Content Management Systems: Opensource Joomla!

By. dj_bumba

A web CMS is a content management system software used for managing content for the web.

The software manages content (text, graphics, links, etc.) for distribution on a web server. Usually the software provides tools where users with little or no knowledge of programming languages and markup languages (such as HTML) can create and manage content with relative ease of use. Most systems use a database to hold content, and a presentation layer displays the content to regular website visitors based on a set of templates. Management of the software is typically done through a web browser, but some systems may be modified in other ways.

A Content Management System (CMS) differs from website builders like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver in that a CMS allows non-technical users to make changes to an existing website with little or no training. Website building tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver require more technical knowledge and training on average. A CMS is an easy-to-use tool that gives authorized users the ability to manage a website. A CMS is a website maintenance tool rather than a website creation tool.

Let's talk about Joomla! Content Management System now.

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

One of the ways people use Joomla! CMS:

* Corporate websites or portals

* Online commerce

* Small business websites

* Non-profit and organizational websites

* Government applications

* Corporate intranets and extranets

* School and church websites

* Personal or family homepages

* Community-based portals

* Magazines and newspapers

* the possibilities are limitless…

Joomla! can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog or taking online reservations.

Advanced use of Joomla!

Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in the application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available extensions:

* Dynamic form builders

* Business or organizational directories

* Document management

* image and multimedia galleries

* E-commerce and shopping cart engines

* Forums and chat software

* Calendars

* Blogging software

* Directory services

* Email newsletters

* Data collection and reporting tools

* Banner advertising systems

* Subscription services

* and many, many more…

You will probably ask yourself what’s the catch?

There is no catch. Joomla! is free, open, and available to all under the GPL license.

The Benefits of Choosing a Sourcing Company for Your Online Project

by. LTS Media Ltd.

1. Expertise At Your Fingertip

90% of Development Sourcing and Project Management Companies have programmers and staff in-house that used to work in the development arena, clearly separating them from traditional Recruitment Companies. This ensures that the right technology will be chosen for your project and that you are not limited to the solution a Development Company has on offer as their standard. Sourcing Companies usually chose their suppliers on merit unlike recruitment companies, which just believe everything a developer tells them. Further, the majority of Development Companies specialises in certain fields only (e.g. program languages, development styles) and might not have the correct technology for your online project.

2. Strategic Online Planning & Project Management

A good Sourcing Company is usually very good at speaking geek. They do understand the processes involved in building systems and usually have a very good idea of the time scales involved. In addition, a professional Sourcing Company will make sure that your brief, sitemaps and wireframes are clearly set out, eliminating all miscommunications with the chosen Development Company from the start. They know which web designer you need; they will get the right programmers as well as overlooking and controlling the work constantly. Getting your project right from the start is essential and can be a risky task without proper project management and strategic planning in place.

3. Stay Within Your Budged And Save Costs - Yes you can!

Professional Sourcing Companies are your personal firewall to protect you from being overcharged by individual specialist providers. Professional Sourcing Companies know exactly what it takes to design, to program, to develop, etc. and it is a vital part of their business model to make sure that your online project will not only be completed within your budged but also work towards cutting your costs without compromising.
In addition, Sourcing Companies have an extensive knowledge of available Opensource solutions, where to find them and who to speak to. This means that an online project does not need to be build from scratch as there is often a pre-build solution available. A lot of those solutions just need modification in order to suit your needs. Again, this makes it possible for you to stay within the budged and even save costs.

Before you Spend Any More of your Money for Software

By. Jeffrey A Solochek

This morning as I was going through my inbox I saw an email from a marketer about this software called ForumEqualizer. Now in the old days I would have just gone to the site and saw a use for the software and then went ahead and purchased it. After spending a fortune during the last 10 years I now do things a bit more frugally.

I like to use a tool called Copernic Agent Pro to do all my research so I would first open this application and do a search for ForumEqualizer and read any review on the product I could find. Then I would think to myself about exactly what the software does and then do a search on the phrase "Forum submitter" This brought up in the matches a link for PHPBB poster so I went ahead and looked at this software which cost less than half of what ForumEqualizer cost so now I was getting somewhere.

My next search was done on the site Sourceforge. I did a search for anything with PHPBB in the name of the description and came up with almost 400 matches. It never ceases to amaze me how many times I am about to buy something and all of a sudden I find an Opensource version. Not this time though.

The keyword submitter could also point to the word poster so I did another search for "forum poster" to see what I would find. I had no idea that people actually get paid by others to post on their forums but in the matches I found some forums where people who did this stuff could post as well as people looking for people to do this stuff for them. It is truly amazing what you can find on the Web these days.

Before we go on let me explain why I went through all of this. Take Microsoft Office which sells for almost $1,000. There is also WordPerfect Office and Lotus Smartsuite out there and both of the later 2 do not cost as much as the Microsoft one does. Now I could stop right here knowing that buying the WordPerfect or Lotus version I would be saving some good money but then I think to myself is there anything out there that does what I am looking for that has no money cost? that's when you discover Openoffice which is the free version office suite.

My son just went ahead and had some software created that helps people to make money on MySpace. Now nobody has the corner of the market with their software and there will always be alternatives out there. Most people who we just looking to add friends to their MySpace profile would probably buy something like BadderAdder. Another software out there create MySpace profiles called Spacepromoter. And then there are still a lot of other softwares out there that each do something on MySpace. Now if you went ahead and bought all these little apps the dent to your pocketbook would be rather large. My son has created a great office suite for MySpace which does all these things. Now eventually there will be other softwares that do what his Buddypromoter can do but there are always choices out there.

Linux Web Hosting – Too Many Positives to Ignore

By. Smita Mathur

Linux Web hosting has a history of prominence – helping millions world-wide with safe and secure hosting options. Net craft, the UK-based prominent internet monitoring company, has already reported that the eight of the ten most reliable web hosting companies of the world run Linux as the OS in their web servers. Let’s dig deep into the subject of why Linux is rapidly becoming the center of attraction for most world-wide.

1. Stability
Linux, the ‘UNIX-like’ OS is based on OpenSource architecture. That makes the source code readily available to peers for regular reviewing. The resultant effectiveness in spotting bugs and incorporation of effective codes to affect enhanced stability of the entire programming structure is not hard to imagine. Any assurance for ‘long uptime’ and ‘crash-proof’ server performance is another option that is ready to be enjoyed with every Linux Web hosting facility.

2. Security
Not just because the stability factor that leads to better solutions concerning to security of the Linux Web hosting variety, the availability of Apache HTTP web server offers several secure options that are too important to be ignored.

3. Ubiquitous ness and cost-effectiveness
LAMP; the computer software-web server combination that defines the architecture of Linux Web hosting service offers perfect instance of ubiquitous ness (as the entire package comes in a bundle with maximum Linux distributions).

The ubiquitous ness and innate OpenSource architecture makes the entire Linux Web hosting package highly cost-effective too.

Few words on LAMP
LAMP is an acronym for Linux (OS), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), PHP/Per/Python (scripting language) – the four essential ingredients that form the solution stack of technologies for successful structuring of Linux web hosting service.

Well, so it all ends up to a situation where you are to choose from Stability, security, ubiquitous ness and cost-effectiveness.

Wonder ever one got so many positives to choose from!

The Best Open Source Gadgets

Author: Dan Ionescu

Open source gadgets mean any software whose source code is made available for use or modification for users or developers.
The advantages of the open source gadgets are evident: since everyone can modify the source they are improved continually by software communities and the vast majority of open source programs are free.

Being free is a huge advantage sometimes you, the computer owner want to do simple, one job, like editing a document or a picture, and you don't want to spend a small fortune doing it, so the free open source programs are your best friends.
The most of the open source gadgets were initially created for Linux owners, but in the last period of time more and more open source gadgets were developed for Windows. And in this article I'm going to tell you about the best gadgets for Windows users.

The free and open-source software that you should use are: web browsing - Mozilla Firefox, video player and video podcasting: Miro, instant messaging: Pidgin, e-mail - Mozilla Thunderbird, RSS: RSSOwl, peer-to-peer filesharing: Cabos, video player - Media Player Classic, DVD ripping and video conversion - Media Coder, word processing suites - OpenOffice.org, podcasting: Juice, sound recording: Audacity, photo editing Paint.NET, FTP - Filezilla.

I'm currently using: OpenOffice.org to write and manage documents, Filezilla for FTP connections, Paint.NET to work with graphics and Thunderbird to read and write emails.
Don't aspect the open source gadgets to have as many features as the paid ones, after all you get them for free.

Well known are the open source Google Desktop Gadgets like: Google-battery (Never lose track of your power. Always tell you how much battery power is left) Google-calculator (Calculator gadget for Google Desktop), Google-cricket-news (Displays cricket news headlines and images), Google-cricket-videos (the same like the previous only it displays videos on your desktop), Google-desktop-sdk (Complete examples of using the Google Desktop Gadget APIs) Google-digital-clock (is one of my favorite desktop gadgets, it is obviously what it does: it shows time, but in a beautiful manner ),Google-flower-pot (It is a Virtual Flower Pot which will grow to full bloom right before your eyes if you give the flowers some water using your mouse like the old Tamagoci games), Google-moon-phase (Displays the moon's current phase) and Google-timezone (Find what the time is in different locations).

For now the most used software's are the paid ones, but the free open source ones come fast from behind. Each day communities of developers work on them for us to have a better experience and free programs.

Long Run of Open Source Software in Business World

Author: Sam Jose

Free and open source software has become the newest craze in business and IT world. The second question ‘is it good for my business’ now takes a secondary position. Both business owners and managers agree to the use of free and open source software.

The real buzz about open source is not hyped by any corporation or company. It is a group of self motivated IT professionals from across America and Europe are behind this newfound attraction of open source software.

The main advantage of open source software is that the users have full control over the source code of any program delivered under open source license. Now people become more and more sensitized about the advantages of having access to the root of a program.

http://www.jbilling.com.

The main advantages that come with access to source code are Flexibility or adaptability, control, lowest possible costs, long term usage and upgrading without additional costs. The business house has to pay for coders and developers though.

Anyone is free to make any changes to software suites or programs released under Open Source License. Anyone can add, edit and make modifications to make the program work in any imaginable manner. The modifier is also allowed to resell the software.

Only restriction on such an open source license is that you have to provide access to the source code that you have modified or added. It is however not necessary to release source code of the modifications made to the original program if it is not distributed or sold. The developer company is free to use it for their own in house purposes. Whenever they sell it in the market, they have to license it under Open Source agreement.

Open source software projects, in most cases attract the fancy of skilled developers from around the world. They actively participate in collaborative development, fixing bugs and adding useful features. The end result will be a completely different software, may be many times useful than the original one.

jbilling Free Open Source Billing Software (http://www.jbilling.com/) remained the most active projects from among 137,389 open source software projects (as on Dec. 1, 2006) at SorceForge.net for quite a long time. SourceForge.net offers a collaborative environment for software developers develop open source software and is a source code repository which presently hosts many thousands of Open Source projects.

Open Source Billing Software project by jBilling has really picked up momentum and the present version 1.0.4 is available for free download at their website.

Open Source Initiatives Need More Concerted Efforts

Author: Sam Jose

Major corporate houses choose open source partly due to the economic gains and mainly due to the control the open source system gives to their hands.

The quest for control is a serious problem in open source arena. The problem sometimes seems trivial, but is really a loss of manpower by the professionals developing programs in open source environment. The problem is seeking too much of control leads developers develop their own solutions for specific issues.

Reinventing the wheel is quite a common problem in open source arena. Instead of using an already popular script, developers tend to write there own scripts for specific tasks. There may be hundreds of scripts with similar functions. There are however instances when a developer has to come up with something new when the existing system doesn't give the expected results. Developing a code from scratch will be faster than modifying existing program.

Proprietary software, in this sense is quite advantageous here. The developers working with proprietary software hardly ever goes to coming up with their own script as a solution for immediate problems at hand. Then again, proprietary software developers too invent their own wheels, but the goal is to avoid nasty situations like legal problems.

The nature of shared development of software development appeals to the human nature to have control over their destiny. This is true even when they can get customized 'solutions' by proprietary software vendors. The future is in open source, but it is premature to make predictions as to when Linux or an open source OS cross runs on 50% of the computers of the world.

Incidentally Microsoft Corporation's Shared Source Program is an effort by the corporate giant to somehow win the trust of open source community. Though Microsoft allows a peek into the source code, redistribution rights are neither granted nor expected. Only an illusion of free handling of source code, shared source program lacks the democratic nature of all open source initiatives.

Back to open source initiatives - open source initiatives find it quite difficult to get professionally talented developers to the fold, especially in the beginning stages. This is true for almost all open source initiative. The situation reverses when there are enough people in the fold and the project takes momentum at SourceForge.net.

There is one last thought for major corporations that have become so stepping on open source shoulders – spare some of your resources to enrich free software and open source software community.
Stumble It!

The Difference Between Friend and Faux Open Source

Community: The Difference between Friend and Faux Open Source

There are lots of different perspectives on the topic of open source community. Some point to the unique development model, drawing together disparate contributors from around the world, most of whom never meet face-to-face. Others are intrigued by the governance model of open source development, which seems to function without any explicit hierarchy. Most commentators on open source fail to address what I consider the single most important aspect of community, the user community.

It’s easy to understand how product users get overlooked in all the histrionics about open source community. In part, it’s because it’s hard to know just who they are – this is due to the challenge of open source anonymity, which I addressed in the June 2005 newsletter.

Another reason that the user base gets overlooked is due to the current state of open source discussion. Many of the established pundits of open source are most interested in the developer community; indeed, they are, in some sense, the alpha males of the user community. The press has contributed to this as well; after all, it’s much easier to talk to the usual suspects than to unearth real users.

In my view, however, this ignores a central reality: for actual users of open source (the vast majority of the people who actually interact with open source products), the user community is the single most important factor dictating potential success for an open source product, as well as a critical predictor about the future of a given product.

Why is this?

Most users of software, whether commercial or open source, focus on software implementation, not creation. For them, information about configuration, integration, and tuning is all-important. Not only are they unlikely to contribute code to a project, they are unlikely to want to even compile the project source, far preferring to download executable binaries.

Consequently, the information they’re most interested in is practical help in getting the software running. For this, fellow users are a vital resource. Other users have probably already confronted (and solved!) the problem a new user is facing. One of the most fascinating things about open source is the phenomenon of users helping users. While it’s fairly easy to understand the motives for open source developers (scratching an itch, status, skill-building, etc.), it’s not as easy to understand the altruism of what is, in effect, free technical support. In my book I described one Perl mailing list contributor, Charles K. Clarkson, a real estate developer. His motive is that the pure logic of Perl programming problems offers relief from the irrational human interactions that make up most of his day – for him, tech support is stress reduction! In any case, no matter what the motives of the contributors are, the user community is where most users of an open source product will realize the majority of the value they get from the community.

However, some organizations choose to purchase technical support from a commercial organization. Primarily, this support comes from companies directly associated with a given open source product. For example, JBoss (the company) offers paid support and services for JBoss (the application server product). Many purchasers of paid open source support dismiss the product community’s importance, believing they have a higher-quality mechanism in place. This is a huge mistake on their part.

Here’s why:

First, the viability of commercial open source vendors depends upon the existence of a vibrant community. Commercial vendors survive selling to no more than one or two percent of the total user population of a product. Without a large community of users, there aren’t enough potential customers to support the vendor.

Second, a strong community is critical for long-term vendor existence. A number of open source companies have been funded recently, many of which are just developing their products. By definition, early-stage open source products have nascent communities. While these companies are currently operating on their venture funding, unless they develop large communities, their future is dim. If you’ve bet your infrastructure on a commercial open source provider like this, your risk exposure is quite high. In effect, you’re buying an option on the adoption of the product by a large community. This situation is likely to become more common, as more vendors decide to take advantage of the “magic” of open source distribution.

Many of these will be what I call “faux” open source companies that adopt open source distribution, but pursue policies more common to proprietary software companies. These policies, which include: (1) shielding developers from the community; (2) focusing most of the company’s energy on selling commercial versions of the open source product; and (3) holding features back from the open source product to make the commercial version more attractive, will all have the effect of hindering community growth. In other words, faux open source companies will never develop a strong community, and their products are poor choices for use, since the company probably will not survive long-term.

Third, and perhaps most important, a large community insulates you from vendor decisions. We’ve all seen software vendors change strategic direction and strand their users. Commercial entities operate according to their own motives, and just because a vendor is open source-oriented does not preclude this sort of shift from occurring. In fact, it’s likely we’ll see this happen more than once in the future. With a significant community, however, underpinned by a product with an open source license, the bond between product and vendor is broken. The community can take up an “orphan” product and ensure its viability.

For all these reasons, community is, perhaps, the key factor for organizations using open source. Most of them aren’t going to take advantage of source code availability, but all of them will rely on the community – even if they deal with a commercial entity. Community is the open source insurance policy.

So, if you’re considering an open source product, be sure to assess its community – present and future. Community is what separates friend from faux.
LinuxWorld Wrapup

LinuxWorld San Francisco has come and gone. I had the opportunity to participate in the product awards committee. This is a real treat, since it offers a peek at new technologies that are coming to the fore.

It was surprising to me that there was so much hardware at the show. File servers, SANs, clusters – all there. I guess it illustrates the fact that, with the operating system a commodity factor, innovation can move to other places – like interesting hardware experiments. It’s clear to me that we’re going to see more and more hardware goodies in the future; it’s a great time to be a user.

Also interesting to me was the crowd. LinuxWorld San Francisco has had the reputation of being more vendor-oriented than the Boston version, due to its proximity to Silicon Valley. While there were lots of vendors and venture capitalists floating around the show floor, what struck me was the number of what appeared to be typical IT types in attendance. It shows that mainstream IT has discovered that open source is something they should be paying attention to – and where better to find out about it than LinuxWorld?

Shameful, however, was the banishing of the .org pavilion to a second floor area away from the main exhibition hall, much like you put a socially inept relative near the kitchen at your wedding reception. It’s really exciting that there is so much vendor interest in open source, but … the thing that underpins open source is the community. Source code availability enforces open source, but community enables it. I hope the LinuxWorld management makes a wiser decision next time.
Takeaways

Community is a term much bandied about in open source, usually with little clarity but typically with much certainty (as in "the community believes" or "the community wants ..."). It often is defined quite restrictively as being made up only of open source developers. As both of the items in this month's newsletter illustrate, community is a broad and critical component of open source; from the user perspective, the community (in both the restrictive developer-only and broader user-inclusive definitions) is key to implementing the power shift from vendor to user that open source represents.

However, community is also key for vendors -- in some sense, the user community is where open source vendors hunt for revenues. In an upcoming newsletter, we'll address how vendors can help or hinder community creation for their products.

Microsoft Releases WiX Toolset to Open Source

By. Ryan Naraine

A Microsoft developer's move to promote 'change from within' has led to the unprecedented release of an XML toolset to the open-source developer community.

A Microsoft developer's vow to promote "change from within" has led to the software giant's unprecedented release of an XML (define) toolset to the open-source developer community.

Rob Mensching, a Redmond employee who works on the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset in his free time, has convinced Microsoft to release the toolset and all of its source code to developers on SourceForge in an attempt to ferret out bugs and improve the toolset's documentation.

WiX is the first project from Microsoft to be released under the Common Public License, an externally created open source license.

The toolset is used to build Windows installation packages (MSI and MSM files) from XML source code and is currently used internally at Microsoft by developers working on Office SQL Server, BizTalk, Virtual PC, MSN and Windows Messenger and the msn.com network.

By putting the source code on the world's largest open-source software development repository, Mensching said the plan is to open up the bug-finding process to a larger community. "When someone encounters a bug [internally], the community tracks the issue down and fixes it. Now, via SourceForge.net, you have an opportunity to be a part of the community as well."

He said the WiX toolset is close to Beta2 quality but made it clear the documentation "leaves much to be desired."

"Part of my motivation for pushing the toolset external to Microsoft is to encourage me (and maybe find others) to update the documentation."

The toolset includes a compiler, a linker, a lib tool and a decompiler. The compiler (called candle) is used to compile XML source code into object files that contain symbols and references to symbols. The linker (known as light) is fed one or more object files and links the references in the object files to the appropriate symbols in other object files. The linker, Mensching explained, is also responsible for collecting all of the binaries, packaging them appropriately, and generating the final MSI or MSM file.

The lib tool (lit) is an optional tool that can be used to combine multiple object files into libraries that can be consumed by 'light' while the decompiler (called dark), can take existing MSI and MSM files and generate XML source code that represents the package.

Mensching said he had to convince Microsoft executives of the value of releasing the toolset to open-source developers. He described WiX as a developer-oriented project and wrote on his Weblog that providing source code access increases the pool of available developers.

"[M]any parts of the Open Source development process appeal to me. Back in 1999 and 2000, I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example," he explained.

He said the process of releasing the tools and the source code started last October but stalled because of the way Shared Source dealt with contributions from the open-source community. In February, Mensching said he met Microsoft business development manager Stephen Walli, who has been working to improve Microsoft's relationship with open-source developers.

"Fortunately, Stephen was much farther along than I and had the step-by-step plan how to release an Open Source project from Microsoft using an approved OSS license." The process continued and reached the point where "everything passed through legal with flying colors," he explained.

"[Now], you get to see the results of many people's efforts to improve Microsoft from the inside out. I'm not exactly sure what is going to happen next but I'm sure there are quite a few people who are interested to see where this leads. Personally, all I hope is that if you find the WiX toolset useful then you'll join the community and help us improve the toolset," Mensching wrote.

Open Source: Now It's an Ecosystem

This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And VCs are eager to help

Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year later, their company, SugarCRM, has given away more than 325,000 copies of its software, and raised a second round of capital, for a total of $7.75 million.


Giving away software isn't your typical path for a venture-capital-backed startup. But Roberts & Co., are smack in the middle of the next frontier of the open-source movement: business applications. "No one had funded an open-source application company at that point -- it was all infrastructure," says CEO Roberts. "We broke a glass ceiling."

Consider it shattered. The open-source movement is making another big thrust forward. Entrepreneurs, investors, and many analysts say they're confident that all of a company's business software -- representing hundreds of millions in sales -- will soon be available as open source. "I don't think there are any limits," says Ray Lane, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner and software industry veteran.

ONE STEP AT A TIME. Many of Lane's colleagues agree. Venture capitalists have pumped nearly $400 million into 50 open-source companies in the last 18 months -- and more are on the way. That may not seem like a lot of money, but bear in mind these companies are incredibly capital-efficient. They don't need to hire armies of salespeople or engineers because the open-source community does a good deal of the heavy lifting.

Investors have funded new ventures offering everything from broad business applications like business intelligence programs that monitor company operations to very specialized applications, like running a hospital's computer systems.

Every open-source program companies download, investors say, marks one step closer to changing forever the applications business long dominated by the likes of SAP (SAP ), Oracle (ORCL ), and Microsoft (MSFT ). Software that companies once paid millions for is now available for free via the Internet. Harried tech managers can simply download an operating system or application and play with it -- no need to free sizable chunks of the budget or get the board to sign off, as is the case with big, multimillion-dollar purchases. And since this is open source, they can customize the programs on the fly to better fit their needs.

WHOLE ENCHILADA. A new open-source ecosystem is emerging. While a big push is on to develop more applications, the movement is much broader: Tech-services companies are popping up to jump-start adoption of all of this open-source software.

Consider SpikeSource, headed by software veteran Kim Polese, who founded Marimba and is one of the original developers of Sun Microsystems' (SUNW ) Java software. SpikeSource was incubated at Kleiner Perkins under Lane's watch. "We were looking at these open-source component companies like MySQL and JBoss, and every one of these things is just a little piece of a big puzzle," says Lane. "We said, 'Why don't we play the whole puzzle?'"

SpikeSource, and competitor SourceLabs, both act as a go-between for big corporations and open-source projects, finding, testing, and evaluating ideas by the hundreds. Then they consult with companies on how to implement them, and provide support if something goes wrong. For legal safeguards, there are even startups like BlackDuck, a Waltham (Mass.)-based company that digs into whatever open-source code a company has downloaded to make sure the licenses are all in order to avoid liability issues.

TRAILBLAZERS. "It was really a Wild West when we started with open source," says Charlie Brenner, senior vice-president of Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology, which manages its open-source projects. The financial services giant is an investor in SpikeSource -- and also a customer. "SpikeSource is a perfect example of a company doing for the external world what we've done internally. It's well worth the price for us."

The Linux operating system, which burst on the scene in 1991, led the first big wave of open-source software. The program, developed and maintained by thousands of volunteers, already represents a $4.2 billion slice of the $49 billion server market, and is set to grow at least 15% a year for the next five years.

In the Web-browser market, open-source champion Firefox has captured an 8% share of the business. That's not much when you compare it to the 87% share held by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But Firefox has been steadily growing -- knocking IE's share of the market to under 90% for the first time in years. Not many software companies have been able to chip away at the giant of Redmond.

BOTTOM-LINE IMPACT. Then came infrastructure companies such as MySQL, a challenger to Oracle's database business, and JBoss, which markets open-source application-server software to compete against proprietary programs sold by BEA Systems (BEAS ) and IBM (IBM ) (see BW Online, 7/8/05, "The Myth of Open-Source"). So far, these companies are mostly small and private, but they're doubling and tripling in revenue every year.

More impressive, many already are profitable, thanks to the low cost of operating an open-source business. Analysts expect MySQL to make $40 million in revenue this year. "We're probably one of their biggest customers," says Greg Gianforte, chief executive of RightNow Technologies (RNOW ), which hosts software that manages call centers for companies.

Gianforte says his company has slashed expenses by running entirely on open-source software. "[Open source] has a tremendous impact on the profitability of the business," he says. His tech costs, which include personnel, communications, and equipment, now run approximately 6% of revenues -- down from around 20% if he used all proprietary software or as high as 40% for top-of-the-line proprietary software, he adds.

BUZZ WORD. A gold-rush mentality is developing in open source. Many venture capitalists are so eager to find the next hot vehicle, they're going so far as to scour Web sites that coordinate ongoing open-source projects, looking for anything that promises to blossom into a business.

Entrepreneurs are every bit as eager. The words "open source" are finding their way into pitches and PowerPoint presentations around the world. After Nick Sturiale, partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, invested in open-source startup XenSource, which makes software to manage efficient use of computing power, more than 30 entrepreneurs came to pitch him open-source ideas.

Sturiale didn't fund any of them, and more than half weren't worth a second meeting, he says. "There's a flash crowd developing, and it's unfortunate," he says, skeptical that many of the deals being funded will make it. "There are too many VCs and not enough growth markets."

FREELOADING. Of course, it's too early to tell if these companies will sprout into thriving ventures and produce venture-style returns. Most business models rely on giving the software away over the Web, then either charging for a souped-up version of the program or for training, maintenance, and support.

But revenue continues to be a problem. While open-source companies trumpet hundreds of thousands of downloads, on average just about 2% of those customers are actually paying any money. After all, just because every piece of software companies rely on to run their businesses can be replicated with open-source alternatives, that doesn't mean there's a market for it, caution analysts.

The upside is that many more companies will try open-source software because it's free. The viral nature of the Web and the open-source community means companies don't need a costly sales organization. Instead of hiring expensive, experienced salespeople and investing a lot of money and time in closing deals with skeptical CIOs, open-source companies just put their code online. Developers within companies often download the software for a test drive. Word of mouth spreads the news. Before long, young companies such as SugarCRM and JasperSoft are getting tens of thousands downloads a day, without spending a dime on sales calls.

NICHE DWELLERS. Because of this low cost of entry, some companies are skirting the venture-capital route altogether. Two of the oldest and most successful application companies, Digium and Compiere, have never taken a dime of funding, nor have they needed it. They may never develop into $1 billion businesses, but they've carved a nice niche in the open-source landscape. Jorg Janke, founder of Compiere, says he has turned down numerous offers of venture-capital funding.

Compiere makes open-source enterprise resource-planning software. It's a tough category, because the program runs everything from a company's accounting to manufacturing to human resources. The software usually takes a lot of customization and can cost companies millions of dollars to install and maintain.

Even so, companies have downloaded nearly 900,000 copies of Compiere's software since the outfit was launched in 1999. Janke doesn't delude himself that big companies will pick Compiere over SAP or Oracle, but he has found interesting niches in the midsize business world -- prisons, for example. Most have several small businesses running within them, such as license-plate manufacture, and need some low-cost software to manage those operations. "We didn't even target them," he says. "They found us."

THREE REQUIREMENTS. But Compiere makes money on only a small percentage of its customer base. It relies on a network of some 60 independent resellers to do a lot of the customization its software requires. Some implementations reach the $50,000 range, but Compiere takes just a small cut of that. But with very low overhead, the company has been profitable since 2003 and is doubling revenue every year, Janke says. "Our business model isn't to conquer the world or to be super-profitable," he says. "We just want to have a sustainable business."

Companies with venture backing will have to do better than that. And because only a small percentage of downloaders are paying customers, they'll have to do far more volume than the average startup. That worries some investors.

Danny Rimer of Index Ventures has been one of the more aggressive investors in open source. Having funded MySQL and voice over Internet protocol company Skype, Rimer isn't turned off by a business model that relies on free downloads to gain steam. But making such businesses successful requires three things, he says.

First, it has to be a commodity product, like database software in the case of MySQL. It also has to be a type of software that's so common companies know what it is and why they need it before they consider replacing their existing software with a no-frills alternative. And it needs a huge market of users so frustrated by the expense or hassle of existing software that they're motivated to try open source. Rimer thinks there's opportunity for some of the service companies and infrastructure companies. But when it comes to open-source applications, he's not so sure the commodity market is large enough.

BIG GUNS. Rimer may have a point -- at least in the near term. Even the biggest proponents of open source aren't moving their entire businesses to it any time soon. "We're great enthusiasts of open source, but we're still very much committed to the systems we get from large vendors," Fidelity's Brenner says. "We rely on large-scale commercial vendors' applications, and we're not likely to move away from them."

Over time, if the software works as advertised, you can bet companies like Fidelity will move more and more of their business to open source. But it will be a gradual process -- and that could spell trouble for VCs betting too heavily on it now. "A small business that's highly profitable making $15 million year in and year out isn't going to move the dial for us," Rimer says. "We're looking to invest in major software vendors."

The new generation of open-source companies will soon get the chance to prove just how mainstream their software can become.

Open Source Technology, a must for your small Business and links to get you started

by. Paul W

Are you looking for innovative ways to increase your ROI, your bottom line and downright save a ton of money on your IT costs? Let me answer that for you! Of course you are, you would not be a savvy business owner if you did not seek out ways to stretch your money. Drum roll please, introducing Open Source technology a new way for small businesses to even the playing field with their enterprise and big boy competitors.

Why is this important? You now have access to the same or comparable solutions that normally costs hundreds if not thousands to implement and deploy. Case in point, the Open Source version of SugarCRM, which is a Customer Relationship Management tool can be had for free while one of its proprietary and commercial competitors Salesforce.com cost about $1,000 to start per year for a five user license. Another quick example has Ubuntu, which is a full-featured Linux based operating system against Microsoft XP. XP Professional edition costs $299.99, while Ubuntu costs nothing and comes freely loaded with Office utilities that rival Microsoft’s Office software suite. You do the math. Remember to include per user and or per pc price and upgrades. Yeah, I know, you have been suckered for a long time and we didn’t even mention the server operating system and licenses. Ask yourself, why am I paying for something when I can get it done for little or no cost?

Using Open Source is like using “guerrilla tactics” for your small business IT needs. Does free mean cheap? Let’s take a look. Open Source software affords the user to have software developed by hundreds of developers instead of just a few. Most of the Open Source solutions mentioned here are tried and tested solutions. Did you know that you already use Open Source? Yep, in fact if you use a web browser or use email your using opens source software. The Internet is built upon open standards and runs on Open Source software. Who currently uses Open Source software? IBM, HP, Oracle, whole governments, Google, Yahoo and Amazon just to name a few.

So you might be asking yourself, what exactly is Open Source? Open Source software in its simplest form is software that freely distributes the source code along with the object code (the actual program that you install and use), so that any programmer familiar with the language can tweak, improve, modify or customize it without needing to ask anyone for permission or wait for a vendor to do it for them. For a more verbose definition, please visit http://www.opensource.org. The bottom line is, this model of software distribution can give you a freedom and a savings that compels you to at least become a bit more knowledgeable to its uses.

These are some useful links to help get you started on the Open Source road.

http://www.opensourceweekly.com (for the latest is Open Source technology for small business owners)

http://www.sourceforge.net (the world's largest Open Source software development web site)

http://www.freshmeat.org (Open Source software repository site)

http://www.theopencd.org (a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software.)

http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/ (a collection of over 100 free/Open Source software for home and business.)

http://www.itservants.com (Open Source Technology Consultants)

Top Open Source Applications for your small business needs.

http://www.openoffice.org (Great alternate to the Microsoft office suite.)

http://www.firefox.com (Open Source web browser, great alternative to Internet Explorer)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird (Thunderbird email application, similar to Outlook)

http://www.tightvnc.com (for remote connection to your computers)

http://www.mysql.com (The worlds most popular Open Source database)

http://www.phpmyadmin.com (database management tool)

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net (Filezilla- ftp application to upload and download your web content)

http://www.joomla.org (Website Content Management System or CMS)

http://www.mamboserver.com (Website Content Management System or CMS)

http://www.apache.org (Very popular Web server application)

http://www.oscommerce.com (online shop/ e-commerce solution)

http://www.sugarcrm.com (the CRM tool mentioned in this article)

http://www.dotproject.net (project management web application)

http://www.gimp.org (Image manipulation program)

http://www.nvu.com (complete Web Authoring System)

http://www.gnucash.org (personal and small-business financial-accounting software.)

http://www.subversion.tigris.org (Subversion- Document management and revision control system)

http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php (WebCalendar- Online calendar program for single or multiple users)

http://www.openvpn.net (full-featured SSL VPN solution)

Desktop Linux Distributions

http://www.ubuntu.com Ubuntu http://www.redhat.com Redhat http://fedoraproject.org/wiki Fedora http://www.novell.com/linux Suse http://en.opensuse.org OpenSuse http://www.slackware.com Slackware

You can also get the server versions to take care of your business client/server needs such as Email, file, print, FTP, Web, Database, Domain, Authentication etc., There are many distributions of Linux available please check http://www.distrowatch.com for additional resources.

This list is not at all exhausting and not meant to be. This should serve as a starting place on your journey into the Open Source realm. For general questions feel free to email me, if you have specific questions about any software listed here try posting to the respective forums. A good book to read is Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems, written by John Locke. My definition of Open Source was found in this book.

What have we learned? Before you plunder hundreds of your hard earned or borrowed money into software seek out or find someone who is versed in this technology. Research and evaluate if an Open Source solution can fit your needs. Remember, Open Source Saves!

Paul Williams is a technology consultant, who teaches people how to save money by using open source software to solve their top 10 technology business problems. http://www.opensourceweekly.com

Open Source Founders Reflect On Project Milestones

by John Koenig

There are tens of thousands of open source projects, some legendary. We asked a few project founders for some insight on their success.

We met with Wireshark founder Gerald Combs at the annual Wireshark conference in Los Altos, California. His story starts while working at an ISP a few years ago and unfolds with his on-the-job need for an inexpensive protocol analyzer. Other than TCPdump, there were only proprietary network analyzers on the market at the time. With his employer's approval, Combs architected and developed the code for an open source network analyzer. It was soon downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

Combs’ cites the project's rapid popularity as the initial milestone. Over the following months, he received emails asking about his plans for the project. He realized it needed his full-time commitment. His employer at the time had little interest in an open source network analyzer but eventually Combs found the right partner. Today CACE Technologies is the project sponsor, a change he cites as the second significant milestone --- as well as CACE becoming his employer.

A third milestone was the build-up of the user and developer community. "We attracted people who stuck with Wireshark -- people smarter than me", he claims. "And we needed an infrastructure including CVS and mail lists that could leverage their talents." Combs explained that most Wireshark contributors work for larger companies than CACE. The parallel architecture of Wireshark makes their participation easier, letting them work simultaneously on their own pieces, such as protocols.

The Asterisk Project

Mark Spencer, founder of Digium and the Asterisk project, was in San Francisco for the Open Source Business Conference in April and gave us his thoughts. As Spencer explains, Asterisk was started from a real business requirement --- his own company needed a phone system. "Telephony" he recalls, "was a large market with no Microsoft-like monopoly, and back then phone systems were expensive."

To keep a complex development project like Asterisk running smoothly, Spencer set up an issue tracker, something he still considers a significant milestone. Asterisk has many contributors to manage, he explains. He initially targeted a technical audience with Asterisk, adding further, that he designed the code base to support "extreme customization".

Spencer likewise encouraged the developers to earn income from the Asterisk ecosystem. Digium sponsored the first Asterisk conference to provide them an opportunity to do commercial business and discuss how to move the project forward.

The Mondrian Project

The MySQL Conference in Santa Clara offered an opportunity to speak with Julian Hyde, founder of the Mondrian project. Mondrian is an OLAP cube that Hyde wrote as a skunk project with his company's permission. Mondrian, he explains, is based on an OLAP standard he created --- one which is similar to the Microsoft OLAP product.

Mondrian's popularity took off when an industry analyst highlighted it in an article. "Open source" Hyde tells us, "provided a multiplier effect, allowing people with the same interests to converge on one project." But the milestone was when people started to use it, he adds. Hyde explains that using SourceForge was not a watershed but it helped get visibility. Awareness attracted Andreas Voss, for example, a developer with whom Hyde agreed to provide cross-support, giving Mondrian a technical boost through JPivot's navigational capability.

Even with Mondrian's success, Hyde didn't want to start a company. Instead he looked for someone to back the project. He met Richard Daley of Pentaho at a conference, and was impressed with their business model and professionalism. Hyde now has two roles there: architect of the roadmap and community advocate. "Engineers at other companies using Mondrian are full-time contributors" he explains, and "these people have a strategic interest in stable Mondrian code." Having a commercial sponsor helped the project achieve maturity and industry strength, including regular releases, Hyde says.

Hyde is looking ahead to another milestone. He would like the open source community to help adopt OLAP4J, because, he explains, "the commercial world has failed to provide us with a standard."

The Open Source Definition

By. www.opensource.org

Introduction

Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

Open Source Software and Documents: A Literature and Online Resource Review

John G. Drummond

Introduction

Open source software (OSS) and open source documents (OSD) are a rising star in technology today. The term "open source" was coined merely two years ago (1998)1, and is now a media buzzword (Raymond, 205). With its rapidly growing market share and corporate and public interest to match, open source as a concept will not stay a fringe phenomenon for long; in fact, it is rapidly entering the mainstream. This literature and online resource review is a starting point for anyone interested in the subject.

The Open Source Revolution
Since open source is relatively novel (as far as the mainstream, non-hacker2 culture is concerned) and largely exists online, there are only two printed works on the subject-and most of the material in these two books is also freely available online. One of the things that make the open source movement so unusual is that as it has developed over the last twenty years or so, it has done little self-documenting. This is one reason that Eric S. Raymond , self-appointed chief advocate for open source, wrote his now-famous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

ESR (as the hacker community refers to Mr. Raymond) wrote "Cathedral and Bazaar" largely to ameliorate this condition of non-documentation. Fascinated by the rapid development and growing sophistication of the Linux3 operating system, ESR began studying the open source development model (Raymond, 198). Why was Linux so mature, when the Free Software Foundation had been trying to develop a similar operating system for years without success? He found that while the corporate, mainstream, closed-source method (the "cathedral" model) of coding large programs like operating systems is bound by Brooke's Law, the open source development process (the "bazaar" model) actually reverses it. Brooke's Law states that programming work performed increases with direct proportion to the number of programmers (N), but the complexity of a project increases by the square of the number of programmers (N2). Therefore, it should follow that thousands of programmers working on a single project should become mired in a nightmare of human communication and version control. As "Cathedral and Bazaar" explains, the open source model (the "bazaar") overcomes this problem through customary central version control, mutual respect, and an army of developers and bug testers. This is summed up in a famous statement by ESR known as "Linus' Law" (so named for Linus Torvalds, original author and maintainer of the Linux kernel4): "Many eyes make all bugs shallow." "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," first given in 1997 at the Linux Kongress in Bavaria, led directly to the release of the Netscape browser source (see http://www.mozilla.org) and the current open source boom (Raymond, 200).

History
So how did all this come about? The open source concept is as old as the history of computing, and is closer to the original academic development of computing systems than the corporate model of today. These early days are illustrated in two excellent essays, "A Brief History of Hackerdom" by Eric S. Raymond, and "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement" by Richard M. Stallman. Both of these essays trace the simultaneous beginnings of modern computing, the Internet, and open source software development. More historical information (along with the origins of many arcane computer terms) can be found at the Jargon File (at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/) or in its published counterpart, The New Hacker's Dictionary (which was, incidentally, one of the first books to be commercially published and simultaneously available online for free).

The first organized effort to produced open source software was the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by Richard M. Stallman (known as RMS) in 1985 (Stallman, 60). RMS formed the nonprofit foundation for two reasons: to further develop GNU5 software, and to create a thinktank to further the notion of "Copyleft." Copyleft is a pun-the idea being to turn copyright around upon itself. The FSF developed this concept into the GNU Public License (GPL), a software distribution license that stipulates (in a nutshell):

* Software released under the GPL shall be freely distributable
* The software shall be distributed along with its source code
* Anyone is free to modify the source code and change the program, as long as the resulting program is also freely distributable and modifiable

This ensures that all of the GNU software (and any other software released under the GPL) is protected from those who would use the code to create proprietary, closed-source programs. Around half of the open source software available today is made available under the terms of the GPL. Today there exist several similar licenses of varying restrictions and attitudes toward commercial use and sale of covered software (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/).

Open Source Documents
The first documents that truly followed the open source model (in the sense of having many contributors and reviewers coupled with online availability) were Frequently Asked Questions lists, known as FAQs. The first online FAQ to go by that title is attributed to Eugene Miya, a NASA employee (Hersch, 1). His SPACE-digest mailing list FAQ was written in 1982, when the Internet was a little-known experimental network known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) (see http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ ). Unfortunately, little is known about the history of these now-ubiquitous informational documents. An attempt was begun in 1996 to write a book about FAQs, but the web page for this project has not been updated since 1997 (see http://www.faqs.org/faqbook/ ).

Unfortunately, documentation is one of the weakest aspects of open source program (Stallman, 68). This is, perhaps, a result of the fact that hackers enjoy coding so very much; updating the documentation is sometimes an afterthought. Conversely, the idea that programmers make poor writers is an unfortunate stereotype. Eric Raymond insists that the very best hackers are also excellent writers, since good programming involves both logical analysis of a problem and a high level of creativity (Raymond, 246). This is evident in the fact that ESR (author of the popular Fetchmail program and numerous modules for the Emacs text editor), Richard Stallman (author of GNU Emacs, the GNU C compiler, and other keystone programs), Larry Wall (creator of the Perl programming language), and other open source luminaries have written numerous (and excellent) essays, manuals, and technical books.

This is changing, however. Since open source software, particularly the Linux operating system, needs good documentation to expand to new users, much work has been done to improve this situation. Open source programs are usually documented in three forms:

* README files that are distributed with each individual program
* Manual pages ("man pages", so named after the man command used to access them), technical references which are also distributed with each program (see ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux/docs/manpages/)
* HOWTO documents, which are instructional in nature, and usually task- (as opposed to program-) oriented (see http://www.linux.org/help/ldp/howto/howto.html). There is also a smaller, less step-by-step subset of the HOWTO documents known as Mini-HOWTOs (see http://www.linux.org/help/ldp/mini/minihowto.html )6

The maintenance of these documents is made difficult by the very nature of the open source development model. Since there are so many developers, running under a directive of "release early, release often," open source software can change at a rapid pace. To facilitate better documentation and document management, the Linux Documentation Project was founded by Matt Welsh in 1992 ( http://www.linuxdoc.org/ ). There is a recent interview of Deb Richardson, the current head of the LDP, at Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/27/0717244&mode=thread ). Another similar resource is the Open Source Writer's Group ( http://www.oswg.org:8080/oswg ), which serves as a database for open source volunteers willing to do documentation and other open source writing projects, based on skill and interest.

As an offshoot of the concept of freely available and modifiable documentation, OpenContent was created by David Wiley to create a license similar to the GPL that would apply to any information that is not a program (http://www.opencontent.org/). The idea is that if computer programs can be debugged (edited) and improved by making them modifiable by anyone with the desire to help, documents and other content should benefit from a similar process. A similar license, the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) was authored by Richard Stallman and released in March, 2000. The idea of "freely modifiable and distributable" music, stories, instructions, and other documents and media is still new, and the nature of any applicable distribution license is (as of March 2000) widely debated (see http://www.linuxmall.com/news/features/000324fdl , and http://opencontent.org/announce.shtml ).

Online Forums and Other Resources
Open source is a community as well as a method of software and document development. There are several "watering holes" that open source advocates, developers, writers, and the curious frequent. The most famous of these forums is Slashdot (so named for the dot-and-slash (/.) notation used to denote the directory structure used in UNIX systems), an open source news and discussion forum ( http://slashdot.org/ ). Journalists who are unfamiliar with the open source community usually go to Slashdot to get their first taste of the quirky, often irreverent world of open source adherents. The site consists of articles, which are usually submitted by Slashdot readers, and discussion of those articles. With the slogan of "News for nerds, stuff that matters," Slashdot topics range from open source issues to science fiction, the role of "geeks" in society, science and technology, and the occasional essay. Other forums and news sites are:

* Segfault7 ( http://www.segfault.org/), a sort of anti-Slashdot that posts parodies and humorous stories
* Freshmeat ( http://www.freshmeat.net/), which announces new releases of open source software and other relevant news such as security issues
* Kernel Notes ( http://kernelnotes.org/ ), which publishes announcements regarding the Linux Kernel4 (which is sometimes updated with a new release several times per day!)
* Linux Forum ( http://www.linuxforum.com/ ), a currently-defunct site for general Linux discussion

There are also other websites, mailing lists, and Usenet8 newsgroups too numerous to mention; a Web search for the term "Linux" at www.google.com yields 1,560,000 results. Examining www.linux.org or the comp.os.linux hierarchy of newsgroups should point the curious in the right direction.

In addition, there are specialized development forums dedicated to open source. Since any open source business model depends on the abundance of quality software, several companies host free development sites, which offer a combination of development tools, shell accounts, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and Web hosting, version control software like CVS (Concurrent Versions System), and "matchmaking" (introducing developers and users who are looking for each other), all for free. Some of the most significant are:

* Sourceforge ( http://www.sourceforge.net ), which offers news, Web and FTP site hosting, shell accounts, CVS, and discussion forums for open source projects
* The Free Software Bazaar ( http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/ ), which serves as a link between open source developers and open source users who need development work done
* SourceXchange, ( http://www.sourcexchange.com/ ) where developers and users can barter code, documents and ideas

Closing
These are just the tip of the iceberg, though I have consciously tried to denote those resources which will provide the most valuable information and point the reader toward other resources of more specialized interest. There are thousands upon thousands of Linux-related pages on the World Wide Web. There are also Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, magazines (see http://www.linuxworld.com/ ), and Linux User Groups (LUGs), in addition to the many different Linux distributions (see http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html ).

Open Source is a phenomenon that is growing in momentum, membership, and market share. It has already touched the lives of everyone who uses the Internet (since many of the services and programs that make the Internet go are either open source, or based on an open source program). It will continue to do so, and anyone required to keep up with technology in the world today needs at least some familiarity with its precepts and concepts. I hope this review will assist those that would like to learn more.
Notes
1. The term "open source" was coined by Eric Raymond and ratified in a meeting between himself, Richard M. Stallman, and other notable open source advocates. It is intended to replace the previous term, "free software," used by Richard Stallman. Despit e the constant admonishment that the "free" in "free software" meant "Free as in speech, not as in beer," corporate-minded people were leery of the idea of software that could not be sold (Raymond, 212).

2. "Hacker" is how programmers describe someone who enjoys solving problems in ingenious ways. It is a term of praise that must be earned in the hacker community. Unfortunately, people who exploit software bugs to crash, interfere with, or gain unauthorized access to other people's computer systems also sometimes refer to themselves as "hackers." The popular media has seized upon this misnomer and popularized it, to the confusion of the general public. People in the open source community refer to such miscreants and criminals as "crackers."

3. Linux (named after Linus Torvalds, its creator) is the most popular of the open source operating systems. Linux is a "workalike" clone of the UNIX operating system, based on the Linux kernel (see note 4, below), the suite of GNU (see note 5, below) t ools and applications, and other software packages depending on which Linux you are using. There are many flavors of Linux (called distributions), a few of which are RedHat ( http://www.redhat.com/ ), Slackware ( http://www.slackware.com/ ), and Debian ( http://www.debian.org ).

4. The kernel is the heart of any operating system. The kernel performs low-level tasks such as memory allocation, process management, and communication with hardware. It serves as the negotiator between programs and the hardware of a computer system. Kernels are some of the most difficult and complex of all types of computer programs.

5. GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not UNIX." (which stands for "GNU's Not Unix Not Unix," which stands for. . .) It is the "brand" for software developed by the Free Software Foundation. Another well-known recursive acronym name is the PINE mail reader ("PINE Is Not Elm" (Elm is another mail reader upon which Pine was based)). A book could easily be written on the quirky names for UNIX commands and acronyms. For example, the biff command (used to check for new email) is not a recursive acronym; it was named after a dog.

6. There are HOWTO documents on all sorts of Linux concepts. Including how to get Linux to make coffee (see http://www.linux.org/help/ldp/mini/Coffee.html )!

7. Segfault is named, appropriately, after an error known as a "Segmentation Fault." This is an error that occurs when a program tries to access an incorrect segment of memory (see http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/segmentation-fault.html ). The program will then perform a core dump, which, as far as most users (and many programmers) are concerned, means that a meaningless gobbledygook of numbers and letters is dumped onto the screen or into a file called "core."

8. Usenet is the collective term for the collection of Internet-wide newsgroups. Usenet was originally a handful of forums intended for ARPANET developers to use as a common bulletin board. It now contains many thousands of newsgroups, arranged in hierarchical dotted notation (e.g., under rec.pets, one may find rec.pets.dogs, rec.pets.cats, and rec.pets.cats.siamese).

Development Ethical Trading and Free Software

By. Danny yee

Introduction

Information goods make up a sizeable and increasing fraction of the world's trade - and an even larger fraction of profits, since margins tend to be higher (Compare Microsoft's profit/turnover ratio with those of General Electric). This trend towards an "information economy" is continuing. Ethical trading and appropriate technology policies should therefore cover informational products.

With some goods the major ethical concerns are in their manufacture or the effects on the environment of their use. Examples are wheat, iron, refrigerators, and so forth. Such goods are covered by a draft Oxfam GB Ethical Purchasing Policy, which advocates products that "are produced and delivered under conditions that do not involve the abuse or exploitation of any persons" and "have the least negative impact on the environment".

The policy mentioned considers weapons and baby milk powder as special cases. But there are many products other than weapons and baby milk powder whose production and delivery may raise no or only minor environmental and ethical concerns, but which may still have effects of major concern in the way they affect the autonomy and independence of users. It is the contention of this paper that software falls into this category.

This paper addresses only computer software. Other intellectual property issues are also of great importance. Control of genetic variability through gene patents is one example; World Intellectual Property Organisation treaties on copyright are another (the latter ought to receive the same sort of critical response that the Multilateral Agreement on Investment did).

"This is the context for intellectual property rights enforcement. This world market in knowledge is a major and profoundly anti-democratic new stage of capitalist development. The transformation of knowledge into property necessarily implies secrecy: common knowledge is no longer private. In this new and chilling stage, communication itself violates property rights. The WTO is transforming what was previously a universal resource of the human race - its collectively, historically and freely-developed knowledge of itself and nature - into a private and marketable force of production." - Allan Freeman, Fixing up the world? GATT and the World Trade Organisation

A good deal of the world's primary resources are located in the poorer countries of the world's "South", even if their exploitation is often in the hands of external corporations. Systems for controlling the distribution of information, on the other hand, are (like possession of capital) overwhelmingly centralised in the rich "North". This should be of great concern to organisations such as Oxfam International members which take a long-term perspective in their attempts to reduce the inequitable distribution of resources.

As a United Nations Sustainable Development Networking Program says:

"Information and Communication Technologies are now fundamental to dealing with all development issues in developing countries."

An Oxfam International Education Now report presents some of the consequences of an information economy for educational equity.

Software: Drawbacks and Dangers

The following analysis of potential political and ethical dangers in software is not meant to be complete. Nor is it an analysis which applies equally to all kinds of software. There are certain key components, such as operating systems, application programming interfaces, and software with mass deployment, on which many implementations and many other software systems depend. These are more critical than software systems with peripheral roles.

The Expense

Software is often prohibitively expensive. The standard price for an ordinary office package might be a year's income for most of the world's people. As one Mexican project adopting free software wrote:

"The primary reason for reaching this decision was the kind of money we would have had to pay if we went for proprietary software: at US$55 for each machine with Win98 and Office, US$500 for every NT license and an average of six workstations and one server for 140,000 labs, that's a lot of money."

Though "discounts" are often available on software, these tend to either be in exchange for accepting a local monopoly for the vendor's products, or an attempt to gain market share at the expense of competitors. Consider, for example, Microsoft's attempts to influence universities and colleges into going all-NT.

So called software "piracy" is obviously an option for those unable or unwilling to purchase software, and indeed it is a common choice throughout the South, where copyright law is often poorly enforced. But this places users at the mercy of the law, increasing their vulnerability to those rich and powerful enough to use it to their own advantage. Also, development organisations themselves are vulnerable to enforcement in their home countries, so they can not support or encourage such practices.

As well as the up-front costs of software, there are usually hidden costs. Often licensing is per-user, so costs will increase with the size of the user base and inhibit growth. Support for proprietary software is almost always prohibitively expensive. Frequent software upgrades may be required to maintain compatibility and functionality (consider the deliberate modification by Microsoft of the file format in successive versions of Word, in order to force users to upgrade to newer versions). And software tends, especially with upgrades, to require more powerful, and hence more expensive, hardware. These hidden costs are often recurrent.

Lack of Openness

Open standards and protocols are in the interests of consumers, and indeed of most businesses. They allow genuine market competition, giving users options and choices. Closed standards and protocols and technical secrets, on the contrary, benefit only those seeking to maintain or attain monopoly control of markets by decommoditizing software. Proprietary software can, of course, use open standards and protocols, but much of it doesn't.

Security and Privacy

The use of black-box proprietary software without source code creates security risks, since it makes the detection of Trojan horses rather difficult. One high-profile case is the Melissa Virus.

An extreme case is government surveillance. An Australian government report, (the Walsh Report, see sections 6.2.10 and 6.2.11) has recommended that security agencies arrange for back doors to be inserted into mass-market commercial software to allow eavesdropping. Perhaps it is paranoiac to think that the U.S. National Security Agency has already arranged for this to be done. When lives are at stake, can one really trust (say) a commercial software developer working in collaboration with a government agency when vulnerable West Papuan or East Timorese activists are involved?

From a privacy point of view, some worrying features are known to have been built into popular proprietary software packages. Microsoft Windows and recent versions of Office include a unique computer identifier in all documents - an identifier which is sent to Microsoft on registration of software, as well as in cookies set by Microsoft's Web site. The implications of this for anyone trying to maintain anonymous - whistle-blowers and activists most obviously - are frightening. See an analysis and a news report from CNET; Paul Ferris points the obvious argument for free software in "Of Corporations, Privacy, and Open Source Software".

The Creation of New Dependencies

Proprietary software increases the dependence of individuals, organisations, and communities on external forces - typically large corporations with poor track records on acting in the public interest. There are dependencies for support, installation and problem fixing, sometimes in critical systems. There are dependencies for upgrades and compatibility. There are dependencies when modification or extended functionality is required. And there are ongoing financial dependencies if licensing is recurrent.

Political dependencies can result from the use of proprietary software, too. For example, an Irish ISP under attack for hosting the top level East Timor domain .tp was helped by hackers and community activists in setting up a secure Linux installation. Given that this attack was probably carried out with the connivance of elements of the Indonesian government, it is hard to imagine a commercial vendor with a significant market presence in Indonesia being so forthcoming with support.

Nearly exact parallels to this exist in agriculture, where the patenting of seed varieties and genome sequences and the creation of non-seeding varieties are used to impose long-term dependencies on farmers.

An Analogy: Baby-milk Powder

The effects of baby-milk powder on poor infants (which has sparked a Nestle campaign/boycott) provide an analogy to the effects of proprietary software.

Sending information in Microsoft Word format to correspondents in Eritrea is analogous to Nestle advertising baby milk powder to Indian mothers. It encourages the recipients to go down a path which is not in their best interests, and from which it is not easy for them to recover. The apparent benefits (the doctor recommended it; we will be able to read the documents sent to us) may be considerable and the initial costs involved (to stop breast-feeding and switch to milk powder; to start using Microsoft Office) may be subsidised, hidden, or zero (with "piracy"), but the long-term effects are to make the recipients dependent on expensive recurrent inputs, and to burden them with ultimately very high costs.

Moreover, because documents can be easily copied and because there are strong pressures to conform to group/majority standards in document formats, pushing individuals towards proprietary software and document formats can snowball to affect entire communities, not just the individuals initially involved.

Restrictions on Self-help

Proprietary software not only creates new dependencies: it actively hinders self-help, mutual aid, and community development.

* Users cannot freely share software with others in the community, or with other communities.

* The possibilities for building local support and maintainance systems are limited.

* Modification of software to fit local needs is not possible, leaving communities with software designed to meet the needs of wealthy Northern users and companies, which may not be appropriate for them.

An Example: Language Support

Language support provides a good example of the advantages of free software in allowing people to adapt products to their own ends and take control of their lives. Operating systems and word processing software support only a limited range of languages. Iceland, in order to help preserve its language, wants Icelandic support added to Microsoft Windows - and is even willing to pay for it. But without access to the source code - and the right to modify it - they are totally dependent on Microsoft's cooperation. See, for example, an article in the Seattle Times and an article by Martin Vermeer which argues that lack of software localisation is a threat to cultural diversity.

Whatever the outcome of this particular case, it must be noted that Iceland is hardly a poor or uninfluential nation. There is absolutely no hope of Windows being modified to support Aymara or Lardil or other indigenous languages. The spread of such proprietary software will continue to contribute to their marginalisation.

In contrast, the source code to the GNU/Linux operating system is available and can be freely modified, so groups are able to add support for their languages. See, as an example, the KDE Internationalization Page - KDE is a desktop for GNU/Linux. Access to source code also allows experiments like the the Omega Typesetting System, a modification of the TeX typesetting system "designed for printing all of the world's languages, modern or ancient, common or rare". This sort of extension or modification is simply not possible with proprietary word-processing packages.

Unsustainable

Sustainable development should favour unlimited resources over finite ones. But while software appears to be a renewable resource, its control by profit-making corporations, as intellectual property, effectively turns it into a finite resource.

The Advantages of Free Software

What is Free Software?

The Free Software Foundation's document entitled "What is Free Software?" provides a good introduction to concept of free software.

"'Free software' refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to three levels of freedom:

* The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can share with your neighbor.
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits."

A key point is that "free" refers to liberty, not price. Software is only "free" if users have the freedom to copy, modify, and distribute it, and to share it with others. A key necessity for this is access to the source code.

Prominent examples of free software are the Linux kernel and the GNU system environment, which together constitute a complete operating system (an alternative to Windows or MacOS), and the Apache Web server and the sendmail mail transport agent, which between them act as the "engines" behind more than 50% of the Internet's Web sites and handle perhaps 80% of the world's e-mail.

Pragmatic Advantages

Quite independently of any ethical and political considerations, there are also pragmatic and technical arguments for the deployment of free software systems.

* Some free software products are widely recognised as more reliable and robust, more powerful and more secure than their proprietary counterparts. A plausible argument can be made that this is not just accidental, but a consequence of their open development, implementation and testing.

Rob Bos puts it well in 32bitsonline

"Free software is better than non-free software. It works better, it works faster, it works longer. Open source programs are tried and proven, they are constantly pressed from every direction to do specific tasks, and do them well; and for the simple reason that they are written to work, not simply to sell copies. Free software doesn't just work better, it works orders of magnitude better. Open sourcing an application gives the source code to a large number of developers, instead of a small, tight group. Free software projects have a pool of developers and an effective budget multiple times higher than an equivalent proprietary development project, and will, given all other equal things, advance at a rate many times faster because of their access to an much larger development team. Peer review of code isn't just a pipe dream, it is an essential means to writing superior applications, no matter where they are written."

* Free software can typically be obtained for the cost of the media (typically a few dollars for a CD) or network traffic (for distribution via computer networks). It can always be freely distributed. The pragmatic benefits of this should be obvious, but in some contexts the price of free software can also take on political significance:

"I live in India, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a large number of awfully bright, poor people. In India, today, the entry-level programmer (C knowledge but no work experience) earns $100 a month, and it is not routine for him to have a computer at home. Entry-level computers at $250 and below will attract millions of buyers in India, who will find the difference between $250 and $750 to be a massive one.

Industry experts look at around 200 million existing computers, 80% of which run Microsoft OSes. It's useful to focus on the next billion computer sales. In this, I see the price-tag of $0 as being a critical product feature."
Ajay Shah, "Unix on a billion desktops?"

* Free software is often less demanding of resources, extending the lifespan of older hardware. Consider Project Computer Bank, an Australian venture providing old computer equipment running GNU/Linux to low income earners, community groups and disadvantaged schools.

Freedom From Dependencies

"Community Aid Abroad's vision is for a fair world in which people control their own lives, their basic rights are achieved and the environment is sustained." (emphasis added)

Free software does not create dependencies on multinational corporations. Support commonly comes from user groups and online communities, which often provide vastly better support than commercial alternatives. Commercial support is available for free software systems, but users of free software can not be tied to single suppliers or vendors.

Access to the source code greatly increases users' options. It allows not just the unrestricted sharing of software packages but also their easy modification to suit local needs and requirements.

The value of free software in avoiding dependencies has been recognised by businesses and by governments.

"Let's say you are a chief technical officer (CTO) at a Fortune 500 company and you have just spent millions of dollars on a strategic business system with software you cannot see inside and cannot modify, software that depends on a single vendor to service. Now are those systems going to change to serve your business plan or your vendor's business plan?

... it probably will not be long before buying closed-source software for your key infrastructure is considered the height of irresponsibility."
- Eric S. Raymond in "Intellectual Capital"

"Scandinavia, Germany, and France are some of the main centers of Linux use. Some people say that this is because companies and the government want to avoid becoming too dependent on U.S. - read Microsoft - products."
- Kalle Dalheimer, quoted in "OSS Europe"

Development of free software is done by those who have the necessary skills and resources - the resulting products are available for use by whoever needs it.

"With Linux, the people who use the system get to [affect the way] the system [develops]. It's democracy in the sense that you don't surrender control. Anybody can do anything. It boils down to [the fact that] you must be [competent], but that's a good way of separating the people who do the work. And even the [people who] don't make changes can make suggestions and can do testing and things like that."
- Linus Torvalds, interview with upsidedown.com

Shared Values

Most free software has been produced through decentralised, community-based development processes which are usually open to anyone with the right technical skills (or a willingness to learn) who is prepared to do the work. Users of free software can join software development communities and participate in the refinement and improvement of existing software, or in the development of entirely new programs, building on what already exists.

Many free software development projects are almost model community development projects. They are based on open communication, inclusiveness, personal relationships and working for the good of the community as a whole. In "Technology and Pleasure", Gisle Hannemyr describes the history of the "hacker" community, placing it in the artisan tradition and in opposition to Taylorism. He describes its imperatives as:

reject hierarchies
mistrust authority
promote decentralization
share information
serve your community

and includes among its position statements:

when creating computer artifacts, not only the observable results, but the craftsmanship in execution matters
practice is superior to theory
people should only be judged on merit (not by appearance, age, race or position)
you can create art and beauty by the means of a computer

The long-term effects of free software and associated changes are likely to be significant:

"Oscar Wilde says somewhere that the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. The problems with anarchism as a social system are also about transaction costs. But the digital revolution alters two aspects of political economy that have been otherwise invariant throughout human history. All software has zero marginal cost in the world of the Net, while the costs of social coordination have been so far reduced as to permit the rapid formation and dissolution of large-scale and highly diverse social groupings entirely without geographic limitation. Such fundamental change in the material circumstances of life necessarily produces equally fundamental changes in culture."
- Ebden Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright"

In many ways the ethics of free software reflect that of the Internet community more generally, a community which is still resisting commercialisation of the Net.

Education and Technology Transfer

Free software both encourages learning and experimentation and in turn benefits from it. Free software is widespread in educational institutions, since access to the source code makes free software an ideal tool for teaching; indeed much free software began as learning exercises.

Due to low start-up costs and rapid change, software development and the information economy more generally offer a possible way for the South to build high value industries, leapfrogging older technologies and even modes of production. The flourishing Indian software industry provides an obvious example. But if these industries are built on proprietary products and protocols owned by multinational corporations, then this will only reinforce one-sided dependencies. Free software has obvious advantages here.

Free software lends itself to collaborative, community-based development at all scales from cottage industry to world-wide efforts involving the collaboration of thousands of people. Internet access potentially offers the poor the ability to communicate directly with the rest of the world, to directly present their own ideas and perspectives. Combined with the free software development model, it allows them to participate in creating and moulding the technologies and systems that will determine their future.

Free Software in Action

The advantages of free software for community and development organisations have been recognised by others. The arguments sketched above apply not just to development organisations but to governments and to some extent even to businesses.

The United Nations

UNESCO is handing out free Linux CD-ROMs to community, scientific and educational projects in Latin America.

"We believe LINUX can play a very important role in Latin American and Caribbean modernisation, constructing networks to permit a great number of universities, colleges, schools and educational centers, to connect to Internet in order to use this fabulous tool to improve their scientific and cultural levels. In a few words, LINUX is the tool which permits to reduce the "technological gap" between the countries. LINUX permits the access to "the informatics the most advanced" implemented according to the reduced economic capacities in our region. LINUX is a new way to make informatics, where the most important thing is "the technical quality and people solidarity"."

The UNDP is running a Sustainable Development Networking Program, with support from the Linux vendor Red Hat.

Mexico's Scholar Net

From http://www.linux.org.mx/arturo/scholar/

"I work as the project leader of the "Scholar Net", a program that aims to bring computers and the net to every elementary and mid-level school in Mexico. We expect to install from 20 to 35 thousand labs per year to a total of 140,000 centers in the next five years.

Due to matters of cost, reliability and configurability, we plan to use GNU/Linux to replace the proprietary server options and, now thanks to GNOME, the proprietary desktop application options.

SatelLife

SatelLife is an international not-for-profit organization employing satellite, telephone and radio networking technology to serve the health communication and information needs of countries in the developing world. From http://www.data.com/issue/981021/people.html

"For starters, the staff of Satellife had to seek out and master technologies cheap enough for users in the world's poorest countries but reliable enough to deliver vital medical information fast. And the organization didn't have the funds that corporate IT departments have for equipment and software - so it used free and open-source software to link users to forums. And as the Internet became a more vital tool, Satellife had to make sure that users without browsers could still get information via the Web. It also used second-hand gear where possible and relied on research institutes and discussion groups, rather than high-priced consultants, for advice."

The Littlefish Health Project

From http://www.paninfo.com.au/intro/littlefishproject_homepage.htm

"Project Vision:"To create a user friendly patient information and recall system on an open source basis with the focus on use by community based primary health care health organisations in the developing world or remote and rural areas or areas of need.""

The Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA)

An impassioned but carefully put together argument for use of Linux by the CBAA. Arguing on both technical and ethical grounds, most of this is directly relevant to development organisations.

"The open source movement, and Linux is particular, are massive volunteer non-profit projects which share the spirit of community media. It's a radical alternative movement creating successful mainstream software. In fact, it's the same movement that produced the software that the internet revolution depends on. Now the movement has produced a cutting edge technology which suits the CBAA's needs far better than the commercial competition. The technology is Linux. A Linux server is one the CBAA could be proud of."

Conclusion and Recommendations

The free software movement embodies principles consistent with those of Community Aid Abroad and Oxfam International. Free software products are tools which fit the needs of Oxfam International members, in many cases better than alternative proprietary products.

It is therefore recommended that:

* Development organisations should include software in their policies on ethical purchasing and appropriate technology; such policies should encourage the use of free software and open protocols.

* Development organisations should encourage and assist project partners in the deployment of software systems that will enable them to "take control of their own destiny", and to reduce their dependence on the developed world. They should consider the major advantages free software has in this area.

* Development organisations should ultimately try to free themselves from the shackles of proprietary software.

About the Author

Danny Yee is one of the Community Aid Abroad Webmasters, a board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia, and an employee of Sydney University.

Thanks to Cameron Tampion, Mike Gifford, Charlie Brady, Greg Taylor, Ronni Martin, and Richard Stallman for feedback on this document.
E-mail: danny@anatomy.usyd.edu.au

Notes

The opinions expressed in this paper are personal and do not necessarily reflect the policies of any of these organisations.

Thanks to Cameron Tampion, Mike Gifford, Charlie Brady, Greg Taylor, Ronni Martin and Richard Stallman for feedback on this document.