Ubuntu Increases Reach with Language Translations

English may be the uncontested lingua franca of most development communities in our (post-?) Pax Americana age. But for developers who prefer working in other languages, the Ubuntu world has taken a big step toward making it easier to contribute without understanding English. That’s a particularly smart move for an open source project such as Ubuntu. Here’s why.

As Ubuntu developer Daniel Holbach discussed recently, translating documentation on Ubuntu development into languages other than English has long been a goal of the project. That vision has finally become reality with the release of the first non-English version of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide documentation, which explains how to make software contributions to Ubuntu.

For now, the only complete translation available is Spanish. But the story is bigger than that, because this sets a precedent for offering development documentation in many other languages via a new system that will make it easier to translate the guide, and keep translations up-to-date as information changes.
Beyond the Spanish version, progress has also been made for translating the Packaging Guide into several other languages. Of these, the version nearest completion, interestingly enough, is Russian. Brazilian Portuguese follows not too far behind.

Translation and Open Source

In many senses, open source software has long been more friendly toward the non-anglophone world than its proprietary alternatives. Because the open source model makes it easy for anyone to translate applications into the language of his or her choice, users are not restricted to the language versions made available by developers themselves. It’s no surprise that Ubuntu supports many more languages than Windows.
And if open source products are appealing to non-English speaking users for this reason, they also theoretically enjoy a leg up with programmers who prefer to work in a different language. Ubuntu developers are thus doing the smart thing by acknowledging that not everyone who stands to make technical contributions to the operating system works primarily in English. Addressing this need helps to strengthen the Ubuntu community while also ensuring that as many programmers as possible are able to volunteer their expertise to advance Ubuntu development. In a channel where voluntary labor is so important, removing linguistic barriers is crucial.

Of course, although I don’t have any statistics, I highly doubt there are legions of skilled developers out there who have previously not considered contributing to Ubuntu purely as a result of language issues. Most educated programmers can likely read and write English well enough to participate if they choose–after all, since most programming languages are filled with English words, it would be pretty difficult to become an excellent developer without learning some English along the way.

Still, the efforts that Holbach and his team have undertaken to assist developers whose first language is not English sends a positive message about Ubuntu’s openness toward participants of all backgrounds. And they just may draw in some valuable contributions from programmers who would otherwise not go to the trouble of wading through English-only documentation.

Source: The Var Guy

Twitter Joins Linux

Twitter uses and builds a fair amount of open-source software, so it wasn’t too shocking when we read in our inboxes this morning that the social media startup has joined the Linux Foundation.

“Not only is Twitter built on Linux, but open source software is core to its technology strategy,” said a Linux Foundation rep to VentureBeat via email.
“It’s investing even more in the platform now as the company evolves and positions itself for the future. Linux has become even more dominant among web-based companies as the ‘hacker way’ has become pervasive among the newest generation of startups.”
Ah, yes, the Hacker Way. Or should we say, the “Hacker Way.”
Espousing open-source ideals, at least in spirit, has become increasingly common among web startups, especially in the Bay Area. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously wrote a “hacker way” mini-treatise into his company’s SEC IPO filing.
But in fact, while companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on open-source technologies and programming languages to get their various jobs done, their businesses are conceptually based on proprietary software, not open-source software.
As famous hacker Eric “esr” Raymond pointed out in a recent interview with VentureBeat, the true hacker way means “to give control to the individual, to respect his or her privacy, to create tools for autonomy and liberty, and to encourage creative re-use of software” — only parts of which are built into Twitter’s products.
While Twitter has open-sourced some of its software — a load-balancer called Iago and a design framework called Bootstrap, for example — vast expanses of Twitter code remain under lock and key, and the company’s recent and coming API changes means it’s getting farther away from anyone’s definition of free and open-source software.
This is a problem. Specifically, it’s a recruitment problem.
Twitter needs to continue to pull in the best, brightest, neckbeardiest developers the world can offer, and it can’t do so without some commitment to open-source communities. The company actually recently hosted an open-source event with thinly veiled recruitment mechanisms built in just for this reason: great developers and open-source software go together like peanut butter and jelly, and the more you can convince a great developer that your company believes in open-source, the more likely you are to recruit great developers in a highly competitive hiring environment.
All that being said, Twitter does have a vested interest in helping to advance the cause of Linux in particular, and some participation in open-source communities is better than none at all.
As a web-based business, Twitter, like every other web service, is supported by tens of thousands of Linux servers. In a statement on today’s news, the company said it intends to partner with the Linux Foundation to promote and protect Linux, the open-source operating system.
“Linux and its capability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Twitter open-source manager Chris Aniszczyk in the statement.
“By joining the Linux Foundation, we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

Red Hat to release enterprise-ready OpenStack package

OpenStack will run on the company's flagship Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat plans to release an enterprise-grade version of the OpenStack open source software for hosting IaaS deployments. The company has posted an unsupported preview edition of the package, ahead of its full commercial release expected in early 2013.

"From the Red Hat perspective, we feel the next release of OpenStack will be the right one to begin offering enterprise-grade services," said Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. "With the preview release, customers can get experience in operationalizing and deploying [OpenStack] and, most importantly, get their voices heard before our product is done."

Red Hat's release of OpenStack will run on the company's flagship Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version has been tested to work on RHEL 6.3 and requires Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) to operate. The company has already started working with a select group of customers that are trying the software.

The first commercial release will be based on the upcoming Folsom release of the OpenStack, due in September. The preview edition, in addition to OpenStack, will also include a number of Puppet modules to ease configuration. The commercial release will also come with an installer and greater integration with Red Hat's CloudForms hybrid cloud management software as well.

Begun two years ago by NASA and Rackspace, the OpenStack project is an effort to create a stack of open source software that can be used to provide IaaS cloud services. A modular software stack, OpenStack consists of separate programs to provide compute, object storage, image management, and other needed services for running cloud operations. The project rapidly gained popularity, attracting at last count the development efforts of over 3,300 programmers and 185 companies.

Red Hat has been devoting increasing amounts of its engineering efforts to open source cloud software projects. In April, Red Hat joined the OpenStack Foundation, which will shortly take reins as the governing body for maintaining the OpenStack project. Currently it is being managed by cofounder Rackspace, which wants to move the project to a more vendor-neutral party. In April, the project leaders released a survey that found that Red Hat was the third largest contributor to the project, after Nebula and Rackspace.

Azul Systems Announces New Initiative to Support Open Source Community With Free Zing JVM

Azul Systems, Inc. (Azul), the award-winning leader in Java runtime scalability, today announced an ongoing commitment to the Open Source community by making its Zing JVM freely available to Open Source developers and projects for use in development, qualification, and testing. The new initiative enables Open Source applications supporting commodity x86 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS and Ubuntu Linux to take full advantage of Zing's unique features and capabilities.

"Our goal is to make Zing the de facto choice for Open Source developers to achieve the most consistent Java performance and scalability," said Scott Sellers, Azul Systems president and CEO. "Azul's development teams have made extensive use of Open Source technologies over the years, and our new Open Source development initiative is another example of our commitment to the Java community and embracing Open Source software. We have put the lowest-latency and most scalable JVM freely into the hands of Open Source developers, removing the bottlenecks commonly associated with the Java runtime and enabling application innovation in a plethora of new markets such as in-memory computing and Big Data analytics."

The Zing JVM provides Open Source Java applications with:

Improved application responsiveness
Reduced application latency
Elimination of response time outliers
Support for large, in-memory data processing
Elastic scalability with memory heaps that can grow or shrink based on real-time demand
Dramatically simplified application deployments
Reduced customer total cost of ownership
Accelerated time-to-market
Improved production time visibility and runtime diagnostics.
"As developers have become increasingly important in adoption and procurement patterns over the past decade, availability has become a key factor in overall technology usage," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst at RedMonk. "With this announcement, Azul is trying to make it easy for open source developers to leverage and incorporate the Zing JVM."

Michael McCandless, Apache Lucene committer and PMC member, said, "Azul's innovative Zing JVM and pauseless GC now enable Apache Lucene project developers to explore use cases requiring large heaps, such as holding an entire search index in memory for faster searching. Initial in-memory tests on the full Wikipedia English-language site index show Zing is truly pauseless while managing a heap in excess of 140 GB."

"I'm very happy that Azul is making their Zing JVM available for free to the open source community, and I believe the platform is a valuable part of the Scala tool chain," said Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Typesafe. "Typesafe and Azul share a common goal of providing the best solutions for scalability in the multicore age."

"Programming and architectural approaches that leverage immutability to enhance concurrency and scale will be well-matched by a runtime that is able to support high continual allocation rates without disruptions or pauses. By making the Zing JVM available to Open Source developers, Azul is making a fantastic contribution to the community," said Rich Hickey, author of Clojure and designer of the Datomic database system.

Martin Thomson, creator of the Open Source Disruptor Framework and co-founder of the Lodestone Foundation, a new project focused on Open Source technology for the financial industry, said, "I've been working with Zing for the past few months focusing on ultra-low latency and scalable deployments. We are seeing excellent GC performance, consistency and predictability with the Zing JVM."

"By opening up access to the Zing JVM, Azul has made it easier for us to ensure JRuby applications will scale to large heaps and heavy loads," said Charles Nutter, co-lead of the JRuby project. "Zing helps fulfill the enormous potential of Ruby on the JVM."

Tilera's TILE-Gx Processor Family and the Open Source Community Deliver the World's Highest Performance per Watt to Networking, Multimedia, and the Cloud

Tilera's MDE 4.0 Software Release Provides the Latest in Open Source Libraries and Tools Making It Easy, Familiar and Efficient to Develop Software on TILE-Gx Processors

GigaOm Structure -- Tilera(R) Corporation, the leader in 64-bit manycore general purpose processors, announced the general availability of its Multicore Development Environment(TM) (MDE) 4.0 release on the TILE-Gx processor family. The release integrates a complete Linux distribution including the kernel 2.6.38, glibc 2.12, GNU tool chain, more than 3000 CentOS 6.2 packages, and the industry's most advanced manycore tools developed by Tilera in collaboration with the open source community. This release brings standards, familiarity, ease of use, quality and all the development benefits of the Linux environment and open source tools onto the TILE-Gx processor family; both the world's highest performance and highest performance per watt manycore processor in the market. Tilera's MDE 4.0 is available now.

"High quality software and standard programming are essential elements for the application development process. Developers don't have time to waste on buggy and hard to program software tools, they need an environment that works, is easy and feels natural to them," said Devesh Garg, co-founder, president and chief executive officer, Tilera. "From 60 million packets per second to 40 channels of H.264 encoding on a Linux SMP system, this release further empowers developers with the benefits of manycore processors."

Using the TILE-Gx processor family and the MDE 4.0 software release, customers have demonstrated high performance, low latency, and the highest performance per watt on many applications. These include Firewall, Intrusion Prevention, Routers, Application Delivery Controllers, Intrusion Detection, Network Monitoring, Network Packet Brokering, Application Switching for Software Defined Networking, Deep Packet Inspection, Web Caching, Storage, High Frequency Trading, Image Processing, and Video Transcoding.

The MDE provides a comprehensive runtime software stack, including Linux kernel 2.6.38, glibc 2.12, binutil, Boost, stdlib and other libraries. It also provides full support for Perl, Python, PHP, Erlang, and TBB; high-performance kernel and user space PCIe drivers; high performance low latency Ethernet drivers; and a hypervisor for hardware abstraction and virtualization. For development tools the MDE includes standard C/C++ GNU compiler v4.4 and 4.6; an Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE); debugging tools such as gdb 7 and mudflap; profiling tools including gprof, oprofile, and perf_events; native and cross build environments; and graphical manycore application debugging and profiling tools.

Industry Support for Tilera

"We have adopted the TILE-Gx processors and within 6 months took our complete RouterOS software stack to production by leveraging Tilera's MDE. The development tools are easy and intuitive because they provide a standard Linux environment that all my engineers are already familiar with," said John Tully, chief executive officer, MikroTik. "Using the TILE-Gx processor family enabled us to utilize the same software and scale it across our family of routers from 1-2 Gig to the high end 36 core Cloud Core Router."

"The software and support we have seen from Tilera has been excellent," said, Matthew Knight, president, Accensus LLC. "Their tools are up there among the best on the market today. Tilera's MDE coupled with their TILE-Gx processor is the only platform we have found that provides real time performance in Linux comparable to that of a bare metal programming model. Using Tilera's Zero Overhead Linux features enables us to provide some of the most deterministic processor latencies in the industry for our High Frequency Trading customers, while deriving all the benefits of the Linux platform."

"The Tilera development environment provides a full Linux distribution with the latest open source libraries, packages and tools," said Victor Julien, lead developer, Open Information Security Foundation. "Running the Suricata software on the TILE-Gx36 processor was a simple task of recompiling. It was just like running on any other Linux machine, with the added benefit of having more cores and more performance density. I am impressed that Suricata achieves 30 Gbps in a 1U platform packing 144 cores from Tilera."

The R Programming Language

Take the open road to statistical analysis

Statistical analysis has been around since mainframes were introduced to academia and corporations back in the 1960s.

But the great diversity of telemetry collected by systems today, the need to sift through it for insight and the growing popularity of open-source alternatives is transforming the R programming language for statistical analysis and visualisation. Its new nickname is Red Hat for stats.

Everybody loves R, particularly those selling big-data products such as data warehouses and Hadoop data munchers.

Part of the reason is that R is an open source package that solicits input from a large and clever community of statisticians and quantitative analysts who are able to steer its development.

Alphabet soup
This was not the case for proprietary tools created by SAS Institute and SPSS at the dawn of the mainframe era, and their follow-ons in the distributed computing era.

Just as Linux can be thought of as an open-source analog to Unix, the R programming language borrows heavily from the S language.

This was created by John Chambers at Bell Labs in 1976, as a reaction to the pricey but well respected SPSS and SAS tools that came out nearly a decade earlier.

S is very much a child of the VAX and Unix minicomputer era, while R is a product of the PC and Linux era.

The R language was created in 1996 by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, two stats professors from the University of Auckland in New Zealand who are still core members of the R development team. (Incidentally, so is Chambers, the creator of S, and it is no accident that some data crunching routines for S will run unchanged in the R environment.)

R can be thought of as a modern implementation of S. So can S-PLUS, created by a company called Insightful, which licensed S from Lucent Technologies in 2004 and was eaten by Tibco Software in 2008.

Come the revolution
Unlike S and to a certain extent S-PLUS, R is not just some code created in an ivory tower.

It is the product of a community of statisticians and coders which has created more than 2,500 plug-ins for chewing on various data sets and doing statistical analysis tuned specifically for particular data types or industries.

R is used by more than two million quantitative analysts worldwide, according to estimates made by Revolution Analytics, which was founded in 2007 to create a parallel implementation of R.

Since then, the company has taken an open-core approach to R, offering commercial support for the open-source package, while at the same time extending the R environment to run better on clusters of machines and in conjunction with Hadoop clusters.

To date, no one has commercialised the PSPP open-source alternative to SPSS (acquired by IBM in July 2009), but it would not be surprising to see this happen at some point, if PSSP matures.

Revolution Analytics has not exactly made the R community happy by peddling proprietary extensions to R in its R Enterprise distribution, after getting some seed money from Intel Capital in 2008 and $9m in venture money in 2009.

Since then, Revolution Analytics has parallelised the underlying R statistical engine so it runs better on multicore/multithreaded processors and across server clusters; added a NoSQL-like format called XDF to help parallelise data sets; and added support for native SAS file formats and conversion to XDF

Most recently it has tweaked its R implementation so each node in a Hadoop cluster can run R analytics locally on the Hadoop cluster on data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System and then aggregate the results of those calculations, much like MapReduce operations on unstructured data.

Revolution Analytics has soaked up a lot of the oxygen in the R room for the past few years. But other companies are doing interesting things, integrating R tools with their own products and making life easier for analysts seeking answers in mountains of data.

Parallel universe
Seeking some kind of advantage over its rivals in the data warehousing space, Netezza opened up the Netezza software stack in February 2010.

Netezza is a maker of data warehousing appliances based on a heavily customised and parallelised version of the PostgreSQL database, which uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to boost its performance running on x86 clusters.

Netezza opened up its software development environment with a set of APIs that allow SAS and R algorithms to run in parallel on its warehouse appliances.

It also similarly offered hooks for Java, C++, Fortran, or Python applications to reach into the data warehouse and use the FPGAs to extract data stored in the warehouse rather than using the SQL database query language.

Seven months later, as it became clearer that big data was going to be big business, IBM snapped up privately held Netezza for a cool $1.7bn.

In October 2010, data warehouse maker Teradata added its own in-database analytics to its eponymous data warehouses with a package called TeradataR.

This turns the Teradata Warehouse Miner tool into a plug-in for the R console, allowing for 44 different analytical functions in Teradata databases, as well as any stored procedures in data warehouses to be exposed to R and called from R programs. There are another 20 functions that let R work in the Teradata environment.

The idea is to stay within the R console and run the analytics in parallel on the database, instead of trying to suck information down into a workstation and running R locally.

Oracle joins in
Even Oracle is getting in on the R act. In February, the company launched Advanced Analytics, a bridge between Oracle databases and the R analytical engine.

Advanced Analytics is Oracle's Data Mining add-on for its 11g R2 database. When R programmers want to run a statistical routine, they call the equivalent SQL function in the Data Mining toolbox and run that against the database.

If there is no such SQL function, then an embedded R engine spread across database nodes (if it is a cluster) runs the R routines, collects up summary data and presents it back to the R console as an answer.

Oracle also ships something called the R Connector for Hadoop for its Big Data Appliance, a version of the Cloudera CDH3 Hadoop environment running on Oracle's Exa x86 cluster iron.

This connector lets an R console talk to Hadoop Distributed File System and NoSQL databases running on the Big Data Appliance.

Linux Mint 13 Maya RC Released in Cinnamon and Mate Flavors

The Linux Mint blog has announced the release of Linux Mint 13 RC. This brings us closer to the final release of Linux Mint 13, which should be sometime during the last week of this month. The RC is polished, and looks crisp as seen in these screenshots from the Linux Mint blog.

This latest release of Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.04. As Ubuntu 12.04 is an LTS release, so is Linux Mint 13, and it will be supported until April 2017. Linux Mint 13 RC sports the latest version of Cinnamon 1.4 and the Mate 1.2. While the Mate desktop is focused on productivity and is more mature, the Cinnamon desktop is a new product Linux Mint is trying to develop alongside its Mint distro. With such a large user base, Linux Mint has good testing grounds for its Cinnamon desktop.

Cinnamon was released in the last week of this January. It boasts of a better user experience than Gnome 3. It is based on the Gnome shell 3.2.1 released in October last year and borrows heavily from MSGE. Cinnamon is on a roadmap to creating a complete desktop environment ecosystem, thus making it a self-sufficient product unlike MSGE, which had no individual identity. Cinnamon has ambitious plans, and it will be interesting to see if it attracts more users for Linux Mint.

Intermediary releases of Cinnamon are available on GitHub in a “stable” branch. Get download links and more details for this RC release at the official Linux Mint blog.

Electronic Medical Systems now uses Linux

Linux is the operating system (OS) of choice for a wide range of medical devices, from vital sign monitors to hospital bedside 'infotainment' systems to complex imaging equipment. Yet not all Linux implementations are alike. Because patients' lives may be in the balance, software used in medical devices must meet stringent regulatory guidelines to ensure that it will perform as promised.

Trying to cobble together solutions from pure Linux without commercial support puts the burdens of testing, validation, documentation and compliance on the device manufacturers and software developers - an onerous, time consuming and complex process that can turn 'free' Linux into a very costly proposition.

There are, of course, commercial vendors of Linux who provide value-added stabilised versions of the open-source software, along with board support packages. Service, support and documentation levels, however, vary widely among them with some chip vendors providing software, but no real post-sales support.

The Advantages and Challenges of Open Source
Linux appears in various medical devices and as a general-purpose OS, it has all the advantages of open source. Free distributions are available and it can be modified and redistributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Linux has been widely adopted and scrutinised by many experienced developers. Linux is also supported by all major hardware manufacturers and runs on virtually any processor. It also has a large ecosystem of board and software providers that use proven toolchains and application programming interfaces (APIs), and has exceptional graphics support, which is important for clear and readable device screens. The innovation and maturity of Linux has made it a mainstay in medical device development, but it also poses many challenges.

Medical devices marketed in the US are regulated by the Center for Device and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA is recognized globally as providing the leading guidance for medical devices, which European manufacturers need to follow to sell product in the US. Whether or not the device maker is claiming compliance to IEC 62304 for medical device software, it must follow several FDA guidance documents.

An OS may be treated as Software of Unknown Provenance (SOUP) or off-the-shelf (OTS) software. The FDA also makes it clear that the burden of ensuring safe and reliable performance does not end with product launch. So, when evaluating operating systems, it is necessary to plan for bug fixes and security updates for the entire product lifecycle.

Medical devices and their components must undergo a hazard analysis, typically performed by the device manufacturer - not to try and predict a likelihood of failure, but to analyse the effect on the patient in the event of failure. The FDA sets out full details in its "Guidance for Industry, FDA Reviewers and Compliance on Off-The-Shelf Software Use in Medical Devices". Choosing a commercial Linux vendor that can help a device maker satisfy these requirements is essential.

Cybersecurity: Assuring the Safety of Networked Devices
If Linux based medical device are being used in networks, then the FDA's guidance on cybersecurity applies: "Guidance for Industry - Cybersecurity for Networked Medical Devices Containing Off-the-Shelf (OTS) Software."   In basic terms, it states that networks are vulnerable to hacking and the manufacturer must have a software-maintenance plan to deal with networking vulnerabilities, specifying that formal business relationships should be maintained with OTS software vendors to ensure timely receipt of information concerning quality problems and recommended corrective and preventive actions.

If a commercial Linux vendor does not enter into formal support relationships with its customers or does not have an on-going cybersecurity plan in place, the burden falls upon the device manufacturer to monitor the Linux community, identify vulnerabilities and take necessary action - this requires a dedicated and highly specialised team.

If security functionality is not a core competency of the device manufacturer, it is critical to have an OS vendor to assist with the configuration of the security components of the network stack. Manufacturers need to be especially vigilant in the face of growing malware attacks such as the Stuxnet worm.

Device manufacturers have to decide what level of security is appropriate. In devices where prevention of any kind of breach is mission critical, manufacturers may want the added assurance of security functionality built into the OS.

Support for Implementation
There are also practical concerns of building a device that is reliable in performance and successful in meeting market needs:
• High-quality test tools are crucial and being able to show validation artifacts for those tools is also a requirement. Using an automated testing system that automatically creates the documentation of the testing performed may deliver time-to-market advantages over manual systems, while reducing the likelihood of human error and increasing confidence in the results.
• It is also essential to comply with the requirements of the GPL and other applicable open-source licenses.  
• Board Support Packages (BSPs) are essential in implementing embedded operating systems, including Linux. Few manufacturers are equipped to develop BSPs in-house and creating customised BSPs can be extremely costly.

In multicore system development, simplifying the design while still gaining the performance advantages of multiple processors and operating systems presents new challenges. Developers using advanced analysis tools in a Linux environment may encounter many new obstacles in a multicore or multithreaded environment. Using tools from a commercial OS provider reduces burden for developers.

Increasingly developers are using embedded hypervisors to leverage virtualisation and enable multiple operating systems to run on a single board. An embedded hypervisor can configure the multicore environment, boot several cores, allocate hardware resources, provide access to and protect memory (for safety and security), and monitor system health.

To successfully manage all these regulatory, safety, security, design and implementation issues, it is important to have a commercial OTS Linux partner with the resources, expertise and long-term support to help device makers deliver effective products that will not only win regulatory approval, but also perform reliably for many years.

OpenMAMA Project rallies around by Financial Services Industry

The Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit -- OpenMAMA, a Linux Foundation Labs project, today announced the availability of OpenMAMA 2.1, the open source Middleware Agnostic Messaging API and the first neutral standard in data messaging for financial services.

The project today is also welcoming three new Steering Committee participants: IBM, Tick42 (formerly known as DOT) and TS-Associates. Founding members for the project include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, EMC, Exegy, Fixnetix, and NYSE Technologies, who originally created the MAMA platform.

Announced last fall, the OpenMAMA project is an open source Application Programming Interface (API) that connects multiple transports and applications. Collaboration among companies and the Linux and open source communities today is enabling users to embrace new, common middleware technologies and applications as the market changes. It also helps organizations reduce their total cost of ownership and time to market for "event-driven" applications and ensures high performance, both in terms of throughput and message latency.

Features and technologies included in OpenMAMA 2.1 include:

1. The Middleware Agnostic Market Data API (MAMDA), which adds a market-specific data application development framework that includes support for quotes, trades and order books. OpenMAMDA will ultimately serve as the reference implementation of the NYSE Data Model.
     
2. Support for C++, Java and Windows. OpenMAMA is built using the C programming language and is designed to run on Linux. New    contributions include wrappers that allow programmers to develop     OpenMAMA applications written in C++ and Java, and to deploy these applications on Windows as well as Linux.
     
3. Integration of NYSE Technologies' Open Data Model Project, which provides an end-to-end open platform for facilitating and simplifying the consolidation of market data with independent technology, encoding formats and distributions mechanisms. This will include support for 200+ datafed venues globally and is expected to be compliant with NYSE Technologies' Market Data Platform.
     
4. Completion of the AMQP Bridge, which integrates OpenMAMA with the standard protocol for interoperability among all messaging middleware.
                     
5. Vendor adoption. For example, Exegy today is announcing it is now delivering data from an Exegy Ticker Plant through OpenMAMA.
     
"The OpenMAMA project represents what all Linux Foundation Labs projects represent: collaboration at its best," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. "OpenMAMA and open source software are accelerating for the messaging layer of the stack what Linux is doing for the OS-level of the software stack: driving innovation to support the largest number of complex transactions in real-time. The companies contributing to these efforts are leaders in their respective areas, and we're happy to see the tremendous progress that together they're making."

"We are truly excited to see OpenMAMA delivered to the financial services community to become a core building block of future innovation in trading technology," said Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies. "I thank my colleagues at NYSE Technologies and the OpenMAMA steering committee for their leadership and dedication to bringing this first of a kind initiative to the marketplace."

The OpenMAMA project members are meeting today with Linux kernel developers at The Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit to discuss these new features and to discuss what comes next. This invitation-only event this year is hosted by NYSE Technologies in New York.

Penguicon 2012 Open Source Software & Science Fiction Convention

Penguicon, an open-source software and science fiction gathering that expects to draw more than 1,200 fans to the Regency Hyatt hotel in Dearborn this weekend, is a great example of a convention that breaks with convention.

After all, there's no rule stating science fiction conventions must be restricted to middle-aged men prancing around in alien costumes while discussing Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics."

The decade-old Peguicon (named for Tux, the Linux penguin mascot) started out as a gathering of fans with crossover interests in computer programming and speculative fiction, but in recent years it's opened up its umbrella to include foodies, costumers, musicians, gamers, microbrewers and others.

The weekend's events will offer presentations of all kinds, from an introduction to 3D printers to a lecture on "How Not To Get Arrested For Your Alternative Lifestyle."

Conference-goers will also have the opportunity to join a zombie walk through the hotel, to go gothic belly dancing, to make liquid nitrogen ice cream, to engineer a customizable marble roller-coaster, to parade around in a drag show and even to take a quick trip to the shooting range with a group called Geeks with Guns.

Considering that Penguicon is a celebration of open-source software, it's not surprising that the event has branched out to include other DIY fields, nor that it's run by a not-for-profit team of collaborators.

"I think first and foremost, 'open source' means run by the fans," said Christine Bender, head of operations for Penguicon 2012. "Every person that works on Penguicon is a volunteer. We all do it because we love it."

This year's guest speakers include the Hugo award-winning science fiction writer John Scalzi, esteemed software developer Jim Gettys, and MadHatter from the open source record label Scrub Club.

Bender said the convention is an opportunity to meet with inspiring creators. "When are you going to get a chance to hang out with them for a whole weekend? You might play a board game with them or have a beer at the bar," she said. "It's an interaction you might not have with them any other way."

Red Hat warily hopeful about Microsoft's Open Technologies Inc

Linux leader Red Hat today applauded Microsoft’s recent launch of an open technologies subsidiary but is clearly taking a wait and see attitude.

Naturally. In the past, Microsoft described Linux and open source as a “cancer” on the software industry. Red Hat pointed out that the path to openness was not without opposition. With that it mind, Red Hat today penned a warily hopeful response to the news.

Linux Vs Bsd

Differences between BSD and Linux

1) BSD license allows users/companies to modify a program’s source code and not to release changes to the public. In other words, BSD licenses allow commercial use and incorporation of a code into proprietary commercial products. This is how Microsoft incorporated BSD networking into their products and how Mac OS X earns money through muscles of FreeBSD.

Linux uses GPL license for most of the time (applications in Linux can also have a BSD license - or any license; it is up to developers how they decide). With a GPL-licensed program anybody can change the source code, but he or she MUST share it with the Open Source community to make sure that everybody will benefit from such a change.

2) BSD has the so-called “core system” (without packages). The core system consists of basic utilities (like ssh, fdisk, various commands like chmod or sysctl, manual pages, etc.) and anything beyond this is strictly seen as an add-on. Linux (not only the kernel, of course) is usually packaged as the whole system where this difference is not seen.

3) On BSD systems, all add-on packages are strictly installed into the /usr/local directory: documents to user/local/share/docs/application_name; themes and other things to /usr/local/share/application_name; binaries to /usr/local/bin/application_name. By application_name we mean a program’s name, so if you install IceWM, for example, its binary will be here: /usr/local/bin/icewm. With Linux, on the other hand, all applications get mostly installed into the /usr/bin directory.

4) BSD systems use the system of “ports”, which are fingerprints of applications in the /usr/ports directory, where a user may “cd” and execute a make command, which will download, via a directive contained in such a fingerprint’s code, the application’s source and the system will compile it as well. “Ports” are actually add-on packages for BSD systems and they are also packaged in packages repository of a concrete BSD system. They can be installed as binaries, too, with use of the “pkg_add” either directly from the Internet or locally. But “ports” have that advantage that if an author of any package makes a new version, a user can immediately get its newest/updated version. Packages released for a particular BSD version (like OpenBSD 4.1) are not updated and users have to wait for a new BSD release (like OpenBSD 4.2).

5) BSD systems have also their stable version. With FreeBSD, for example, you have a FreeBSD-Release (a version that can be used normally), FreeBSD-Stable (system more profoundly audited for bugs and security holes), and a development version - Current, which is not stable and not recommended for a regular use. Some Linux distributions started to imitate this philosophy, but with BSD systems this way of making distributions has become a rule.

6) Of course, the kernel is absolutely different.

7) BSD has FFS file system; it is the only file system on BSD’s contrary to Linux, where you can use dozens of file systems like ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, etc.

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Java and Linux - an open marriage in search of success

In 2004 Eric Raymond wrote an open letter to Sun Microsystems' then chief executive officer Scott McNealy demanding Sun open up their core Java intellectual property and allow anyone do whatever they damn well please with it.

That other pillar of open source, and creator of the GNU Project Richard Stallman, meanwhile, became one of Java's loudest opponents - sternly advising people not to install the closed-source evil that was Java, and giving Java as a dire example of corporate lock-in.

Two years later Sun silenced the the baying crowd with OpenJDK - an open-source project based on Sun's closed-JDK codebase.

Sun also released Java Standard Edition (Java SE) for the desktop, Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) for mobile devices and Glassfish - Sun's implementation of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) - under GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2). Sun said GPLv2 would achieve the objectives of "driving more volume and adoption for Java and maintaining the 'write once run anywhere compatibility' promise."

Sun has spent much of the intervening period talking about how OpenJDK would make it easier to distribute Java with Linux, putting Java into new markets and on platforms, and into the hands of new developers. Stallman, himself, was sufficiently impressed by the move.

Two years on, has Sun's move changed anything other than end the shouting war over whether to open-source Java?

Sun's chief open-source officer Simon Phipps told The Reg that OpenJDK is doing "at least as well as I hoped." Sun could hardly have done any worse.

But has the move improved the life of Joe the Programmer, the everyday coder? "If you're an everyday developer programming under Windows writing everyday programs, you'll probably see no visible differences. But a tools developer will see a huge difference, as their market has suddenly grown hugely," Phipps said.

In other words, their tools will now be easily available on Linux as well as Windows.

Java goes further

The addressable market is certainly bigger. OpenJDK is now included in the top four FOSS GNU Linux distributions - Fedora 10, the Ubuntu main repository starting with version 8.10, OpenSUSE 11, and the planned Lenny version of Debian. It's also available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL5) and CentOS 5. Sun, meanwhile, claims success by download on Glassfish: eight million downloads and 250,000 "product registrations" in the last 12 months.

OK, so OpenJDK ships with top Linux distros - job done? Not quite. Java might ship with certain distros, but there is no single version of Java, or set of Java APIs or libraries, certified as 100-per-cent Linux compatible. That makes the job of installing it and administering Java on Linux a headache and creates portability hurdles for application developers writing software for different Linuxes.

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