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."

Open Source HPC Language Project Started under Sun, Oracle winding it down

Oracle researchers are "winding down" development of the Fortress programming language for high-performance computing, an effort started nearly 10 years ago by Sun Microsystems.

Fortress was meant to provide a superior alternative to the well-established Fortran language for HPC. It is also among a number of languages that received financial support from the US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) High Productivity Computing Systems program.

"Ten years is a remarkably long run for an industrial research project (one to three years is much more typical), but we feel that our extended effort has been worthwhile," well-known computer scientist and Fortress project architect Guy Steele said in a blog post on Saturday. "Many aspects of the Fortress design were novel, and we learned a great deal from building an interpreter and an initial set of libraries."

However, the project faced "severe technical challenges" during the past few years, according to Steele. The issues revolved around "the mismatch between the (rather ambitious) Fortress type system and a virtual machine not designed to support it (that would be every currently available VM, not just [the Java VM]," he wrote.

Team members decided there wasn't enough research value in finishing an implementation of Fortress compatible with the JVM, he added.

"We also note that, over the last ten years, other languages (Chapel, X10, Clojure, and Scala, among others) have explored some of the same issues that Fortress has addressed, and we have very much enjoyed conversations, collaboration, and friendly competition with those who have explored these ideas in alternative contexts," Steele said.

Work on Fortress is going to be gradually stopped over the next few months as team members get "the code and language specification into the best shape that we can," Steele added. The codebase will still be open-source and Oracle's Programming Language Research Group will answer queries about it.

The writing may have been on the wall for Fortress as far back as November 2006, when DARPA stopped funding its development. But work on the language continued at Sun and Oracle, which completed the acquisition of Sun in early 2010.

News of Fortress' pending draw-down drew a mixture of disappointment and shrugging acceptance from programmers posting on social media sites.

"Oracle would keep it alive for...what, exactly," one poster said in a Reddit thread. "Sometimes neat languages never get traction, and throwing good money after bad won't help matters."

"It's a project that is going nowhere (a lot of people in this thread have never even heard of it)," another wrote. "Surely they can put someone like Guy Steele to work on something that is more likely to succeed."

Open-Source Startup Meteor Gets $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz

Meteor Development Group (MDG) raises $11.2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others to fund development around the open-source Meteor Web app development platform.

Meteor Development Group (MDG), the company behind the Meteor open-source project, which produces a platform for building software applications, has announced $11.2 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Also participating in the Series A round of funding was Matrix Partners and others, while a veritable "dream team" of enterprise technology leaders, including Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework and founder of SpringSource—now  part of VMware—will advise the company.

Applications written with Meteor run on a user's own computer—inside their browser or on their mobile device—and fetch any needed data from cloud services, which represents a sharp break from the model of Web applications for the past 15 years, where applications run on distant Web servers. Running the application on the user's computer gives a smoother, more responsive experience that is increasingly expected by consumers. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter use this technique in their flagship products, but it is typically out of reach for most developers because it takes months of work even for a team of experts, MDG officials said.

The Meteor Project is a collaboration between a group of developers who are experts in building this new kind of application. Its goal is to put the new technology in the hands of everyone. Because the Meteor platform is open source, any person or company may use it for free, or modify it to suit their needs. And Meteor apps can be written entirely in JavaScript.

"We want to create the universal standard for writing this kind of application, and that will only happen through broad industry cooperation," said Meteor co-author Matt DeBergalis, in a statement. "It's clear to everyone that we need something new. Will it be Meteor? What we see today is that it is open-source developers who drive the technology that is ultimately adopted everywhere else in the industry. So it depends on whether the open-source community chooses to rally around Meteor."

The new funding comes in the form of a Series A investment in Meteor Development Group, a corporation controlled by Geoff Schmidt, Matt DeBergalis and Nick Martin, the original authors of Meteor. The company will use the money to support Meteor development and grow the Meteor community, and plans to sell a complementary set of enterprise-grade operations management tools to large organizations that are using Meteor.

"JavaScript is fast becoming the most popular programming language for Web development, and Meteor is front-and-center in the JavaScript community. By addressing simplicity and scalability, Meteor is a great platform for enterprise Web development," said Peter Levine, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. "We are delighted to be partnering with Geoff, Matt and Nick as they build out the next-generation Web development tools."

In a blog post on the Meteor funding, Levine notes that JavaScript has become the No. 1 programming language on the GitHub hosting service for software development projects.

“The problem with JavaScript, however, is that it was designed to be a client-side language, leaving all the back-end server implementation to other languages,” Levine said in his post. “The result is that cloud-based Web applications take way too long to develop due to the sheer complexity and brittleness of the environment. Without Meteor, everything from security, to multi-tenancy, to latency, to database access requires special APIs and custom development, and developers need to know at least two languages.”

Yet, Levine continued, “The Meteor framework solves all of these problems. Meteor makes real-time application development dramatically faster and more approachable. It gives developers a comprehensive platform for writing Web apps in JavaScript where both client and server code use the same language and API, enabling the same code to be run on both the client and server. The result is real-time, cloud-based Web apps that are scalable, secure and distributed by design.”

Thus, the healthy investment in the startup. “We see this technology as fundamentally important to the future of the Web,” Levine added. “Through this investment in Meteor, as well as our recent investment in GitHub, we at a16z are excited to help developers build the next generation of applications.”

Meanwhile, in a separate post, David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners, indicated that Meteor might be the next Ruby on Rails. He said, “Every once in a while a new application development framework comes along that dramatically accelerates the way people create applications. Those rare platforms that excite developers ultimately revitalize software development and spur new creativity. Though it's still early, Meteor appears to be the next big thing in Web application development as it is clearly delighting both expert and novice developers.”

In his own post on the Meteor Website, Schmidt, CEO of MDG, said the $11.2 million gives the company “certainty” because “no matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years, without taking on consulting work or trying to create some other application on top of Meteor to sell. The high valuation of the round eliminates any possibility of a talent acquisition. And we control the company's board. So, everyone in the community can be certain that Meteor will be around for the long haul.”

And though Meteor will always be free and open source, eventually MDG plans to deliver a commercial product named Galaxy, Schmidt said. “Galaxy will be a product that the operations department at a large company might buy,” he said. “It'll be an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for Meteor apps. In other words, it'll let you run a private, centrally controlled ‘meteor deploy’-like service for your company, on your own hardware. You'll be able to manage how your apps are distributed across your data centers, perform capacity planning, and enforce controls and policies that are appropriate to your organization. Google and Facebook have these tools—why shouldn't your organization?”

However, the MDG agenda for the next few years is to:

Make Meteor the best platform for writing most any kind of app. This is an enormous job and will continue to consume almost all of our energy. Our goal is ubiquity on the scale of SQL, Apache or Java.
Create opportunities for Meteor developers—for example, encourage companies to adopt Meteor, creating jobs. We want to make you famous and get you paid.
Support the Meteor community. This includes everything, from publishing books and organizing conferences, to being responsive to bug reports and pull requests, to finally making some cool T-shirts.
Rod Johnson will join the company's board. Skok and Levine will serve as special advisors to the company. Previously, Skok built the enterprise sales strategy for JBoss, the open-source Java application server, while Levine is the former CEO of Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix Systems.

"Rod, David and Peter are our dream team," Schmidt said in a statement. "They know more than anyone else about building open-source technology for the enterprise."

"Today, we're in the midst of the biggest architectural change since the rise of the Web. Traditional Web application architectures don't cut it anymore, as users expect a better experience," said Johnson in a statement. "I believe that Meteor can lead this transformation in Web technology, and I'm excited to join their board. Meteor not only enables Web developers to develop rich applications spanning multiple client types, it makes Web development fun again."

Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A financing, which included significant participation by Matrix Partners. Other investors include Maynard Webb, who sits on the boards of Salesforce and Yahoo; Paul Buchheit, author of Gmail; James Lindenbaum, co-founder of Heroku; Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Y Combinator; Ron Conway; Yuri Milner; and Aaron Iba, co-author of EtherPad.

Black Hat Hacking Hotel Doors With Open-Sou0ce Arduino

By using open-source Arduino tools, security researchers are exposing security gaps in door-lock systems used by millions of hotels.

For millions of travelers and road warriors, the ubiquitous hotel key card is the primary, and essentially the only, way to access their rooms at the end of day. However, security researcher Cody Brocious believes the current systems used to secure hotel doors throughout the United States and elsewhere are severely flawed.

Speaking at the Black Hat security conference here, Brocious demonstrated how locks from Onity—a company that sells security products to hotels and other businesses—can easily be bypassed. At the show, Brocious detailed the primary security flaws that allowed him to bypass Onity locks and gain access to rooms.

Brocious used an open-source tool known as Arduino, a portable programming platform. Arduino was used as a substitute for the commercial portable programmer that an Onity lock would typically require. Brocious explained that the Onity locks have a serial hardware connection that is easily accessible, as well.

In addition to the Arduino tool, Brocious used an oscilloscope that allowed him to see what was happening in the lock whenever a key card was put in and the door opened or closed. He was able to determine through his research that the underlying firmware on the lock does not require any form of authentication to arbitrarily access the memory of the lock.

This means it is possible to read out every bit of information that is on the lock, which makes it possible for anyone to gain access or make a key.

In theory, programming for the lock should go over a secure channel, rather than doing direct unencrypted memory access, said Brocious. The problem, according to his research, is that the existing Onity lock design does not easily allow for that, and there is no easy way to update the firmware.

Another potential option is to actually provide physical security on the door lock. For example, the company could make the serial port harder to access. However, with 5 million of these locks in use today, Brocious said this would be an expensive and challenging way to add additional security.

The actual door locks are only half the problem exposed by Brocious. The card keys are also at risk. Typical card keys in the Onity system use only 32-bit key encryption making them easy to decrypt, according to Brocious.

"The system is broken at every layer," said Brocious.

The severity of the issue and its high impact is what led Brocious to choose to release his research at Black Hat. In addition to his research, he is also releasing a software tool so that others can continue or expand on his efforts.

"Something needs to be done about this problem, and I didn't want to put it out there in a way that could be defeated by process," said Brocious. "No doubt, this vulnerability has been found before, and it has been in the locks for years."

Brocious added: “I'd be surprised if this hasn't been used by malicious actors in the past.”

What Brocious is hoping to achieve from this disclosure is not a mass string of hackers getting unauthorized access to hotel rooms, but rather some kind of fix and industry response.

"I'm saying that this is what you're vulnerable [to], so come up with a way to solve the problem," said Brocious.

The OW2 Open Source Community Announces High-Profile Participation at this Year’s FISL

The OW2 community ramps up its presence in Brazil through its high-profile participation in FISL with members and projects 4Linux, Mandriva, MAPS, CompatibleOne and SpagoBI.

OW2, the global open source community dedicated to open source infrastructure software and generic applications, announces its participation as a Silver Sponsor in the 13th edition of the International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, July 24-28.

For its second participation in FISL, the OW2 community is making a significant contribution to the event in both the exhibition hall and the conference program. OW2 is ramping up its efforts to reach out to all those IT professionals in Latin America looking to benefit from its open source software solutions.

On the exhibition floor, the “OW2 Village” will be one of the largest booths. Members and projects 4Linux, Mandriva, MAPS, CompatibleOne and SpagoBI will showcase OW2's state-of-the-art open source technologies in middleware, enterprise applications and platforms, and cloud computing.

As for the conferences, the OW2 community will be hosting eight sessions that will reveal the strengths of open source innovation at OW2. From breakthrough collaborative projects to enterprise-ready application platforms, the community's contribution to the FISL conference program includes the following talks:
Cedric Thomas, OW2, will give two talks, one presenting the CompatibleOne open source cloud broker and the other discussing his analysis of the changing nature of open source.

Nelson Lago, University of Sao Paulo, will provide an update on the CHOReOS project,
Sergio Rafael Lemke, Mandriva, will present Mandriva and its Pulse 2 solutions for managing IT infrastructure,
Andrea Gioia, Engineering, will discuss extensive information management in SpagoBI,
Leandro Marcio Hernandez Benitez, 4Linux, will present BonitaSoft,

Miguel Koren O'Brien, Konsultex Informatica, will give a presentation of a SpagoBI use case,
Julien Renaut, MAPS SA, will present the Jmine platform.

“We are proud of our high-level participation in FISL this year. It demonstrates the strong momentum of our members in Brazil and our strategic commitment to Latin America.” said Cedric Thomas, OW2 CEO. “This is a great opportunity for the OW2 community.” he adds.

Trentino joins Italy's open source alliance

New law affects the software choices of some 15,000 public offices in the region

The Autonomous Province of Trentino - Alto Adige this week joined the ranks of Italian regional administrations that are turning their backs on proprietary software in favor of free and open source alternatives.

A majority of councilors from the northern province bordering Austria voted on Wednesday for a law instructing regional administrations to promote the use of free and open source software, with only the minority Northern League voting against the measure.

The law is intended to promote pluralism in information technology and "the elimination of every barrier created by the use of non-open source standards, in the service of the principles of economy, efficiency and effectiveness."

Article 8 of the law calls on the provincial administration to promote good ICT (Information and Communication Technology) practices "based on the adoption and use of open communication and data exchange protocols and on the development and adoption of software covered by FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) licenses."

The vote by the Trentino council came a week after a similar law was approved by the local government in the southern region of Puglia. The new law also calls for the development of broadband communications in the Trentino region, the use of open source software in the region's schools and the creation of a digital archive for the regional administration.

Michele Nardelli, the Democratic Party councilor who played a leading role in promoting the law, said he had been inspired by the ideals of the "Arab spring," the Internet-fueled popular revolt against dictatorial regimes that has spread along the southern rim of the Mediterranean over the last year.
"It's a law that coordinates all the themes of the information society within the context of free software," Nardelli said in a telephone interview Friday.

The center-left politician said Microsoft representatives had lobbied hard against the measure. "The region of Sardinia wanted to make a choice in favor of free software but they didn't succeed in accomplishing it because of Microsoft's heavy intervention, which influenced the choice of a majority of the regional councilors," Nardelli said.

Nardelli said he had been approached by Microsoft representatives himself and had arranged to be accompanied to the meeting by witnesses, to ensure that inappropriate inducements did not form part of the discussion.

The law had important economic implications, since it would influence the software choices of some 15,000 public offices in the region, Nardelli said. The region currently pays ¬1.5 million (US$1.8 million) for proprietary software licenses for 5,000 regional administrative offices, with other licenses required by the health and education systems and regional utilities, according to data published on Nardelli's website.
Despite the resistance from multinational software companies, the trend toward free software was unstoppable, Nardelli said. "There's a rearguard action being fought by commercial interests allied to the habit and mental laziness of people working in the civil service," he said. "But I think free software has become an avalanche that no one will be able to stop now."

Microsoft open-sources Entity Framework

Code release of .Net application development tool is being handled by Microsoft Open Technologies

Microsoft on Thursday released code for its Entity Framework database mapping tool via open source in an effort to increase transparency.

The move is being handled by Microsoft Open Technologies, a company subsidiary launched in April to advance Microsoft's open source and related efforts. Entity Framework is used for .Net application development, providing an object-relational mapping framework to work with relational data as domain-specific objects, eliminating the need for most data access "plumbing" code, according to Microsoft.
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Source code is being released under an Apache 2.0 license, with the code repository now hosted on Microsoft's CodePlex site for open source software. "This will enable everyone in the community to be able to engage and provide feedback on code check-ins, bug fixes, new feature development, and build and test the product on a daily basis using the most up-to-date version of the source code and tests," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Microsoft server and tools business, in a blog post. "Community contributions will also be welcomed so you can help shape and build Entity Framework into an even better product."

Microsoft will continue to ship official builds of Entity Framework as a supported product in both stand-alone form and as part of the Visual Studio IDE. New features will be released as well. An upcoming Entity Framework 5 release will add such capabilities as spatial data types and improved performance.

"Our goal with today's announcement is to increase the development feedback loop even more, allowing us to deliver an even better product," Guthrie said. The open-sourcing of Entity Framework follows up similar efforts for Microsoft technologies, including ASP.Net MVC and ASP.Net Web API.

Also on Thursday, Microsoft Open Technologies is launching an MSOpen Tech CodePlex landing page, intended to boost different Microsoft-driven open source projects. Microsoft Open Technologies also is launching MS Open Tech Hub, an engineering program for MS Open Technologies engineers, who can collaborate on open source projects.

This article, "Microsoft open-sources Entity Framework," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.