Open Source Daily Guide

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Last Tuesday, Google proudly announced the release of the source code for its much awaited mobile phone Android’s operating system. It is now available for everybody FREE of charge. By this bold move of making the operating system an open source code, Google is hoping that many applications will be written and appear for the mobile phone, as will cheaper phones. The Android is to be released under the Apache license. With this license, it doesnt obligate the developers to share the changes they made with the code in the open source community. It Google also hopes to enable manufacturers develop and innovate more on the platform so there will be differences with what phone manufacturers has to offer to the users.

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The open source and free software market is rising high with its continued user appreciation. The free software products like Linux and others are moving from the boundaries of servers, to personal desktops and laptops. But the idea of free software and open source projects and softwares is ever so unclear to many of the people who use them. Somehow, we interchange both terms. We use free source and open source side by side, leading us to believe that these things are available for free. The word “free” is actually a misnomer. “Free burgers” should not be confused with “free speech”. Thats why, some of the softwares from both communities are available for free. Just download it. But not all of its utilities. These communities work hand in hand to offer options and freedom for developers but with different approaches. Different prospective and different philosophy.

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The ‘ dd ‘ command is one of the original Unix utilities and should be in everyone’s tool box. It can strip headers, extract parts of binary files and write into the middle of floppy disks; it is used by the Linux kernel Makefiles to make boot images. It can be used to copy and convert magnetic tape formats, convert between ASCII and EBCDIC, swap bytes, and force to upper and lowercase.

For blocked I/O, the dd command has no competition in the standard tool set. One could write a custom utility to do specific I/O or formatting but, as dd is already available almost everywhere, it makes sense to use it.

Like most well-behaved commands, dd reads from its standard input and writes to its standard output, unless a command line specification has been given. This allows dd to be used in pipes, and remotely with the rsh remote shell command.

Unlike most commands, dd uses a keyword=value format for its parameters. This was reputedly modeled after IBM System/360 JCL, which had an elaborate DD ‘Dataset Definition’ specification for I/O devices. A complete listing of all keywords is available from GNU dd with

# dd –help
Using dd you can create backups of an entire harddisk or just a parts of it. This is also usefull to quickly copy installations to similar machines. It will only work on disks that are exactly the same in disk geometry, meaning they have to the same model from the same brand.

Now and then, the giant  software wholesaler do something that their customers are locked into the proprietary products they put on the market. Some may think that because of the enormous amount of licenses and certifications, that’s why others are completely switching to Linux. One should not shift it’s gear yet merely because of the benefit of open source revolution. Open-source application is still lacking of something and so far the most popular open source Windows program are the free Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Aside that it is still running in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefoz are substitute  browsers that anyone could use.

Ubuntu is an open source operating system designed for desktops, laptops and even servers. It is distributed by Linux based on Debian GNU/Linux. Ubuntu is owned by Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur from South Africa where the name Ubuntu originated. In case you are curious about the concept of Ubuntu, it is rendered as “We are people because we are people”. Ubuntu wants to make this OS available for everyone that’s why they made it a free software. It aims to give its users an up-to-date yet stable OS. Ubuntu supporters testifies that even the average users will enjoy Ubuntu due to its usability, easy installation and the user-friendly interface.

One of the languages developed on top of the Java Virtual Machine is the Jython, and this project began in 1997. the development of the language has been passed on to several lead developers until Sun Microsystems took over and worked full time on it. Jython 2.2 which is the latest release matches up to the CPython 2.2 release but later, its developers shifted to a new direction for its implementation using ASM and ANTLR to hasten development time. With the interactive interpreter found inside the jar file, you can discover the capabilities of Jython, most specially in executing files.

When using the Open Source Software for commercial gain minus the tricks and preserving the community and openness aspects, there are two things to consider: that payment is collected proportionate to the advantage gained from the software; and that active user in the community can have the assurance that their license charges is compensated in relation to their code contributions. This means a user is allowed to have open access to the source code, allowed to redistribute it, and free rights to make changes to the code; being able to initiate some limited charges supported by certain restricted types of program execution, and agreeing to cash or in kind payments.

Open source software and open source documents are fast gaining popularity. It is firmly gaining a growing market share as well as getting the corporate and the public’s interests. It is also quickly entering mainstream, being in the technology world starting 1998. However its concept began alongside the birth of computing. Frequently Asked Questions list or FAQs were the first documents to be known as having used the open source software but beside this information little is known about this list. Open source needs good documentation to spread out to new users and three forms are currently in use: ReadMe files, Manual pages, and HowTo documents.

There are two types of software being used: the conventional closed source from software vendors; and the open source, with Linux and MySQL as examples. Both software have managed to be on the same footing and is in existence probably almost at the same time, around the start of the computing world. Recently, customers are expressing disappointment over the closed source protocol software but are not inclined to be completely dependent on the open source programs. They are looking for warranties, agreements and vendor assurance that they have qualified and committed developers. Their areas of concern with open source deal with collaborative source software and license and feedback from it.

Web Services for Remote Portal provides a pattern for the portal application to allocate portlets between portals. It is the facility to produce an interface to useful function that can be used throughout the enterprise with little or no changes to existing code. Almost all of the newest versions of commercial and open space portal products support it. The key procedure is similar to earlier web services – producer provides WSDL that directs the consumer on how to create a SOAP request. SOAP responses are obtained at the presentation level and the consumer then decides where to display them. Being simple, it provides whatever the enterprise needs to reuse portals across the enterprise.