Open Source Insider

Ford has launched its OpenXC vehicle application research platform running on Arduino and Android to allow software programmers to build new in-car apps.

The motor giant says that it wants to "unleash" the power of the open-source programmer (and hacker) community to explore what can be done with vehicle data.

OpenXC is described as a combination of open source hardware and software for developers to build vehicle-centric custom applications and pluggable modules.

"[Developers] can start making vehicle-aware applications that have better interfaces based on context, can minimise distraction while driving, are integrated with other connected services, and can offer you more insight into a car's operation," says Ford.

The company highlights the fact that every new car today is full of computers and electronics, and although many companies are already offering tools to hook into the driver's interface, they have -- for the most part -- limited availability for hobbyists and developers.

The OpenXC team has envisioned a time when a car will be as easy to program as a smartphone.

Image: http://www.designsmag.com/

"Ford is committed to innovating with the help of software and now hardware developers," said Paul Mascarenas, Ford vice president and chief technical officer. "By connecting cars and trucks to wireless networks, and giving unheard-of access to vehicle data, entirely new application categories and hardware modules can be explored - safety, energy efficiency, sharing, health; the list goes on. OpenXC gives developers and researchers the tools they need to get involved."

The OpenXC kit includes a vehicle interface module based on the popular Arduino platform developers can use to read data from the vehicle's internal communications network. The hardware module provides real-time access to parameters like the vehicle sensors, GPS receiver and vehicle speed. The hardware module is connected to a smartphone or tablet on which apps can be written to consume and use these data.

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Dr Shay David, co-founder of the Kaltura "first and only" open source online video platform. David co-author's this piece with Zohar Babin, Kaltura's senior director of community who currently heads up the firm's 50,000 members strong developer group.

Open source projects are measured by the size of their developer communities, by market adoption, by the number of downloads and other such metrics; companies are measured in terms of revenue and profits.

Often, attempts at maximising profit can conflict with the interests of the community or the adoption metrics. So how can competing interests be aligned?

What makes for a successful balance that allows a commercial open source software company to thrive while serving all of its masters?

Open sourcing commercial software poses many challenges, the biggest of which revolves around the meaning of 'FREE'. At the heart of the matter is the need to release code for free vs. protecting existing business interests, staying ahead of competition, and allowing customers to own their commercial deployments.

There are various ways to make money while developing open source software, including:

● Providing integration and support services (Acquia)
● Selling subscriptions to updates and support (Red Hat)
● Selling proprietary components to segments of the user base (Funambol)
● Selling premium plugins, applications, services and themes (Joomla, WordPress)
● Selling hosting services (i.e. Software as a Service SaaS model, adopted by companies such as Acquia, Alfresco)
● Selling the software under a commercial licence and releasing the code under an open source licence simultaneously, aka Dual licensing (MySQL).

As an example, at Kaltura we chose to maintain a combination of business models, leading with a dual licence model that is combined with a SaaS offering and an API centric architecture. Released under AGPL and a commercial licence, Kaltura has rapidly grown to be the leading media management platform on the market.

Adopting a dual licence approach enables developers and customers to adapt and modify the open source software to their needs, while the commercial licence allows companies to provide customers with the ability to keep derivatives - or to embed the software in proprietary solutions along with warranty, indemnification, and professional services. For those who need help running their system, a SaaS offering provides a set of affordable hosting services.

An open API architecture is also important. It provides platform-agnostic means for developers to create video-centric applications quickly and cost effectively. As an example, Kaltura's community and partners program (dubbed the Kaltura Exchange), enables developers and third party vendors to play an important and valuable role in extending the Kaltura software, by building innovative solutions on top of our video platform and expanding its reach to new markets while supporting the ever-growing needs of the existing customer base.

The last few years have shown us that open systems win every time: Android, for example, now outsells the closed iOS 2.1, despite Apple's huge early lead. Every large organisation in the world now relies on open source software for mission-critical infrastructure. By combining different open business models software vendors can do well by doing good. Gone are the days where customer retention was achieved by locking data into proprietary formats or developing secret software.

With its extreme transparency, open source forces vendors to focus on creating customer value - or risk becoming obsolete. Entering the virtuous cycle of value creation that customers are willing to pay for, rapid development that leverages the community, and quick cycles to create more value... this is the promise of good open source business models.

The Microsoft Open Technologies subsidiary has announced a public preview of its app store for Windows Azure known as VM Depot.

This programmer resource is hoped to allow developers to construct, deploy and share Linux configurations and create custom-made open source stacks.

Developers can also use this community-driven catalogue of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure to collaborate and build new architectures.

VM Depot features preconfigured operating systems, applications and development stacks.

Microsoft's intention here is to push more open-source applications forward (running on Linux) as guest inhabitants on the Azure cloud service.

"The preview launch of VM Depot is an introduction of things to come: You can already easily deploy different Linux-based virtual machines that include custom and curated installations and configurations. We have the latest, full-fledged distributions of Debian, Alt Linux, and Mageia for your hacking pleasure," said Gianugo Rabellino, senior director of Open Source Communities at Microsoft Open Technologies.

Rabellino urges developers to use the service to make comments and rate the free offerings that exist on the portal.

He urges programmers to "rate and remix" and then share results with other members of the community.

Red Hat has released an unashamedly labelled 'minor' release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This 5.9 version features better hardware enablement, security and certification improvements, improved developer tools and refined virtualisation technologies.

The firm positions these so-called minor increments as part of what it calls its "10-year lifecycle" with the platform.

"This release marks the beginning of Production Phase 2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and demonstrates the company's continuing effort to promote stability and the preservation of customers' investments in the platform. It maintains Red Hat's commitment to a 10-year lifecycle," said the company, in a press statement.

There is backwards compatibility with both hardware and software platforms across the lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This so-called "hardware enablement" is in fact:

• support for the latest CPU,
• chipsets and,
• device driver enhancements.

On the developer tools front here we see that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 includes the ability to develop and test with the latest version of open source Java available through OpenJDK 7.

According to Red Hat, the RHEL Enterprise Linux 5.9 enhances the operating system's usability in multi-vendor environments by introducing Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for improved performance.

This is a good week for open source video games, the Cube 2: Sauerbraten multi-player shoot em up has reached its next major release and the game is available for download from the project website now.

This first person old school 'deathmatch' style open source favourite now has 45 new maps as well as three new game modes:

• collect
• insta collect and,
• efficiency collect

Players can mess around and get creative with map/geometry editing cooperatively right in-game -- and the engine running this beast is coded and designed entirely under the open source ZLIB license.

NOTE: Sauerbraten means "sour roast" in the original German and is a meat pot roast made from beef venison, lamb, mutton, pork and (sometimes) horse.

Downloads are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The Sauerbraten games programming engine supports the rendering of directional sunlight -- it is also sophisticated enough to handle reflections on reflective materials such as water, lava and glass.

In addition to the documentation provided (which includes an install guide), a wiki is provided has a lot of useful information for working with the game and engine, contributed by the community, which elaborates and breaks a lot of the information down into more digestible chunks.

If you so wish, commercial support for the game can be purchased from dot3 labs.

The London and Isle of Man headquartered company that oversees commercially supported services for the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system has confirmed that a smartphone interface has been produced that will offer PC capability when docked.

The new 'mobile Ubuntu' will use all four edges of the screen in terms of user 'swipes' and 'touch' for what Canonical claims will be the most "immersive experience" possible.

Forget smartphone, enter the 'superphone'

Given the positioning that Nokia is pushing for so hard for in the 'enterprise smartphone' space with its Lumia line running Windows Phone 8 (and Google with the Nexus products), this open source alternative is then positioned as an opportunity to converge phone, PC and thin client into a single enterprise 'superphone'.

NOTE: Whether Canonical is actively trying to encourage the coining of the term superphone as a portmanteau of 'supermodel' and 'smartphone' was not confirmed.

CEO of Canonical Jane Silber suggests that there is now an opportunity for the company to target 'basic smartphones' that are used for the phone, SMS, web and email -- (and, presumably bring these phones from basic to super status).

Ubuntu on mobile outperforms [basic smartphones] thanks to its native core apps and stylish presentation, claims Silber.

Canonical's official press statement on the launch last night confirmed that this iteration of Ubuntu is aimed at two core mobile segments:

a. the high-end superphone and,
b. the entry-level basic smartphone

The firm's publicity engine then kicked into fifth gear and detailed the hope that Ubuntu will also appeal to "aspirational prosumers" who want a what the firm calls a "lower bill-of-materials" device.

Impressive, but not smart (or super)

Principal technology analyst at Davies Murphy Group Europe Chris Green says that it is an "impressive move" but ultimately not a smart one.

Quoted on the BBC news website Green says, "[Canonical is] not the first company to try and drop a desktop operating system on a mobile device and nobody has ever been able to make it work. Microsoft tried to foist something that looked and felt like normal Windows on a mobile phone and they had to screw it up and develop a separate phone system."

Green continued, "If you look at the platforms that thrive at the moment it's the ones that have diverged and had a platform designed for mobile on their mobile devices and a platform designed for conventional PCs on those."

Despite his critics, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth insisted on his blog last week that 2013 will be all about mobile.

"Broadening the Ubuntu community to include mobile developers who need new tools and frameworks to create mobile software. Defining new form factors that enable new kinds of work and play altogether. Bringing clearly into focus the driving forces that have shaped our new desktop into one facet of a bigger gem," said Shuttleworth.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called "feature complete" at this stage.

This means that (as far as the W3C sees it) businesses and developers have a "stable target" for implementation and planning the next generation of web applications.

NOTE: HTML5 is described as the "cornerstone" of the Open Web Platform, a full programming environment for cross-platform applications with access to device capabilities; video and animations; graphics; style, typography and other tools for digital publishing; extensive network capabilities.

"The broader the reach of Web technology, the more our stakeholders demand a stable standard," said W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe. "Businesses know what they can rely on for HTML5 in the coming years, and what their customers will demand. Likewise, developers will know what skills to cultivate to reach smart phones, cars, televisions, ebooks, digital signs and devices not yet known."

The W3C has also announced the first draft of HTML 5.1 and Canvas 2D, Level 2, an early view of the next round of standardisation.

The W3C community continues to enhance existing HTML features and develop new ones, including extensions to complement built-in HTML5 accessibility, responsive images, and adaptive streaming.

The future HTML 5.1 specification is currently being engineered to support improved web video performance, a development that is backed by both the W3C and television industry firms too.

Application development for the Android open source operating system and platform is of more interest to software programmers than building apps for either the iPhone or iPad.

This is according to a Google TRENDS Web Search Interest ranking pitching the following three search terms against each other Worldwide, 2009-2012:

• iphone app development,
• android app development,
• ipad app development.

The Google trends graph shows that interest in iPhone and Android development (searches) was near parity in August of 2011.

It also suggests that Android development is now twice as interesting to programmers today as it is for the iPhone, with iPad development shown at roughly a quarter of Android's heights.

Industry reports suggest hat the big question for programmers may now have shifted from a question of Android vs. iPhone, to a question of native vs. the mobile web.

Cross-platform compatibility and portability will (arguably) be the key deciding factor in the new more mobile cloud based world of software application development.

Of course the central premise behind the opportunity to "write once (and then) deploy anywhere" is an appealing proposition for both developers and users alike.

Initially championed by Sun Microsystems as a slogan to illustrate the cross-platform advantages of the Java programming language and platform, write once run anywhere (WORA) ... or even write once run everywhere (WORE) ... has since moved onward to be championed by big and small(er) software application development focused entities alike from Google to Qt and everywhere in between.

So we now have multiple platforms, multiple devices and consequently multiple Software Development Kits (SDKs) for programmers to use to drive application builds in various directions.

This is great news, but...

While the devices themselves have become equally functional, have we the users managed to catch up?

Like a lot of people I use Mac OS X in its desktop and tablet iOS versions. But I also use Windows -- versions 7 and 8 and Windows Phone 8 in fact.

Then there's my BlackBerry and even the PlayBook, which although not so popular has very impressive graphics and some other worthwhile functions.

Then of course there is Android and desktop Linux in the form of Ubuntu, which I come into contact with quite regularly.

Did I miss one?

The iPod doesn't really count does it?

How about the microwave, the television, the toaster and the doorbell come to think of it.

If we can get past the central desktop experience with many of these now famously cross-platform devices we "mostly" find that the applications themselves do function in a relatively consistent way.

But, as strong as efforts are in this regard, let's just take Skype as an example... run it on Windows 8, Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Android (as I do) and try and it's easy enough, but not as intuitive and driving a car i.e. the steering wheel is pretty much ALWAYS right in front of you and the big clear glass thing that you look through at the front can almost certainly be guaranteed to be there.

This is not a rant; this is probably quite the opposite in fact as I revel in the joy of being able to play with some many different devices.

But this diversity could spell trouble on the road ahead if we don't reign ourselves in with a little cross-platform control in future.

Cloud-based desktop environments are on the rise.

Give the popularity of Apple's iPad and the plethora of other tablets, sub-tablets (sorry, am I supposed to say mini tablets?), high end smartphones (thank you Nokia, yes I am having fun playing with the Lumia 920 you sent me to look at) and other "connectivity enabled" devices we now have at our fingertips...

... more and more of us are getting used to placing more "digital assets" on the web (ok, sorry, I'm supposed to say "on the cloud" here again aren't I?).

So the cloud-based desktop emerges and it's not just one or two.

Sometime referred to as Virtualised Desktop Infrastructure (or VDI for short) -- cloud centric desktops are emerging from both the proprietary vendors and the open source (with options for commercial licensing of course) world alike.

Our cloud desktop du jour is as follows...

Communication and collaboration software company Open-Xchange has released the open source community version of its OX App Suite.

This cloud-based desktop environments seeks to provide "central access to digital assets and consistent user experiences" on all devices.

... and there you have those words again i.e. "digital assets".

Based on a Linux, Apache and MySQL backend, Open-Xchange says that it has designed the OX App Suite web interface to support a set of applications including mail, contacts, calendars, media and all documents.

There is also integration with Google Mail, Hotmail, Facebook and LinkedIn.

CEO of Open-Xchange Rafael Laguna has stated that Open-Xchange´s software code can also be used to set up an on-premise installation in educational institutions, public sector organisations and SME's to deliver a cloud service currently used by over 60 million users.

"It gives the freedom to move data between providers or from a hosted solution into an on-premise installation," he said.

Open-Xchange expects the first cloud service providers to deploy OX App Suite to their customers by the end of Q1, 2013.

Is this "just another" cloud desktop environment in the "me too" list of contenders that seem to be endlessly springing up in this space, or is this a case of 60 millions users can't be wrong so there might be something in it.

Answer: not sure... but the firm is based in Germany and Silicon Valley and that's often a telling sign.

Open source programmers are being offered a Selenium-based free cloud testing service from application testing company Sauce Labs.

The Sauce Free Open Source Software accounts (simply known as "Open Sauce") is a new programme designed to give developers free and unlimited use of the Sauce Labs cloud for testing web applications.

Strict adherents to the community-driven model of open source programming, Open Sauce user test results will by default be publicly viewable on the Sauce Labs website.

"We benefit from open source software and we are significant contributors to open source projects like Selenium, Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM), and WD.js," said John Dunham, CEO of Sauce Labs.

"Our business depends on open source and so we want to 'pay it forward' by giving back to the open source community whenever possible. For example, Sauce Labs offers free use of our service to the Selenium Project, which uses us for integration testing of new Selenium releases."

Selenium is a suite of tools specifically for automating web browsers.

Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes and provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE).

Given the rise of open source standards and platforms across so many technology streams, if we are going to maintain industry equilibrium(s) then we need to analyse exactly how big brand IT firms are nurturing developer outreach and the provision of software development kits (SDKs) needed to perform core integration.

A case in point is Adobe.

The firm's Adobe Acrobat Portfolio SDK exists to help programmers develop software that interacts with Acrobat technology as the SDK contains header files, type libraries, simple utilities, sample code and documentation.

Besides the technologies provided by the Acrobat SDK, developers can also use the PDF Library (PDFL) to develop applications that create and manipulate PDF documents but do not interact with Acrobat.

So Adobe is keeping a few technology corridors open but...

... there are "open source alternatives to Acrobat" -- such as Foxit PDF Editor 2.2, Nitro PDF Professional 6 and Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7.

Not to mention the other PDF readers such as Evince, Qippa, DigiSigner and even Google Chrome of course which opens PDFs quite nicely (just try a RIGHT click).

But - and it's a big but - Acrobat actually sells more year-on-year to knowledge workers and information workers despite the rise of open source tools

Steve Newberry is Acrobat business development manager at Adobe and he has much to say on Acrobat 11, which was launched just over a month ago now back on October 1 2012.

"Available in Pro, Standard and Reader formats Acrobat 11 adds new and tighter integration with EchoSign (for electronic signatures) and FormsCentral (an online form builder service to create and analyse forms and online surveys). We've also added Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration, easy deployment, applications virtualisation and robust application security," he said.

Newberry explains that integration with EchoSign has come about because users were struggling with digital signature technology i.e. users mostly just want to mark a doc, but some also want to be able to authenticate.

So EchoSign is a web based signature service with a "viewable audit trail" that shows the mechanics of what is happening for those developers that need to dig into the back end.

Again, this (not open source) openness is hoped to raise Acrobat's wider professional appeal over and above any other contenders and pretenders to its crown.

There's also a new emphasis on working "across devices" and Acrobat Reader is now available on more platforms i.e. Android and iOS... and Windows 8 is on the way.

There will also be more options to interact with cloud storage platforms and Acrobat has also been in the workshop to ensure that (going forward) it becomes more touch friendly -- and this is an imperative.

NOTE: Acrobat will already recognise if it is being used on a touch-enabled device and this works on Windows 8.

"A large proportion of the customer base has been asking for the ability to make changes more quickly. The problem being that users spend too much time looking for the original document and/or having a massive formatting issue when exporting text from the Word doc. New options now to edit inside the PDF document (in the Standard and Pro versions) and there is more ore of an InDesign feel overall in fact," said Adobe's Newberry.

For developers and the use of the use of the Acrobat SDK, the general state of play can be summarised into three use case scenarios:

• they want to extend Acrobat functionality to suit their own applications
• they want to just interface with it
• they want to build the functionality of Acrobat into their own applications so that "export to PDF" can be used (for example)

Adobe faces a challenging time ahead as it now strives to build new channels of openness and accessibility to Acrobat in the face of open source competition -- so how is it really going out there?

"A developer community is out there using Adobe SDKs to build plug ins to extend the capabilities of apps with regard to Acrobat and -- some of these guys are part of the Adobe developer connection and some are just doing it independently," insists Newberry.

There is heaps more to read and analyse here. Adobe CTO's statement here at the time of the product's launch makes for good reading.

More to come on Windows 8 and Creative Suite compatibility next if Adobe will share the inside track...

The global economic slowdown has of course been mostly bad news for most people, business verticals and individual companies.

But it's important to remember that recessions can also be good as they flush out the old dead wood and help us to re-position for leaner and more economically efficient times ahead.

Can we take this reality forward then and apply it to open source?

James Falkner is community manager for free and open source enterprise portal company Liferay and he contends that the future of open source has been shaped by external circumstances like the economic crisis.

Open source has 'won'

Falkner suggests that owing to the economic recession (which forced a re-think of budgets and investments) and the advances made over the last decade in web development that led to successful open source business models, open source has become a "de facto standard" in most of the world.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This is probably too strong and Windows still arguably holds a much stronger claim to being a de facto desktop standard at this time. The mobile space with Android and Apple iOS is of course a different matter.

So can we now go with Falkner and the Liferay team's proposal that proprietary lock-in is now considered to be "an aberration" and an RFP eyebrow-raiser, thanks to open source's proven (in Liferay's view) better security, ease of maintenance, and lower entry cost?

Falkner says that the future continues to look bright: open source practices are now taught in academia right alongside sound software engineering practices (and in some cases prior to the university level, like with Google Code-In).

This he says is resulting in graduating developers having a sound understanding of the two-way benefits of open development and free software, and championing its use in their early careers.

He continues as follows:

"Developers have always preferred open source for many reasons. Having access to source is the most basic reason, whether it's for debugging or simply understanding how the software works."

But it's more than that...

"People with a common interest have gathered in garages and universities for centuries to share knowledge and develop new ideas and developers are no different. The benefits from large-scale collaborative development naturally attract technically minded people, who are for the most part humble and seeking to learn from others. The positive experiences (and resulting work) of yesterday's open source pioneers has led to a new generation of developers who seek these kinds of environments in which to grow their careers."

"Over the last 13 years, developers and companies (and their legal departments) have developed a much better understanding of - and comfort in - open source and they are developing new approaches to its use. As open source licenses, business models, and application practices continue to diversify, so to does the definition of what it means to be producing or consuming open source."

Falkner finishes by saying that the conflict of interests between the ideas of open collaboration, ownership, profit and helping others continue to exist in developing open source software. It is up to each community to resolve these as much as possible, guided by expectations and established norms within itself.

Much of what we read relating to the future impact of open source, or cloud computing, or any significant 'still-nascent' technology paradigm tends to be focused on the user/consumer end.

With more "BYOD trends will impact our future use of cloud" headlines that many readers can stomach, the (arguably) more analytical approach just now is most productively taken by looking at the underlying information infrastructure level.

Alternative and non-traditional

Garter has spoken of the change that is happening at this information infrastructure 'strata' and suggests that by 2015, 25% of new DBMSs (DataBase Management Systems) deployed will be of technologies supporting:

a. alternative data types and,
b. non-traditional data structures.

The big truth here is that we will now need to engineer to integrate across new architectures in parallel -- but also, these conjoined architectures will need to be:

a. joined in parallel, as stated
b. constructed and composed from less costly servers
c. built using "multiple threads of execution"
d. distributed across multiple networks, some of them cloud based
e. positioned to be able to perform data analytics effectively

Gartner's Merv Adrian says that the products needed to be able to perform this work will need to "purpose-built alternatives" but that they are, as yet, immature.

"The Apache Hadoop stack, a platform for the MapReduce Java programming framework, has garnered early support in the marketplace and substitute components are already appearing at different layers," said Gartner's Adrian.

He continues...

"Familiar paradigms are being reshaped as new NoSQL data stores reshape expectations for persistence strategies for transactions, observations and interactions. Lower-cost alternatives are gaining traction relative to traditional RDBMSs, which may not be well-aligned to newer architectures, languages and processing requirements."

"Data processing has always represented a spectrum of use cases from transaction/interaction processing to analytics, and many combinations of the two. Big data processing is no different, and new use cases have emerged that leverage both new and existing data not well-served by legacy solutions that were built decades ago in different computing environments."

"This was before massive scale-out architectures were commonplace and the variety of data types now being deployed existed. New product categories have sprung up, designed to fit new needs at lower cost and with better alignment to new development tools and practices. Products and vendors are continually emerging to offer more purpose-built alternatives; these are immature, but often worth assessing."

As every good schoolboy knows, 2013 was a very good year.

Such a good year in fact that if you wanted to jump out of a space balloon, be a Korean pop star, run for a second term as US president, take part in the London 2012 Olympics... it was pretty much all possible.

Google's Zeitgeist 2012: Year In Review reminds us just how much really has been going on over the last twelve months and it makes for pleasant viewing.

Meanwhile back on Earth, not all of us live on YouTube and some serious development work has been going on in the open source arena.

Where Google is there to remind us to search for picture of cute polar bears, The Linux Foundation is on hand to remind us that...

Goldman Sachs reported late last week that Windows has gone from dominating 97% of the computing market to 20%.

Android leads while Apple takes up second place.

The Goldman Sachs report reads as follows, "Microsoft faces an uphill battle (though not insurmountable) given it lacks meaningful share in either tablets or smartphones and as such will need to rely on its appeal to knowledge workers to help drive adoption as its complement ecosystem will remain behind the iOS and Android platforms at least over the next 6-12 months."

Linux Foundation VP Amanda McPherson's blogs on the state of the open source nation and says that part of the reason Linux is experiencing so much success is because of the "network effect" created by its collaborative development environment.

"Embedded engineers work on power savings for their devices; that same code is then used in the datacenter to lower power bills. The defence industry improves the real time capabilities of the Linux kernel and automakers benefit and add to it," said McPherson.

"Because Linux has no branding restrictions Android (of the Kindle or a Chromebook) can be Linux without you knowing its Linux. This freedom allows companies to innovate at a pace that is simply unmatched," she added.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is readying itself for the 25th outing of its ApacheCon North America official conference, training and expo event.

The foundation describes its remit and status as a group of "all-volunteer developers, stewards and incubators" of what amounts to nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives inside Apache.

The Apache HTTP Server is a free of charge web server software noted for its significant role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web.

Distributed under an open source license it was the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone. Currently at version 2.0 it runs runs on most UNIX-based operating systems including as Linux, Solaris, Digital UNIX and AIX.

NOTE: The name 'Apache' was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache, known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance. It is also pun on "a patchy web server".

Taking place from 24 February-2 March 2013 at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon, ApacheCon 2013 runs with a theme labeled as "Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation".

According to the foundation's official news statememt, "First held in 1999 for developers and users of the Apache Server to meet face-to-face, ApacheCon is the public showcase for Apache innovations, from the ubiquitous flagship Apache HTTP Server to industry-defining solutions in Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Infrastructure, to dozens of emerging projects in the Apache Incubator and Labs."

A Forrester Research survey of developers on the Dr Dobb's software application news website has confirmed that they use open source tooling at some level.

The top five classes, types of disciplines of software that are seeing open source tools being used as follows:

1. operating systems,
2. web servers,
3. relational database management systems,
4. IDEs
5. software configuration management tools.

Over half of the 500 developers surveyed say that they are using Linux.

Over half of the developers confirm that they are employing the use of open source web servers, such as Apache Tomcat or NGINX.

Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond confirms that these open tools are even being used in so-called "risk averse" industries such as financial services.

Hammond also confirms that many programmers are using TomCat and Red Hat JBoss "as a mainstream part of their solutions" these days.

Why is this so?

Hammond thinks that the very nature of applications is changing and that we now have new "systems of engagement" on top of systems of record.

The analyst has also highlighted new categories of "application infrastructure" such as new frameworks for IaaS and PaaS as we look to integrate with offerings from the public cloud.

Changing times, interesting times.

Intel is aiming to extend its recognition with the open source, developer and big data arenas by now offering an open source programmer tool aimed at supporting big data analysis.

The Intel GraphBuilder tool has been specifically engineered to help handle big data for computer learning.

Currently at beta stage release, GraphBuilder's Ronseal naming is appropriate enough given its ability to construct large-scale graphs for software system frameworks devoted to big data analysis.

The tool also claims to be able to offloads many of the complexities of graph construction and these would typically include:

• graph formation,
• cleaning,
• compression,
• partitioning,
• ... and serialisation.

Intel principal scientist Ted Willke asserts that GraphBuilder makes it easy for "just about anyone" to build graphs for interesting research and commercial applications.

Big data analysis relies upon the extensive use of complex graph data and Intel has reportedly worked with researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle to bring this innovation about.

Big data made easy

Discussed the perceived complexity of big data, Wilke says that big data does have structure, "It just needs to be discovered from within the raw text, images, video, sensor data, etc., that comprise it."

Intel suggests that until recently, only the "wizards of big data" were able to (rapidly) extract knowledge from a different type of structure within the data, a type that is best modeled by tree or graph structures.

According to Wilke's blog on Intel Labs, "Many of these graphs are very large, with tens of billions of vertices (i.e., things being related) and hundreds of billions of edges (i.e., the relationships). And, many that model natural phenomena possess power-law degree distributions, meaning that many vertices connect to a handful of others, but a few may have edges to a substantial portion of the vertices. For instance, a graph of Twitter relationships would show that many people only have a few dozen followers while only a handful of celebrities have millions. This is all very problematic for parallel computation in general and MapReduce in particular."

A visualization created by IBM of Wikipedia edits. At multiple terabytes in size, the text and images of Wikipedia are a classic example of big data.

Commercial open source software company Acquia may soon have to describe itself with a capitalised and bolded COMMERICIAL given the firm's ascendancy from initial start up phase to its current financial status.

The firm, which provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system has raised over £18 million (US $30 million) in what is described as "Investor Growth Capital" as well as venture capitalism funds in order to finance its expansion.

Acquia co-founder and Drupal creator Dries Buytaert is quoted on Reuters saying that his firm is at a stage where it is seeing "tremendous growth" just now.

How would you spend it?

What does an open source firm do when it raises this much capital?

Buytaert says that Acquia's next moves will be to invest in sales and marketing alongside a push towards research and development to create and produce new products.

Expansion in Europe and Asia is also reportedly on the cards.

"There seems to be a big shift from funding consumer Internet companies to enterprise Internet companies. It seems enterprise software is sexy again," Buytaert told Reuters, in a telephone interview.

The firm has been ranked as one of the 10 fastest growing software companies in America and has now raised a total of £42 million ($68.5 million) from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Accolade Partners and Tenaya Capital.

Open source Business Intelligence and data integration company Pentaho has pushed some additional product releases to SourceForge web-based source code repository this week.

The firm also works in the related areas of business analytics and OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) services. OLAP is defined as processing to "selectively extract" and view data from different points of view from a multidimensional database as opposed to a two-dimensional relational one.

Pentaho's moves this month see the release of Pentaho BA Server 4.8 and Pentaho Data Integration 4.4 to SourceForge. These products have been bundled as a plugin to the first version of the Pentaho Marketplace developer portal.

The company's Will Gorman blogs, "It's great to see so many helping hands on a project like this, all done out of passion for the product, and the goal of opening up the product to even more capabilities and contributions!"

Pentaho is bullish about its position in the data analysis market with regard to its OLAP proficiency is openly states that, "As a leading OLAP analysis vendor in competitiveness, a KPI that measures how well products perform against other in head-on competitions to win customers, Pentaho beats vendors such as SAP, MicroStrategy and IBM."

Analyst firm Gartner defines the 12 evaluation rules for providing OLAP as:

1. Multidimensional conceptual view
2. Transparency
3. Accessibility
4. Consistent reporting performance
5. Client/server architecture
6. Generic dimensionality
7. Dynamic sparse matrix handling
8. Multiuser support
9. Unrestricted cross-dimensional operations
10. Intuitive data manipulation
11. Flexible reporting
12. Unlimited dimensions and levels