Business

VIDEO: Elizabeth Krumbach on the SDForum Panel Discussion on Women and Open Source

On March 31, LinuxForce’s Elizabeth Krumbach participated in the SDForum panel discussion on “Tech Women: Women and Open Source”. There was a wide ranging discussion starting with a basic introduction to “open source” and how to get involved in open source. Other issues covered included special issues with the involvement of women, mentoring, business, and entrepreneurship. The Google Open Source Blog also reviewed the session.

Video of the panel discussion is online. Part 1 is 52 minutes.

Part 2 is 21 minutes.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in FOSS Community, News, 0 comments

One way to bring Innovative FOSS and Linux solutions to your organization

Here is an effective way to try out Linux or FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to help grow your organization. Hat tip to CIO magazine for

Adam Hartung’s short little InnovationZone article “Outsource for Growth”.

Mr. Hartung recommends outsourcing to grow your organization … to do new things … to innovate … to be more flexible. Since your IT staff is probably too busy to take on growth projects like these, it makes a lot of sense to use consulting experts, like LinuxForce, to develop, test, and provision innovative FOSS infrastructure for you. How could your organization benefit from the outsourcing for innovation approach to build out a FOSS or Linux-based solution to grow your business?

Posted by CJ Fearnley in Development, 0 comments

Licensing Considerations When Integrating FOSS and Proprietary Software

Recently, I was looking for resources to help explain the implications of integrating FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) with proprietary software. This question is important for any organization who might want to build an “embedded” or “dedicated” system or product which might include either their own proprietary software or third party applications. I discovered that most of the information available about FOSS licensing addresses this issue rather obliquely. This post will cover the basics so that such organizations can see how straightforward it would be to include FOSS in their projects. Standard disclaimers about my not being a lawyer apply.

Use of any software system requires understanding the software licensing involved. There are many dozens of FOSS licenses that could apply in your situation, so understanding the details is necessary to assess compatibility. In broad terms, these can be effectively summarized by the Debian Free Software Guidelines and The Open Source Definition. Any software that complies with those specifications will freely (in both the “freedom” and money senses of the word) permit running proprietary and FOSS applications on the same system. This is easier said than done. Since Debian has analyzed most common FOSS and quasi-FOSS licenses, their archive and their license page can be used to assess how the license might work in your situation (for example, anything in “main” would be OK for co-distribution and running in mixed environments). So we always start with Debian’s meticulous and well-documented analysis to assess any license.

From a high-level perspective, the requirements that FOSS licensing will impose on an organization wanting to include it with proprietary software will primarily be in the form of providing appropriate attribution (acknowledgement) and providing the source code for any FOSS software (including any modifications) shipped as part of an integrated system. Typically the attribution requirement can be satisfied by simply referencing the source code of the FOSS components. The source code requirement can be met by providing the source code for all of the FOSS distributed as part of the integrated system, for example, by placing it on a documented ftp site.

There are some subtle issues that may arise during the software development process if proprietary and FOSS code are “linked” together. In such cases it is necessary to ensure that code over which one wants to assert proprietary control is only combined with FOSS code that explicitly supports such commingling. So it is necessary for a company wanting to keep its code proprietary to keep it “separate” from the FOSS code used in the integrated system. The use of the words “linked” and “separate” is intentionally vague because the terms of each FOSS license will need to be examined by legal counsel to understand the precise requirements. In these situations, there are license compliance management systems that can be adopted to help ensure that this separation is maintained.

Those are the basic issues. The references below describe these and related issues involved with Linux & FOSS licensing in much more depth:

Posted by CJ Fearnley in Development, Systems Management, 0 comments

Beyond the Cloud: The Comprehensive Flexibility of FOSS May Bring Clearer Skies

Last week’s InformationWeek has a good article on cloud computing, Cloud ROI: A Grounded View.  It seems that even with all the hype (or because of it?) most are not “running blindly” to adopt “the cloud”.  I must admit the cloud metaphor has a powerful poetic charm to it.  That is probably why it has grabbed the attention of so many over the past few years. Everything in our world is ephemeral, so there is an aptness to the concept of a “cloud”. Moreover, I too like and use cloud analogies. But I am now looking for clearer skies!  Here is a short list of my gripes about "the cloud":

  • What does “cloud computing” mean? It isn’t at all clear! Here is some data: CIO magazine cites a Forrester report that says "the number one challenge in cloud computing today is determining what it really is". CIO also reported on a McKinsey study that "found 22 separate definitions of cloud computing"! And that leads to my second point:
  • The word “cloud” is so … vacuous and amorphous …  “A cloud:  it looks like Zeus!” only to transform in shape before your very eyes “Wait, now it looks like Aphrodite!” … and then its gone!  Is this the kind of model people should entrust with their business data?  It has no structural stability:  inherently:  it is just rapidly moving gases … far out of reach … away in the sky. What kind of business model is that?
  • Although RADLab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory) has put out some interesting papers, I was a little surprised when I read their acknowledgements in the CACM article A View of Cloud Computing.  It reads like a who’s who in cloud computing: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Sun, eBay, Cloudera, Facebook, and so on. The original Berkeley paper has a shorter list of cloud companies funding their work. I’m sure they are maintaining their academic integrity, but it does show that they are not wholly independent. Remember what Kitty Foyle said:

    I’ve taught myself a lesson, or I hope I have: when I find myself thinking something I stop a minute and ask myself, Now who had it all figured out beforehand that was the way they wanted me to think?
    — From Christopher Morley’s novel “Kitty Foyle

  • Although the Berkeley papers raise a number of very interesting issues, none of them requires vacuous meaningless jargon to further obscure the subtleties and complexities of emerging technology trends! So my final gripe is that the name “cloud” tends to obscure what is really important even when I agree with “the cloud thinkers”.

Perhaps the most important issue “the cloud people” are missing is what might be called comprehensive flexibility. As a user of software technology, I want my computing functionality everywhere … in every imaginable format. For example, I’d like to be able to use the software that I’ve invested the time to learn to be available on my desktop (32-bit, 64-bit, Mac, Windows, or Linux), and I’d like it to work whether the Net is working or not, on my cell phone and other portable devices (again with network or not), in the data center (clustered or not), in the WAN (Wide Area Network, note that the Internet is our shared, global WAN), perhaps distributed among several hosting providers, and perhaps even provided by “utilities” (to save the trouble of maintenance and scaling costs). But I think software should be so flexible that it can live in each of those environments. Talk about utility computing: wouldn’t software have so much more utility if it worked everywhere instead of being beholden to whatever your software provider offers or what hardware you happen to have in front of you right now?

Fortunately this type of flexible software does exist. It is called Free and Open Source Softare (FOSS) and it is becoming ubiquitous. In fact, whether you know it or not, you are using FOSS software: Apache, the FOSS web server, runs this web site and indeed the majority of all web sites. WordPress, the blogging software we use here is also “everywhere” and you can purchase it from “cloud” utility providers or install, run, and modify it yourself. The list of important FOSS software goes on and on and this blog is dedicated to helping elucidate its importance as well as the issues involved in managing it.

So I would argue that instead of letting our heads go to the “clouds” we need to ask how can we make software that works in all environments, on all hardware, and for all people? … how can we make software that is comprehensively flexible?

Posted by CJ Fearnley in FOSS Community, 0 comments

Slides Available From Our Managing FOSS Seminar

Last Thursday LinuxForce hosted a seminar on Managing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Business Results. The Seminar home page now has links to the slides from the event. Specifically, there are four sets of slides available:

Please let us know if you have any questions about the content in the slides or from the seminar itself.

Posted by CJ Fearnley in News, 0 comments