The Enterprise Open Source Blog

5 Keys to Successfully Building Enterprise Cloud Apps

Posted by Eric Weidner on February 3rd, 2012 in Open Source Trends, The Cloud

Deploying enterprise cloud apps to public or remote cloud infrastructure provides a lot of useful benefits, but can be problematic for many organizations due to concerns over security and control. Once you are ready for the move from your warm and windowless data center to someone else’s warm and windowless data center, here are 5 keys to being successful.

1) Protect your data (part 1)

Cloud security is the number one issue with using public clouds. Many organizations are building applications that include personal information, confidential information, or intellectual property that needs to be protected. Help all the paranoids sleep better by building in security features from the start, even going to the point of overkill if necessary. Database encryption is a common way to protect data at rest, but also consider treating your cloud instances as single use servers. Remove all the keys and passwords from disk once your application is running and disable all unnecessary connections including ssh. Adopt a devops strategy that allows quick launches and centralized logging and management. If a server does stop responding or gets rebooted for some reason, just throw it away and get a new one. Taking a few extreme security measures will help you get more opportunities to utilize the true power of the cloud.

2) Protect your data (part 2)

Cloud technology does pose some new challenges. At this point, server failure rates can vary and the faster options include storage that does not persist across restarts or failures. Data loss is a real risk unless a high availability or replication strategy is adopted. There are also plenty of cloud based data solutions popping up, including Cloudant, Amazon RDS, and Rackspace MySQL Cloud, that can put the HA burden on someone else’s shoulders. Bottom line, losing data will kill a project fast. Keep it safe.

Open Source License Interpretation Made Easy

Posted by Jilayne Lovejoy on February 1st, 2012 in Legal & Compliance

Why is it so hard?

Understanding and interpreting open source licenses is not always an easy task. Open source licenses are essentially unilateral; if you use the software, you agree to the terms of the license. There is no protracted negotiation process in which you ruminate and refine terms, as is often the case for custom-developed software. Open source licenses may not track on U.S. Copyright Act statutory language or use accepted license wording. Alternative language or definitions may be used instead of legal terms of art or expanded to encompass a global perspective. All of this can cause ambiguity when it comes time to interpret the license for compliance.

Making it even more difficult, the more troublesome compliance terms have yet to be litigated, most notably the derivative works question in regards to the GNU General Public License. However, that does not mean there is no guidance; organizations that have authored or maintain a license often provide a frequently-asked-questions resource to proselytize their interpretation. Whether a court would agree with their interpretation may be debatable, but so long as there is no judicial opinion regarding specific compliance terms it is wise to pay attention to these resources. For the more common and established licenses, seasoned open source attorneys can also rely on community-accepted practice for compliance.

Cloud Technology and the Technology Adoption Life Cycle: A Book Review

Posted by Aaron Mandelbaum on January 30th, 2012 in Open Source Trends, The Cloud

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore, was not written about Cloud Technology. In fact, the book was originally published in 1991 when a reference to “The Cloud” most probably would have had people looking out their windows at the sky.

Cloud technology and cloud based solutions are having an impact on all stages of the current technology adoption life cycle, and although the book was published in 1991, the principles and characteristics defined appear to be solution agnostic and still resonate 20 years later with recent references in articles like, 5 More Books for the Aspiring Funnelholic, Crossing the Content Chasm, and Will Google+ Cross the Chasm?.

So what exactly are the stages of the technology adoption life cycle, and where do you stand when it comes to cloud solutions?

Proprietary Software Support vs. Open Source Support – Common Misconceptions

Posted by Nicholas DiPiazza on January 27th, 2012 in Support

Many people in the business world prefer to use proprietary software instead of open source software due to the misconception that proprietary software is better supported than open source software. After several years of supporting both open source software and proprietary software, it becomes clearly evident that just because you pay for proprietary software does not mean that supporting that software is any easier; in fact, there are plenty of reasons why supporting open source software is actually easier.

Let’s identify the set of steps you would take to handle a support issue for proprietary software.
First, you would have a system administrator consult the software documentation to learn more about the issue at hand to find a solution to the problem. If the administrator cannot resolve the issue with the use of documentation, then do one of the following:

SOPA and PIPA: What Bills Like These Mean to Open Source Software

Posted by Amanda DePaul on January 25th, 2012 in Open Source Trends

SOPA and PIPA were very recently put on hold after much protesting and petitioning from the likes of Wikipedia, Google, the Free Software Foundation, and angry Internet surfers everywhere – but you can bet this isn’t the last we’ve heard of bills such as these. So what would similar bills mean to open source software if they were realized? Here’s what the potential impact could look like.

Open Source Scanning: A Technical Perspective on Which Files to Scan

Posted by Dave McLoughlin on January 23rd, 2012 in Scanning & Provisioning

When preparing to scan your application development projects for open source software, one simple approach is to point your scanner at the root directory of your development system. But that is probably not the most efficient approach, and results may include many open source components that are not actually part of your application. Or worse, the scanner may miss components that are not present in the build environment. There are many reasons to be careful and selective about what you scan and why. Here’s a short list of considerations when preparing to scan and determine the open source used in your application.

Open Source Benefits: A Developer’s Perspective

Posted by Peter Williams on January 20th, 2012 in Open Source Trends

Open source benefits to businesses are pretty obvious, even if only recently recognized. It costs less, and often works better, than its commercial competitors. Developers have long preferred open source products to their commercial counterparts. In fact, this developer preference is why we are seeing the surge in enterprise open source usage. Why do developers prefer open source so strongly?

I want it yesterday!
Developers want to get stuff done. The thought of engaging in a procurement process is enough to sap the energy from almost any idea. We will just go back to reading hacker news instead of slogging our way through all that red tape.

Open source tools, on the other hand, are always close at hand. It takes almost no time from conception to actually writing code if you are using open source tools. Even better you can wait until you have something interesting to demo before you ask for forgiveness. With commercial offerings you almost always have to ask for permission, and we all know that is a sure fire way to get your pet project shut down.

Open Source Trends for 2011: HBase, Node.js and nginx are Top Gainers

Posted by Kim Weins on January 18th, 2012 in Open Source Trends

Although it may be easy to identify the open source projects that widely used, uncovering the hot new projects that enterprises should be evaluating can be more challenging. OpenLogic’s Open Source Trending report analyzes which open source projects are growing the most quickly in enterprise interest and adoption during the past year. With this information, you can keep an eye on the trends that may be coming to your enterprise in the year ahead.

OpenLogic analyzed 8 growth metrics for 16 projects in three categories — web and application servers; application frameworks; and databases and big data. The projects were stack ranked on each metric and across all metrics to create an overall growth ranking.

5 Steps to Open Source Compliance

Posted by Aaron Mandelbaum on January 16th, 2012 in Legal & Compliance

Google estimates that the exact phrase, “open source compliance,” is searched only 73 times globally per month. In contrast, “free software” is searched 90,500 times globally per month, and “source code” is searched 450,000 times globally per month.

The way I interpret this isolated piece of data is that either:

The vast majority of the people using open source software are so confidant that their open source compliance is spot on, that they don’t need to search for compliance solutions;
People haven’t looked at addressing the issue as fast as the interest and adoption of open source and free software has grown; or
People just don’t know what they don’t know and could very well be sitting on top of a ticking time bomb with issues of compliance waiting to surface.

So if you have stumbled upon this article or you are one of the 73 people in the world this month that searched for “open source compliance,” the following five steps or questions will help get you going in the right direction.

5 Ways an Open Source Governance Process Can Improve Your Organization

Posted by Greg Bell on January 13th, 2012 in Governance

Is one of your resolutions for the new year to create an enterprise open source governance process for your organization, or review and update your existing governance process? If your organization doesn’t already have an open source governance process, this should definitely be on your list of goals for 2012. Likewise if you have a governance process that’s outdated, incomplete, or inconsistently implemented throughout the organization.

As with any business process change, it can be difficult to find the time, inspiration, and support from others necessary to get started with creating or updating your company’s open source governance process. If you find yourself in this predicament, now is the perfect time to review the many ways an effective governance process can positively impact your organization. Here’s a list of five benefits to help motivate you and your team to get started.