Open Source Daily Journal

In a move to expand their corporate might, the ever present Google has acquired the mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility. This results in their acquiring at least 17,000 patents that were owned by Motorola. There is also the issue of the pending 7,000 that are under the process of evaluation, further expanding the reach of the internet giant in this their latest foray into the mobile market.
Google has long been in the sights of other internet giants such as Apple and Microsoft when it comes to patent court cases. With the addition of these new ones, they are getting more to complain about. Now is the move aimed to simply protect their booming systems such as Android, only they can tell but experts are speculating that they are readying

It may be the previous mindset that open source was only for use with small scale implementation but with many big industries eying the potential in terms of savings of open source development it has entered the mainstream of the computing industry. Many industries such as one airline owned by a rogue British businessman has expressed great interest in applications developed on open source platforms.
Savings that amount to a fraction of what a software system used to cost can be substantial, with no need for extensive and expensive licenses. Support becomes an issue though for should the problem be with the platform, which is not owned by one company but rather a community of individuals and companies it becomes quite vague in the long run in that area.

Linux is the quintessential open source software. Talk about open source and Linux will most likely be mentioned or cited as an example. Linux has been widely described as the geek’s choice for an operating system. It has hipster cool credibility, unlike Windows or even the Mac OS. The widely regarded opinion is that Linux is hard to use and requires above-average computer skills.
This may be true when Linux was still in its infancy. But looking at the new flavors of Linux will show that it has transcended that earlier view. It is now highly usable and may even be described as being as easy as Windows in certain departments. It’s high time that computer users check out Linux.

There has been a lot of discussion on the security issues that face open source systems and many industry experts are saying that they are not founded on facts. First, the developers of open source systems did start out as a sort of backyard projects, developers looking for things to do when they were out of their desks but really couldn’t leave them.

In today’s environment however, with open source software going mainstream security has not been much of an issue due to the fact that it becomes what it was designed to be. Security is defined by the open source developer who has tools all over the internet in making their system secure from hackers. Enterprise security is available through the efforts of the many advocates of the platform such as Linux and the many other open source systems in use today.

This effort illustrates the will and capacity to build a comprehensive index of Open Source / Free GIS related software projects. The effort still has a long way to go, with much emphasis needed in projects in different other languages. GIS has been given a loose working definition in order to include a wide range of projects that deal with spatial data. This effort depends on the strength of other projects, most notably OSRS , FreeGIS.org, Metalab Linux Archive, and Fresh Meat.net. Descriptive text gathered from the project site is in quotes and almost all of these projects fit the ideal of Open Source Software as defined by the Open Source Initiative. Also, most of them exemplify the stricter definition of Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation.

Pidgin was formerly known as Gaim. Pidgin is an instant messaging client that can be used in different platforms. Pidgin is capable of supporting the commonly used protocols of different instant messaging platforms. This allows users to log into many different instant messaging services by using just a single application.

According to statistics, it is estimated that the number of Pidgin users across the world has reached to over three million in 2007. Pidgin is considered free software under the GNU General Public License.

Some of the supported protocols of Pidgin are as follows: .NET Messenger Service (MSN), AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Gadu-Gadu, Yahoo!, Skype, Bonjour and Lotus Sametime.

The open source model allows user to view and modify a product’s source code. Organizations and individuals that uses this model believes that the benefit that they gain from improvements to their software provided by the community of software developers is more important than protecting their competitive advantage. Most advantages cited by proponents for having such a structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality. Most of the open source software is licensed under what is often termed a “copyleft” license[citation needed], a term which gives emphasis to the license’s reversal of the principles of copyright. A traditional license is used to limit freedoms, which the free software movement considers importantl, the “four software freedoms”, taking them away from the users either completely (“you may not distribute the software”) or partially (“you can use the software for an evaluation period of 30 days; after that you must either pay a license registration fee or discontinue the software”). By contrast a copyleft license protects the “four software freedoms” by granting them and then explicitly prohibiting anyone to strip them away when redistributing the package or reusing the code in it to make derivative works. But there are few open source software packages licensed under a license that grants the four software freedoms but allows re distributors to remove them if they intend to do so. Such licenses are sometimes called permissive software licenses. An example of such a license is the BSD license which allows derivative software to be distributed as closed source products, as long as they give credit to the original designers.
(Source:The Wikipedia)

Want to quickly find and fix potential problems across all of the servers in your farm? Then don’t forget to take a look at SharePoint Health Analyzer. SharePoint Health Analyzer is a feature in SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 that allows administrators to schedule regular, automatic checks for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems in the server farm. Any errors that SharePoint Health Analyzer finds are identified in status reports that are made available to farm administrators in Central Administration. Status reports that are produced by SharePoint Health Analyzer explain each issue, list the servers where the problem exists, and outline the steps that an administrator can take to treat the problem. In some cases, errors are repaired automatically as soon as they are found, and farm administrators are informed of the repairs.
Continue Reading »

With the closed source model, source code should be hidden from the public and competitors who might reproduce, study or modify the code, may either resell the product, learn from the product or for many reasons. Most software companies that follow the closed source model use it as a way to protect their products from rampant software piracy or misuse, from reverse engineering and duplication, and to maintain its competitive advantage and vendor lock-in. Closed source software usually is developed and maintained by a small team who produce their “product” in a compiled executable state, which is what the market is allowed access to. As an example, Microsoft the owner and developer of Windows and Microsoft Office, and along with other major software companies, have long been proponents of this business model, although their business models have shifted with time. (Source:The Wikipedia)

BBC Open Source Projects is a lists of projects developed by the BBC where the source code has been released as open source. The website does not fully show the many open source projects to which the BBC has been part of, but only those that the BBC has started and managed itself. For the BBC, open source software development is like an extension of the Public Service remit. Releasing open source software aids audience in get additional value from the work they have supported and also in acquiring tools for free which they could not get in any other way. It also lets people outside the BBC to extend projects in ways that may be used in the BBC in the future.