The Open Invention Network has announced the launch of a new Associate Member programme. The first Associate Member is Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system
Read more at The H
IFOSSLR 2.1 Available
The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has published Volume 2, No. 1. There are several new articles, covering topics like GPL obligations, copyright boundaries, and a piece on “challenges and opportunities for open source legal communities” by Luis Villa.
Read more at LWN
Google Setting Up Music Store Later This Year, Looking for Search and Android Synergy
Remember that chart that pointed out the differences between Google, Apple and Microsoft? Well, it’s looking increasingly like Google is intent on filling any and all gaps in its portfolio. Those good old unnamed sources have been talking, originally to CNET last week and to the Wall Street Journal today, and disclosing Google’s supposed intent to introduce its very own music store. This would initially encompass a web store where you can stream or download tracks, with a search tie-in that’ll get your money into Google’s pocket in the fastest possible way. Subsequent plans are said to include…
Read more at Engadget Mobile
Salesforce Releases Facebook for Suits
Chattering classes
Salesforce.com is today expected to release its Facebook for businesses against established enterprise collaboration software from Microsoft and IBM.…
Read more at The Register
Open Economics: Inspiring Confidence Through Transparency
Market confidence is a valuable commodity in tough economic times. And governments will try just about anything to inspire some. Recapitalization–bailouts–for struggling sectors is one approach. Another (less deficit-inducing) solution seeks to inspire confidence through a sizable dose of transparency. Bank stress tests are beginning to figure prominently in the later effort. Stress tests measure how well financial institutions perform under financial “what if” scenarios.
Read more at OpenSource.com
Jolicloud 1.0 Betbook OS to Include Touchscreen Support
The Jolicloud developers have confirmed that the upcoming major 1.0 release of their Linux-based netbook operating system will include support for some touchscreen displays out of the box
Read more at The H
15 Facts You Should Know About MeeGo
Coming out of Computex, there’s been a lot of momentum for Meego, the Linux-based platform that can power multiple computing devices, including handsets, netbooks, tablets, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Ibrahim Haddad, the Linux Foundation director of technology and alliances, has just published a new article, “An Introduction to the Meego Project.”
It’s a great introductory piece on the platform, the benefits of the project and the role of the Linux Foundation. Below you will find an excerpt that I find especially interesting. I think Ibrahim captures the important points about MeeGo, many of which we raised in this recent Linux Foundation op-ed in BusinessWeek.
15 Facts You Must Know About MeeGo
1. Full open source project governed according to best practices of open source development: Open
discussion forums, open mailing lists, open technical steering committee meetings, peer review, open
bugzilla, etc.
2. Hosted under the auspices of the Linux Foundation
3. Aligned closely with upstream projects – MeeGo requires that submitted patches also be submitted to
the appropriate upstream projects and be on a path for acceptance (Figure 1)
4. Offers a complete software stack including reference user experience implementations
5. Offers a compliance program to ensure API and ABI compatibility
6. Enables all players of the industry to participate in the evolution of the software platform and to
build their own assets on MeeGo
7. Lowers complexity for targeting multiple device segments
8. Offers differentiation abilities through user experience customization
9. Provides a rich cross-platform development environment and tools
10. Offers a compliance program to certify software stacks and application portability
11. Supports multiple hardware architectures
12. Supports multiple app stores
13. Has no contributors agreements to sign; instead it follows the same “signed-off-by” language and
process as the Linux Kernel
14. Has over 1000 committed professional developers and hundreds of open source developers and a
very a vibrant community of users and developers (~ 8000 subscribed to meego.com)
15. MeeGo 1.0 Netbook release supports the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified,
Chinese Traditional, Swedish, Polish, Finnish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Spanish,
Russian, Dutch, English, and British English.
For those of you interested in MeeGo it’s a great place to start. You can also check out http://www.meego.com of course for the latest news and to join the community itself.
Read more at News and Thoughts from Inside the Linux Foundation
Google Tightens Up Docs for the Enterprise
Secure collaboration through the cloud is the next great growth vein for online application and security vendors so Google is improving the access controls for its popular Google Docs suite.
Read more at internetnews.com
LinuxCon Preview: Virgin America Runs Massive Workloads on Linux, Shares Best Practices
Virgin America’s Ravi Simhambhatla is delivering a keynote at this year’s LinuxCon North America. He will be giving us the CIO view on how to sell the value of open source internally when cost isn’t the only driving factor. Mr. Simhambhatla took a few minutes to answer some of our questions as we prepare to see him speak in Boston on August 12, 2010.
How does Virgin America use Linux? How are you using Linux today compared to when you first deployed it in your company?
Simhambhatla: Virgin America uses Linux to operate its commercial web site www.virginamerica.com, frequent flyer database, data and systems integration, border e-mail gateways, anti-spam, ssl-vpn (OpenVPN), document management systems (KnowledgeTree), and high performance internal and external proxy servers. There is not much more room for Linux, as it already occupies a hefty share of the operating systems running in our data centers.
What did you migrate away from in order to deploy Linux, and how did that process work?
Simhambhatla: On almost all fronts, we started with Linux in the data center so there really was no migration involved. However, we did switch from a commercial VPN solution to OpenVPN on Linux. The setup was simple and because OpenVPN hooks into active directory, all we had to do was make a new VPN client available to our users to allow them access to our network.
What kinds of workloads are you running on Linux today?
Simhambhatla: We’re running very large workloads on Linux-based systems including www.virginamerica.com, which accounts for 70 percent of our sales – not to mention all inbound/outbound email and spam checking. This accounts for more than 150gb of documents in our document management system, tens of thousands of soap calls served up by our proxy servers, and more than 2 million members in our frequent flyer program hosted on MySQL/Linux.
How does the collaborative development model help you do your job at Virgin America?
Simhambhatla: The collaborative and community model helps us immensely, as the quality of the product is typically far better than commercial counterparts. Additionally, contrary to conventional wisdom, serious problems are typically addressed more expeditiously than commercial vendors. This is a direct result of the pride and love of the subject of computing (and building great software) that is exhibited by community developers and engineers. This quality and inherent stability allows me to focus on bringing new solutions to our guests and our business, instead of focusing on keeping the technology running.
How was your introduction of Linux received by your colleagues at Virgin America? What obstacles, if any, did you have to overcome to get consensus?
Simhambhatla: At first, there was a fair amount of skepticism due simply to the lack of exposure to the Linux operating system. However, Virgin America was founded by, and is run by, risk takers and innovators who were willing to take a look at what Linux had to offer. Building consensus was easy: we built new products (e.g. our web site, data integration layers) and deployed infrastructure solutions (document management system, postfix MTAs, anti-spam, anti-virus, proxy servers) at costs vastly below industry “norm” and with the very high quality that was expected of them. These systems, which we deployed in 2006, are still in place and are performing very, very well.
What is your primary piece of advice for other Linux users?
Simhambhatla: Give back to the community – whether you publicly extol the virtues of Linux, or help with InstallFests, or host your local Linux Users Group at your workplace. There are many, many ways to give back. And, the most important impact is that giving back encourages even more adoption and innovation.
Linux is built and supported by a bunch of super talented and wildly enthusiastic people from all over the world who have but one goal: to build the best and most useful software. As such, you can count on its longevity and ever-evolving strengths and capabilities. Also, the passion behind Linux community is undeniable and ever increasing as can be seen by the absolutely awesome software available on the platform. If you take a long, hard look at your computing environment, you will see multiple pain points that you can easily attend to using Linux as the operating system and software running on Linux. If you are attempting to bring Linux into your environment, I suggest finding one of those many pain points – – for example, email, dns, proxies, filtering, anti spam/virus – – and build a Linux equivalent and show off its capabilities.
Linuxables: Intro to Linux Command Line
This is the first in a series of a “Linuxables,” short, quickly consumable tutorials that can provide easy reference while at work or at home. We hope they’re useful for you. Let us know in comments.
Ah, the Linux command line – that of which myths and legends are made. It is that frightening beast that keeps so many users from trying Linux. After all, everyone knows you MUST use the command line if you want Linux as your operating system. Not so. In fact, you could install Linux, never touch the command line, and have an amazing experience. But there are times when you will want to have that extra power at your fingertips. And when that time comes, you want to be prepared for it. The Linux command line is not all that difficult…you’re not programming in assembly after all.
It is my intent, in this first series of “Linuxables,” to introduce you to the Linux command line interface (often referred to as the CLI) in such a way as to alleviate any hesitations related to this versatile, powerful administrative tool. I’ll cover what is the command line and its basic structure in this first piece.
What is the Command Line?
The command line is the tool that all GUI applications use to do their work. In other words: graphical tools are merely front-ends to command line tools. This is the case with most operating systems. You click a button and that button most often interacts with a command. And any time you are using the command line, you are doing so within a terminal window. To get to your terminal window, you click Applications > Accessories > Terminal (in GNOME).
All commands do not look like:
find /etc -exec grep ‘[0-9][0-9]*[.][0-9][0-9]*[.][0-9][0-9]*[.][0-9][0-9]*’ {} ;
In fact, most Linux commands are quite simple. It’s just a matter of understanding how the basic command structure works. Let’s take a look.
Command Structure
The basic Linux command works like this:
command OPTIONS ARGUMENTS
The explanation for each is as follows:
command: This is the base of the command. For example, if you were going to create a new directory, you would use the mkdir command. But if you used the mkdir command alone you would get an error, because you didn’t pass any arguments or options along with the command.
OPTIONS: Options are those pieces of the command that alter the behavior of the command. Say, for example, the directory you need to create needs to have specific permissions set upon creation. You could add the -m option (for mode), which would directly affect the results of the mkdir command. Options aren’t always used alone. Some times an option will be used along side a modifier. In the case of the mode option you will have to use a modifier to tell mkdir which mode to use. ‚Ä®
ARGUMENTS: Arguments are typically file names or other data that is needed by the command. Keeping with our mkdir example: Say you want to create the directory TEST with the mode 654 (more on modes in a later article).
For this, the command would look like:
mkdir -m 654 TEST
As you can see there is command OPTION ARGUMENT and TEST is our ARGUMENT.
The Linux command line interface does not have to be an overly complex tool. In fact, it’s really quite simple to use. And if you are ever in doubt about how to use any given command, don’t forget that nearly every one of those commands has a manual page included that will help you out in your quest to use that command. To read the “man page” for the mkdir command, you would issue the command man mkdir.