dropping them off" at the end of the event.

As for Computer Weekly's contribution?

This report was brought to you by a journalist who flew on a shorter domestic US flight than might have otherwise been taken due to both Oracle's and salesforce.com's PR function being flexible with travel arrangements - it had to be said, so there you go.

Oracle has announced what it labels as a Development Milestone Release (DMR) of MySQL Cluster 7.3.

Widely labelled as the "world's most popular" open source database due toits high performance, high reliability and ease of use, MySQL is used by Facebook, Google, Adobe, Alcatel Lucent and Zappos (to name five) to run what are specifically called out as "high volume web sites" as well as the firms' business-critical systems.

The new MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR will introduce native support for Foreign Keys.

NOTE: In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is that part of a database that comes from another database table and refers to or targets a specific key. Foreign key's usually target the primary key in the target database i.e. the unique identifying column that specifies the core use of the database.

MySQL is described as the "database of choice" for a software applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python) today.

Oracle says that foreign key support will enable users to extend the benefits of MySQL Cluster into a broader range of "packaged applications and custom deployments" by simplifying data models and application logic.

"Oracle invests to deliver MySQL solutions powering the next generation of web, mobile and embedded applications," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL engineering, Oracle. "The new MySQL Cluster features make it a great choice for a broader range of highly demanding web and telecom services, deployed either on premise or in the cloud."

Mexican Facebook game runs on MySQL

"By deploying MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition technologies to power our market-leading 'La Vecindad de El Chavo del 8' Facebook game, we have been able to scale to over 3 million users in just six months, while reducing our DBA overhead by 80 percent," said Ricardo Rocha, CEO, Playfulplay.com.

Being as this is Oracle it may not surprise you to learn that MySQL also comes in a commercially supported "paid for" version. Oracle has also just announced new commercial extensions for MySQL Enterprise Edition with additional technology focused on auditing and compliance.

Open source newswire reports this week suggest that France's new Prime Minister has issued a call to his public sector authority bodies to deploy and use open source technologies at all possible levels.

Monsieur Jean-Marc Ayrault is said to have backed a sanction to encourage French public authority organisations to undertake a "systematic review" of free and open source alternatives when approaching software application development and/or revision and update processes.

This news comes from Joinup -- a website described as a "new collaborative platform" created by the European Commission and funded by the European Union.

NOTE: Joinup's mission statement says that it offers a new set of services to help e-government professionals share their experience with interoperability solutions and support them to find, choose, re-use, develop, and implement open source software and semantic interoperability assets.

Chair of the French Free Software Council Patrice Bertrand has called this the "coming-out" of the government on free software. "Free software already has a special place in the services of the state, but the official pronouncements were rarely as clear and committed as this one," he said.

French governmental and public entities have been told to now build up open source expertise and look to opportunities to share and pool resources.

They have also been urged to engage with open source developer communities and - crucially - to also start participating in the open model fully and start giving back by making code contributions/commits where applicable.

Helsinki-based open source database solutions company SkySQL has announced what it labels as the "first ever" graphical interface for deploying and managing a cluster of databases in the cloud.

NOTE: This is essentially a free-to-use product for deploying "highly available" MySQL databases on Amazon cloud. Highly Availability (or HA) is often denoted as a computer system or component that is continuously operational for at least 99.999 % of the time.

SkySQL Cloud Data Suite, beta release, uses a new configurator based on MariaDB (the community-developed branch of the MySQL database) to deploy 100 MySQL databases in the cloud.

SkySQL began life in 2010 as a services and support company for MySQL and MariaDB database users.

Service - Customer - then Product

Patrik Sallner, SkySQL CEO, said. "Few startups build a service business and customer base before developing their own products - exceptions include Red Hat and now SkySQL"

With SkySQL Cloud Data Suite, beta release, users can configure their clusters of MySQL nodes to be deployed in Amazon EC2 with four clicks, or they can use a more advanced configuration to take full control of the deployed systems.

Database administrators can use a graphical console to execute administrative tasks such as backup, restore, node isolation and re-configuration of the deployed nodes. The company insists that the "elasticity of the system" is guaranteed by special features available from the same console.

The OpenStack Foundation this week comes into being as a new, formally established, completely independent body.

Forged with a remit to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software, the foundation has attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than US$10 million in funding and says that it is ready to fulfil the OpenStack mission of becoming the planet's "ubiquitous" cloud computing platform.

Executive director of the OpenStack Foundation Jonathan Bryce has said that this is a "defining moment" for the open cloud movement.

Open source synonymous

"When you look at what this community has done to innovate and make cloud technologies accessible, as well as make open source synonymous with cloud computing, you understand why huge technology industry leaders and users across the world are placing their bets on OpenStack. The opportunity for OpenStack to become the open source standard for cloud computing is real," he said.

Priorities and vision

Founded in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, OpenStack says that its "priorities and vision" for the foundation include:

• strengthening the ecosystem,
• accelerating adoption...
• and empowering the community to deliver the best cloud software.

Led by executive director, Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation is hiring 10-12 employees who, under the strategic direction of the board, will help carry out the OpenStack mission.

"Ubuntu has been the reference operating system for OpenStack since the beginning and, today, more enterprises and carriers trust Ubuntu and OpenStack to deliver mission critical platforms than any other cloud platform. Canonical, as a founding platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation, contributes to the project's governance, technical development and strategy," said Kyle MacDonald, VP of cloud at Canonical.

Reports suggest that specific responsibilities now to be addressed include coordinating the project's infrastructure and working with systems for testing the software at scale. Building community activities is also said to be a priority.

The problem with IT security and vulnerability analysis in complex enterprise application environments is (it is argued) that companies are prone to using almost too many protection tools.

This scenario could in fact lead to a situation where security officers and development managers have trouble pinning down the vulnerabilities which they have in fact identified.

ThreadFix is a newly launched open source vulnerability management platform from Denim Group designed to "substantially accelerate" the process of resolving application-level vulnerabilities.

This new product works by aggregating vulnerability test results from the "list" of tools that might be in place such as:

1. 'disparate static' vulnerability analysis tools
2. 'dynamic' scanning tools
3. manual penetration testing reports
4. code review processes
5. threat modelling

The concept here is the construction of a single view of the security status of all applications within an organisation to help security analysts and development managers to make the right remediation decisions.

Normalisation of de-duplication is the answer

This has been described as the "normalisation of data" from multiple scanning sources to bring much needed de-duplication to vulnerability reports.

"The industry trend of using multiple commercial and open source tools to test the security of applications has enabled security teams to become more effective at identifying vulnerabilities. However, the downside of this approach is the volume of data that is produced to detail these vulnerabilities. Until now, this information has been managed with tedious and error-prone processes such as manually entering data into Excel spreadsheets," said the company, in a press statement.

To protect the organisation's assets during the remediation process, ThreadFix generates application firewall "virtual patches" while the software vulnerabilities can be addressed at a code level.

... and it's open source?

Denim Group CTO Dan Cornell confirms that "ThreadFix aggregates [all of this] data, making it much easier to pinpoint the critical risks that can get buried underneath an overwhelming number of lower-priority or irrelevant vulnerability information. We're pleased to be able to release this as an open source product to enable companies of all sizes to accelerate secure application development initiatives across the market."

You can read more on this story here.

Oracle is pushing forward its technologies for managing instances of virtual machines. The company has this week announced the availability of its VM VirtualBox 4.2 open source, cross-platform virtualisation software.

The product is designed to make it easier to manage larger numbers of similar virtual machines with a 'VM Group' feature to allow administrators (or users) to operate on any number of VMs all at once, through a graphical user interface, set of APIs and command line tools.

NOTE: A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computing environment in which an operating system or program can be installed and run. The virtual machine typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for CPU, memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer, which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware.

Oracle's senior vice president of Linux and virtualisation engineering Wim Coekaerts confirms that this is the only free open source virtualisation software that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Oracle Solaris platforms.

"Users can install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 on their preferred host platform and run a huge variety of guest operating systems in virtual machines," said Coekaerts.

There are also new startup options and new network tuning capabilities in this latest release.

Oracle's open source pedigree

What is interesting here is...

a) a powerful product with new 'expert' mode capabilities for experienced users as the penetration of virtualisation goes ever deeper into our global IT landscape and...

b) the fact that VirtualBox has gone on a development path from its initial roots with innotek GmbH (when the product was offered as a proprietary tool) through to its purchase by Sun and its subsequent open sourcing... and now under Oracle where it appears to be continuing its wider progression path healthily.

VirtualBox is a community effort and everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

An Eclipse Foundation forum log posting has confirmed that Google has donated US$20,000 (£12,500) pounds to support the Eclipse IDE project.

NOTE: The Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) for Java or Android applications is thought to have a market share of around 66% of the total Java development market. The open source Eclipse 4.2 release IDE ships with its own dedicated Java compiler and Java Development Tools are also available for 'advanced development scenarios' where Java source code is compiled outside of Eclipse.

Eclipse's forum posting confirms Google's benevolence as follows:

"Given the recently raised news concerning 4.2's performance, and the loss of testing hardware previously provided by some member companies, Google's Open Source Programs Office is sending the Eclipse Foundation a donation of $20,000 to purchase hardware and begin building a common testing lab."

Let's spend it on hardware.

While $20,000 is of course not much more than dinner money to Google, the Eclipse Foundation's Ian Skerrett confirmed to Computer Weekly that, "It was great to have them step-up and help fund some hardware. Google is a great supporter of OSS and Eclipse communities."

Google's open source credentials are of course less than virgin white and the majority of its technologies remain under proprietary guardianship. Where it has dipped its toe into open source, it has at times left itself something of a black mark. The firm's withdrawl of its Linux supporr for Picasa being a case in point.

Google's blog last year confirmed the following:

"We launched a WINE-based version of Picasa for Linux in 2006 as a Google Labs project. As we continue to enhance Picasa, it has become difficult to maintain parity on the Linux version. So today, we're deprecating Picasa for Linux and will not be maintaining it moving forward. Users who have downloaded and installed older versions of Picasa for Linux can continue to use them, though we won't be making any further updates."

Is Google open source washing then?

The firm has famously used a large amount of open technologies to power its servers so this donation arguably stops short of thoroughbred altruism and philanthropy. That said, this donation will help massively, of that there is no doubt.

Give until it hurts Google, make it $200,000 next time.

We've seen open source hardware architecture grow significantly within the last eighteen months as well as open technology development even touching areas like car design.

No surprise then that the sky is the limit (ouch! sorry for that!) and that open source should also extend to planes.

MakerPlane says that its mission is to create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them.

As a result of this aim, the firm says its aircraft can be built with "consistent, repeatable and highly accurate" processes, which create safer flying at lower cost.

The core blueprints and design for the MakerPlane 1.0 prototype describe a "light two-seater sports plane" with a maximum speed of around 138 mph. The aircraft will support a maximum take-off weight of 1,320 lbs, which is just over half a metric ton, but a "ballistic parachute" is also included.

Plans at this stage show MakerPlane 1.0 being constructed using computer-controlled (CNC) routers with 3D printers to help build a selection of some of the parts.

MakerPlane's founder John Nicol has explained that there are massive time savings with the techniques his firm is pioneering. He says that a "wing rib" can be created and cut out on a CNC machine in no more than a couple of minutes, instead of the two to three hours it takes today using traditional methods.

The firm's build process also features step-by-step build and assembly instructions, videos and animations with a minimal use of text where possible.

According to a press statement, "The design has a very large and comfortable cabin that can accommodate tall pilots up to 6'8″. The tricycle gear configuration along with the high-wing, give MakerPlane 1.0 classic aircraft lines perfect for the weekend flyer and for training. MakerPlane 1.0 will be a modular construct that will allow many different pre-approved options such as landing gear, wings, power plant, interior and other configurations. These designs and plans will also reside in the MakerPlane open source repository."

The estimation is that somewhere over 60 percent of "kitplanes" end up as unfinished projects, Nicol's MakerPlane hopes to change that.

The Swiss-German city of Basle is home to this week's Magnolia Conference 2012. The open source enterprise web content management system (CMS) company is soon to roll out the version 5.0 iteration of its eponymously named product.

The CMS is changing

Pascal Mangold is chief executive officer and co-founder of Magnolia. He contends that the CMS is about to change in a paradigm shift equivalent to the difference between 1) a Nokia mobile phone at the turn of the millennium and 2) the iPhone of today.

NOTE: A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the editorial, pictorial and video-based content of a website. At Magnolia's level, its CMS will stand alone (in the traditional sense of a CMS) or may also be used by web designers and web developers in a web agency to construct the user interface (and the underlying business logic and functionality) that users come to regard as "their company CMS" in day-to-day use.

The CMS of tomorrow

• In Magnolia's view, the CMS of tomorrow features an entirely new user interface, where content is authored and edited through default built in or bespoke developed task-focused applications.
• In Magnolia's view, the CMS of tomorrow is built for touch and mobile from the start so that tablets and smartphones become natural devices used for authoring web content.

The user's problem

The problem with users... (actually, it's not really a problem, it's more of a predicament) is that enterprise workers are becoming increasingly used to "apps" at every level. This being "apps" in the sense of smartphone and/or tablet apps rather than the Windows applications or heavyweight (older) clunky installations of SAP for example. So for a CMS to offer web content editing through these so called "customisable task-focused applications", a new level on "in application" convenience is called for where the days of hard editing HTML code are long gone.

Magnolia's new CMS interface is designed to offer users a range of tasks relevant to their corporate role and privileges from a central hub. Users then have the option to customise their CMS usage to suit departmental work processes and campaigns without any need to burden the IT department.

Open source customisability

This customisability comes about in no small part as result of the firm's open source pedigree where the whole architecture is designed to expose the software's enterprise functionality in the most flexible way possible.

"Since the 1990's, enterprise CMS vendors have been racing to pack more functionality into increasingly bloated, monolithic menus. These bewildering user interfaces deter a majority of potential users from using the system and contributing to a more meaningful virtual presence. Magnolia 5.0 offers simple, yet powerful, apps focused on tasks that are relevant to the user," said Boris Kraft, Magnolia CTO and co-founder.

Apps on top of a CMS?

Magnolia CMS then is an open web content management system that allows enterprises to use its standards-based Java architecture to build applications "on top of the CMS" for additional interoperability and functionality. Think about applications that could allow users to take video from mobile devices and embed (and edit) that content directly into the CMS. Not sending it to the office for upload, but actively using the custom-developed CMS extension app to perform the task immediately - while working remotely.

"Very soon, 80 percent of content management systems will look like this," asserts Magnolia's Pascal Mangold.

Mini case study

The Swiss city of Lausanne has used the Magnolia Content Management System (CMS) as the technology centre piece of its new eGovernment portal, delivering secure online services to local citizens and businesses.

Customers of Lausanne's industrial services (electricity, gas, heating and Internet access) can view their bills, check energy consumption or announce a change of address online, dramatically simplifying interaction with the authority.

What next for the CMS?

So what's the next stop for content management systems? All of the above plus integration of content from external third party sources, intelligently engineered so that links all remain live if web pages or content of any kind is moved at any level.

Magnolia 5.0 is being previewed here this week. More to come, hopefully posted from a mobile device!

The Linux Foundation wrapped up its CloudOpen conference this weekend at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.

Billed as "the only" conference providing a collaboration and education space dedicated to advancing the open cloud, but what kind of taste did it leave in our mouths?

Can we say unequivocally that ALL open source cloud computing is ALL good news?

Some might argue that it is, but (and it's a big but) with both OpenStack and CloudStack in existence, plus the rise of deviations and modifications upon both standards... and then corporate vendor-driven spin in between...

... things are getting just a little confusing.

IT analyst house IDC says that a massive 94 percent of Windows and Linux users want open collaboration and a "vibrant and open source ecosystem" for cloud computing.

IDC: "72 percent of businesses say that the use of open source software, open standards and/or open APIs are key factors when choosing a cloud provider or building their own cloud."

OpenCloudWashing

The "problem" (if there is one) now though is that every cloud company appears to be calling itself an "open cloud company" as a matter of course. Cloudwashing has moved on, now we have OpenCloudWashing.

So are we in danger of an "open cloud me too" situation here?

That's not the only danger, while we see nearly 200 companies now sign up to OpenStack, there is of course CloudStack as a secondary cloud open standard. Which way should we turn?

The best guide right now is to look at the number of installed live production environments in use. TechTarget's own Gina Narcisi writes here in a piece entitled CloudStack vs. OpenStack: Competitors or allies?

Most of this work has really only been in place since the turn of the decade and that should be your best guide here i.e. most of the frameworks in place are still in formation.

We're looking for the "Linux of the cloud"

Forbes quotes Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a piece that looks at the "battle to become the Linux of the cloud" as follows, "Software is built differently today than the last time we experienced a technology shift. What Zuckerberg proclaimed as the 'Hacker Way' is pervasive, in large part due to the early work of people like Torvalds. As for the cloud, a lot is still unclear. Standards and APIs are evolving. It is still unclear what the reference implementation will be. Which OSS projects will gain vs. lose."

Could open source financial analysis software shake up Wall Street?

This is what financial analyst Marc Joffe is hoping as he champions his new open-source methodology for rating sovereign debt.

Insurgent (open source) guerrillas

Working for San Francisco based Public Sector Credit Solutions, Joffe has produced a piece of software called the Public Sector Credit Framework (PSCF). He is now calling on insurgent guerrillas from the open source community to help perfect this simulation model.

Joffe claims that major credit rating agencies who provide fixed income investors with analysis and guidance as they decide which debt instruments to buy or sell only provide "limited insight" into exactly how the analysis they produce is derived.

This means that investors (like you and me) would so generally be putting their cash forward based largely on faith.

NOTE: A credit rating agency (CRA) is a company that assigns credit ratings for issuers of certain types of debt obligations as well as the debt instruments themselves. In some cases, the servicers of the underlying debt are also given ratings. Credit rating agencies often rate credits with proprietary, black box models; or in the case of government issuers, with no models at all.

European sovereign debt crisis

Joffe asks, "Rating agencies played a major role in the 2008 collapse of the municipal bond insurance industry in the U.S. and are now key players in the European sovereign debt crisis -- so are these agencies the best source of information when predicting something as critical as the next government default?"

"PSCF is hoped to enable analysts to perform multi-year fiscal simulations that go beyond traditional single-scenario analysis of debt-to-GDP ratios. Analysts can consider a variety of ratios (such as the interest expense-to-revenue ratios), and create budget projections that incorporate socioeconomic factors such as the impact of an aging population on social insurance costs," he said.

This approach supports thorough analysis by making use of all the budget, economic and demographic data and forecasts available from governments and private forecasters.

The question of course now is, will it work?

Let's look at the facts, PSCF is open source and this model is promised to be "completely transparent" -- it is available free of charge.

Unlike proprietary models used elsewhere, Joffe is adamant that there is no chance to "fudge the numbers" (as he puts it) or quietly revise methodologies to cover up modelling errors.

Social network Twitter has signed up as a member of the Linux Foundation.

The non-profit Linux consortium welcomes the social network on the back of its extensive use of Linux servers and other open technologies in its data centres and operational office headquarters.

The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson for Linux and generates original research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform.

The foundation itself relies on corporate sponsorship from a variety of IT vendors who manufacture and ultimately profit from commercially supported versions of open source software.

Reports suggest that Twitter has joined as a "silver member" for a mere US$15,000 or just less than £10,000. Good news then for the group as it eyes its annual LinixCon convention scheduled for next week in San Diego from August 29-31.

Twitter open source manager Chris Aniszczyk has Tweeted the following:

"... it's been in the works for awhile... press is coinciding with #LinuxCon next week, that is all, we sponsored@TheASF (The official Twitter feed of The Apache Software Foundationhttp://www.apache.org/) months ago!'

Twitter has already got its open source credentials over and above its use of Linux-based servers, the company uses MySQL as its database of choice for tweet storage and also uses the free and open source Memcached distributed memory object caching system to the extent that it has even developed its own (publically available) fork known as Twemcache.

Twitter is also said to be a user of other open source technologies including the Iago load generator testing service, the Zipkin distributed tracing system and the Scalding Scala library.

Below image courtesy of the Twitter Engineering Blog.

Big Data is becoming an increasingly important and sensitive factor in terms of every large firm's ability to pinpoint and control their competitive advantage. Managing Big Data and analysing it correctly takes the skill of a modern day Sherlock Holmes...

So in the news this week we hear rumblings from Jaspersoft. The company is offering free business intelligence (BI) training for users who want to deploy the Hadoop open-source data-intensive distributed applications software framework.

The new training offer is presented through Big Data University, an online on-demand educational site established by IBM that offers Hadoop and Big Data training courses.

Jaspersoft says that skills needed to work with big data proficiently are "reporting and analytics" -- and that with these talents on board users will better understand big data and be able to use it to improve business performance.

Impediments to adoption

Managing and analysing large and complex data sets needs special skills among a firm's staff base. Lack of skills in this area has been labeled as an "impediment to adoption".

But Big Data management requires more than Hadoop skills, so the university offers additional courses in analytics, database and data integration.

The first Jaspersoft training module to be offered is "Hadoop Reporting and Analysis" and it is available now. Additional BI for Hadoop training modules will be available in the coming months.

"As an open source company, Jaspersoft understands the importance of helping the Hadoop community and we are delighted to offer free business intelligence training," said Karl Van den Bergh, VP of technology and alliances at Jaspersoft.

"After completing this free Big Data University training, even more people can realize fast insights from their data through our industry-leading suite that provides easy reporting, analytics, and dashboards."

IBM Big Data evangelist James Kobielus lists information on this subject on his 'Big Data Hub' blog quoting IBM distinguished engineer Stephen Brodsky.

Brodsky suggests that the data scientist is the 21st century Sherlock Holmes and that in the future, we may have Data Science as a college degree.

"Quantitative decision making will increasingly be based on Data Science. Economies with more Sherlock Holmes/Data Scientists will have significant competitive advantage. With a mix of domain expertise and analytics skills you can turn data into the right insights. Analytical skills will be important - data analysis as well as data structures in comp science study. Probability and Statistics as well as Machine Learning will be great core skills," predicted Brodsky.

STORY REACTION:

Upon posting this story, the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider received the below reaction from Geoffrey Taylor, head of academic programme, SAS UK & Ireland.

"No-one disputes the potential of Big Data, but a more important question is: do organisations have the skills to turn this tide of data into economic opportunity? My own experience confirms widely held views that there is a huge chasm between the amount of people needed to analyse data, and the amount of talent trained in the art of doing so."

"Consider the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University - the first of its kind. On average, each member of the class of 2011 had 14 interviews and two job offers, and the average base salary offer was $81,500. In a tough job market, this illustrates the increasing demand for those trained in high performance analytics."

"The problem is deep rooted and we must 'catch them young' by encouraging uptake of STEM subjects in schools if we are to ensure that the UK can compete on the world stage. Working with businesses and government to base syllabuses around the applications and software used in real-life scenarios will help give students a head start when it comes to gaining employment in an information age. Equally, the onus should also be on universities to provide courses that are fit for purpose; making sure their courses are aligned to the needs of the marketplace."

Microsoft has opened its door to a greater proportion of open source technologies and open standards, specifically within its Office 2013 suite of 'productivity' applications.

Office 2013 will now offer 'full support' for the Open Document Format (ODF), variants of Open XML and for PDF formats.

The news was broken by principal program manager lead for Office standards Jim Thatcher. "[The next version of Office]... will support strict Open XML and Transitional Open XML, ISO 32000 (PDF) and OASIS ODF 1.2.," he said.

With OpenOffice and LibreOffice both having backed ODF for some time now, one wonders if the greater weight of pressure from industry also supporting the standard (IBM and Oracle to name two) has finally brought the 'suits' in Redmond to a new open realisation.

NOTE: RedmondDeveloper reports Microsoft's Thatcher claiming that it was the ISO/IEC organisation that created the dual "strict" and "transitional" Open XML standards. So today, although the strict version is not reliant upon Microsoft-specific data types, full support for both types will feature.

Industry comments suggest that this move towards openness with relation to ODF has taken six, perhaps even seven years.

Open standard inflexion point

As electronic paper archives (many of them governmental) now come into increased focus and usage, this is arguably an extremely important tipping/inflexion point for open document standards. Microsoft's moves in this space are unlikely to have been driven by pure altruism or philanthropy, so the deeper implications and ramifications here are surely quite telling.

Microsoft's Thatcher has also explained plans to introduce the "PDF reflow" feature in Office 2013 so that PDFs can be worked upon as if they were "editable Office documents" -- although Thatcher is also quick to point out that PDF reflow is not designed to "replace" Adobe Reader or Acrobat.

"The goal is not to make Word into a PDF reader or PDF editor. The goal is to help you to bring the contents of PDF files back into an editable format using Word 2013," Thatcher said.

Currently in preview release, market predictions anticipate a formal launch of Office 2013 in early 2013, which should suit the product's brand name ideally.