Posts Tagged ‘application’
Guidelines for Starting Your Very Own Open Source Project
Are you thinking of launching an open source project? Doing so successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re doing an open source project.
The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.
As we noted in a this post, the Software Freedom Law Center has a set of very good online resources on how open source licenses and copyrights work, and much more. Legal issues are smart to anticipate up front. The authors are attorneys who were part of creating popular open source licenses. It’s also an excellent idea to keep up with urrent and archived editions of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review
For an easy to digest, plain language discussion of license types for open source projects, and which license will work best for your project, try available here, and the Free Software Foundation has a good primer. It’s also an excellent idea to visit SourceForge, and review the many projects housed there, which types of licenses they have, how their communities work, and more. Should your project be housed there?
If you’re stitching together open source code or deploying applications, Hewlett-Packard’s free application Fossology is designed to analyze the source code for any project and report accurately on which licenses are being used.
For developers who want learning resources, Developer.com offers useful in our post here.
Finally, don’t forget that Tecnobitsitself is an excellent forum for getting questions answered. Type a question in at any time in our Member Questions area (see the Questions button on the home page) and you’ll get answers from experts. You can also read some of OStatic’s many interviews with open source project leaders, some of them found here, here, and here, and find a whole series of interviews on open source cloud-based projects here.
HP Moves Into Public Beta with its Cloud Services
While Citrix’s moves ahead with CloudStack and its abandonment of the OpenStack cloud computing platform dominated the news recently, let’s not forget that OpenStack has enormous backing and a well-funded foundation forming around it. In our post "OpenStack’s Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race," we detailed some of the many tech companies that are developing around the OpenStack platform.
Hewlett-Packard, for example, has announced its Converged Cloud services and platform tools, based on a "hardened" version of OpenStack. And now, HP is ready to deliver the public beta version of its HP Cloud Services, which could mean a lot for the struggling company.
HP has delivered public, open beta versions of three OpenStack-based services: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network. Users will pay only for the services they consume, and while HP has gone out of its way to position its services as different from Amazon’s you can bet that HP will be competing closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud.
Along with HP’s announcement, there are many partners and supporters making related announcements. Opscode, which specializes in cloud infrastructure automation, has announced integration with HP Cloud Services. And Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud application management solutions, has announced support. Standing Cloud offers a simple way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud. You can find the full details on HP’s partner community here.
HP’s pricing is very fully disclosed everything will come down to support. Many of the companies "backing" OpenStack are contributing code or pursuing other forms of community contribution, but a unified, robust support effort is what will really make a difference.
HP Cloud Support is up and running, and you can find more details on it here. Can HP become a major player in the cloud by betting on a flexible, open source platform? We’re about to see, and this should be interesting to watch.
Microsoft’s Vision of a Better Bing is Social Integration
Microsoft is dipping its search brush into its paint bucket and getting ready to swipe it across Bing, the world’s second most popular search engine behind Google. The new-look Bing will take on a three column design that Microsoft says is “the most significant update” to the search engine since it launched three years ago. Microsoft is looking beyond simple keyword searches and putting a big part of its focus on sharing search results by incorporating a Facebook column on the right-hand side.
“Now it’s possible to do more than find pages with search. You are able to share nearly everything you do, including where you are and who you are, in real-time,” Microsoft explains. “From rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations to applications that let you take action in the real world, digital connections are created that present the opportunity to do something. This presents an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how search should work. Suddenly an index of documents that does not embrace these changes is insufficient.”
The social sidebar is always present and supposedly “never intrusive.” It will appear as part of every search query, though it’s whisked to the right side of the browser. Most of the social content that used to appear in the main search pane will be shuttled to the side. You’ll be able to share links and comment directly to Facebook using the sidebar.
It isn’t all about social networking, however. The other two columns will consist of core web results, which will take up the largest third of the screen, and a ‘Snapshot’ center column with relevant information and services related to your search, such as maps, restaurant reviews and reservations, and more.
You can read more about Bing’s redesign here.
Apple iOS 5.1.1 available, but do you want it?
It’s all well and good giving a shout out to a new software update that will touch the lives of millions, but how certain can we be that our lives will actually improve after the time-consuming effort of updating an iPad or sumsuch? Tecnobitsoptimistically plugs an iPad 3 into a USB 3 port, hoping that things might go quicker.
While the iPad 2 seemed as solid as a rock from the day it arrived, we have to say that there have been times with the iPad 3 when ‘your window just disappears’. You’re doing something one second and the next, it’s gone.
Microsoft users roll with these punches – it takes more than randomly ending browser windows before we get psyched. That said, once you do lock yourself into the locked down world of the Apple-ites, you sort of expect things to work.
Cue Apple iOS 5.1.1
According to Apple’s own site, users have been suffering from a number of afflictions, including (but not limited to) the following (with solutions):-
- Improves reliability of using HDR option for photos taken using the Lock Screen shortcut
- Addresses bugs that could prevent the new iPad from switching between 2G and 3G networks
- Fixes bugs that affected AirPlay video playback in some circumstances
- Improved reliability for syncing Safari bookmarks and Reading List
- Fixes an issue where ‘Unable to purchase’ alert could be displayed after successful purchase
The update takes a while, so it’s nice to get the ‘things seem OK’ message at the end.
The main security issues fixed with Safari/WebKit are described as follows:-
Safari
Available for: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation) and later, iPad, iPad 2
Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to spoof the address in the location bar
Description: A URL spoofing issue existed in Safari. This could be used in a malicious web site to direct the user to a spoofed site that visually appeared to be a legitimate domain. This issue is addressed through improved URL handling. This issue does not affect OS X systems.
WebKit
Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to a cross-site scripting attack
Description: Multiple cross-site scripting issues existed in WebKit.
Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
Description: A memory corruption issue existed in WebKit.
Being protected from all of these evils is certainly a good thing. What’s less good is the speed with which ‘issues’ with iOS 5.1.1. are posted – almost as soon as anyone has had a chance to install the update.
One quick glance through Google and the most common seem to centre on things like synchronisation and battery life.
You'd need to research the issues for yourself to assess their veracity, but the idea of Apple being 100% stable is just not true – so we would recommend that you do a little research and a lot of backing up before you press 'go'
Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.
At Citrix Synergy, Citrix’s CloudStack Strategy Spreads Out
Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says "customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models."
Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene.
In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here. Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.
At the conference, Citrix is also swe covered here. Citrix is positioning Podio as a new part of its GoTo line of products, which includes GoToMeeting, and if you consider Podio alongside both GoToMeeting and CloudStack, it becomes clear that Citrix has its eye on end-to-end cloud platform tools, including approachable front-end applications. While Podio isn’t open source, its freemium model and user-configurable cloud collaboration environments have an open and flexible ethos to them. There is a good discussion of this week’s Podio demos here.
With all of Citrix’s CloudStack moves, it’s becoming clear that CloudStack will do direct battle with OpenStack, but we’ve noted that there is room for both of these open source cloud platforms. We’ve covered Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy. Both OpenStack and CloudStack have many big backers, so it’s natural that these two platforms are being characterized as engaged in a high-profile fight.
The ReadWriteCloud Channel extrapolated on the notion that multiple cloud platforms can succeed in an excellent point in a post titled "It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud":
We’ll round up more news from Citrix Synergy, but through the end of today, you can still catch the free webcasts of events from the conference.