Your choice of public vs. private cloud and IaaS vs. PaaS providers can have a dramatic impact on your ability to support your open source-based applications in a 24×7 production environment.
Read More »The SPDX (Software Package Data Exchange) standard is designed to help companies streamline their open source compliance efforts by sharing information about open source licenses that are used in software packages.
Read More »I often talk to people who are having a hard time developing the business case for purchasing and implementing a source code scanning tool or purchasing an application audit service. I respond by describing that a legitimate and successful business case in 2012 needs to include the following:
At minimum, a general understanding of the basics of open source software
Both the want and need to find and implement a solution
The organizational drivers and resources to develop a solution to a problem or to enhance and compliment an existing system that lacks efficiency or accuracy
Cross-functional approvals and resources from multiple departments
Accurate and balanced vendor evaluation and selection criteria
Hopefully some of the ideas in this article will resonate to help all of you continue building the business case as you consider how or when to start a scanning and license compliance initiative.
Read More »As we are moving some infrastructure to SaaS applications, I am reminded of previous debates about the effect of SaaS applications on Open Source Technologies. It’s pretty clear that the growth in Open Source has accelerated and has even been enabled by the presence of game changers like SaaS and Cloud. The ability to cheaply and rapidly get new products to market has made the use of Open Source vital to many organizations and the sheer number of options is staggering. At OpenLogic, we build SaaS applications and those applications use hundreds of Open Source components. In fact, CloudSwing now contains more Open Source libraries in less than a year of development than OLEX has in over 4 years of development.
Read More »The first quarter of this year has be a busy time in open source management. JBoss has had two releases in the 7.1 series, the Apache web server has had two releases in the 2.4 series and Ruby on Rails has had two releases in the 3.2 series just to name a few. This may sound like a flurry of new releases, but is really par for the course. In the open source world releases happen all the time. Most open source projects take the release early, release often motto to heart. And for good reason too, it results in better software.
Release schedules, like everything else in software engineering, are always a trade off. The downside of rapid release cycles is that users have to deal with those releases. Dealing with any particular release is usually pretty easy, but dealing with all the releases of all your dependencies can be quite difficult. Our applications, for example, usually depend on a hundred or more individual open source components. I suspect that most projects have similar levels of open source dependency. Just keeping track of all the releases across a dependency set that large is difficult.
Read More »Posted by Kim Weins on March 16th, 2012 in Governance, Legal & Compliance, Open Source Trends, Scanning & Provisioning, Support, The Cloud
Open source management is increasingly becoming an important point of discussion as today’s companies are using open source software more widely in their IT infrastructure. So much so that Gartner expects open source to make up 30% of enterprise IT portfolios in 2012.
Open source software can provide both cost and innovation benefits, but in order to user OSS successfully, companies must have an open source management capability. OpenLogic defines four stages of Open Source Maturity that measure your company’s open source management capability.
The four stages are: Prevent, Manage, Promote and Transform:
Read More »Open Source License Management:
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 during which to ruminate and refine terms as is often the case for custom-developed software.
Adding to the difficulty in understanding and interpreting open source licenses is the fact that 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.
Read More »The Apache Foundation released Apache HTTP Server 2.2.0 at the end of 2005. Now 7 years later there is a new major release of Apache HTTP Server. Apache HTTP Server currently has 65% market share according to Netcraft. There has always been two competitors in the web space – Apache and IIS – but in late 2007 Nginx was born and has been grabbing more and more market share everyday. Looking at the release notes for Apache 2.4 you can see that this release has a few features that match Nginx’s feature set. Apache HTTP 2.4 has included something for everyone: performance increases; lower memory usage; new modules; program enhancements and new features for old modules.
I have picked 10 pieces from the change log that I feel are important to know about.
Read More »The vast majority of enterprises use open source software projects like Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, ActiveMQ and others as a significant and growing part of their IT portfolio. And most enterprises work with one or more open source vendors to get commercial grade open source support for the open source software they use.
In order to select the right open source support vendor, it’s important to understand the various vendor business models and how those models impact you.
Read More »As you almost certainly know by now, the world is chock full of cloud providers. Hundreds of them. Which should you choose if you’re just getting started and why?
Like most “which technology should I use?” questions, this one has the typical answer, “it depends.” If you only want to use or “rent” somebody else’s software for maximum convenience, you want a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution. Now that the easy answer is out of the way, let’s get down to business.
IaaS or PaaS?
At first blush, it seems like a simple question: Do you want direct access to the infrastructure (e.g., virtual machines) or do you only need access to abstractions (e.g., API’s)? Ideally, you’d want both. Sometimes you want the convenience of pre-built, hosted, scalable services such as storage (think Amazon’s S3), but other times you’d like the complete flexibility of having root access to a virtual machine under your control. I expect most enterprise developers and IT folks will agree. We want the best of all worlds and we have a hard time giving up control to a pure PaaS provider. This stance tends to rule out options like Google App Engine, Heroku, and others that look like a black box from the outside and put significant restrictions on the programming languages, application frameworks, databases, and other technologies you can deploy on them.
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