Open Source Daily Guide

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.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is famously against open source software. While speaking about his upcoming plans to work on the Gates Foundation full-time, he was asked if he would consider open sources uses in health research, and he replied…

“There’s free software and then there’s open source,” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can ever improve the software,” he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business… He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,” he said, adding with a shrug: “That may seem radical.”

This great website can help you find open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products.

It also helps you decide whether to use open source or commercial software by offering these advantages: By choosing an open source product, the user obtains a number of advantages compared to commercial products. Besides the fact that open source is always available for free, it is a transparent application, in that you are invited exclusively behind the scenes to view all source code and thereby to suggest improvements to the product. Furthermore, every product is covered by a large dedicated network, or community, who is more than willing to answer any questions, you may have.

The prestigious Harvard Business Review recently published a case study called “Open Source: Salvation or Suicide” by Scott Wilson and Ajit Kambil of Deloitte Research. It features a fictional company whose CEO has never heard of open source and is a little frightened by the idea when it is presented to her. However their open source competitor proves that open source does have its advantages, such as faster development and testing of new features. The Linux Journal has a very comprehensive summary and review of the case study, including the comments of the four commentators: Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Eric Levin of Techno Source,  Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, and finally attorney, Michael J. Bevilacqua.

Google recently closed the registration for its 3-month Summer of Code and announced that this year’s program brings together the talents of 1125 students who will be given stipends worth $5000 each to contribute to 175 Free and Open Source projects: Mozilla, GNOME, and MySQL, among others. The lucky students will even be allowed to use the work they did during the Summer of Code for course credit in their university classes, and of course they will be given free t-shirts.

If you’re interested in contributing or applying as a mentoring organization, it’s too late this year but try again next year!

The huge global team behind the Open Office suite of products will be holding their annual conference in Beijing, China this year. The conference proper will be on October 15-17 with tours and activities on other dates. For the schedule of activities, location and other details, see this page.

According to their site:

This annual gathering is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve. Come along and help the community make the world’s best open-source international office suite even better.

Traditional business owners may still prefer to purchase expensive software rather than use free open source software because there is nobody to go to for training and support in case things go wrong, thus they are afraid to adopt the use of open source software in their companies. Is this a valid concern?

In actuality, serious open source projects publish full documentation and some small business organizations even offer paid support for these otherwise free software, especially operating systems. Their business models range from offering support services only to the whole product including commercial licensing, professional training and certification, cases to refer to, and partner programs.

There are two versions of this, both referring to Linus Torvalds:The first was written by hacker and open source leader Eric S. Raymond in his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. It states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. More formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.”The second was written by Linus Torvalds himself in the prologue to the book “The Hacker Ethic” and states that “… all of our motivations fall into three basic categories. More important, progress is about going through those very same things as ‘phases’ in a process of evolution, a matter of passing from one category to the next. The categories, in order, are ‘survival’, ‘social life’, and ‘entertainment’.”