Open Source

Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organization is 'cloud-ready' the organizational adoption will be much faster and much better. A workforce ready and eager to maximize the potential value and benefit will more readily embrace a cloud strategy. read more

These days, it seems that every cloud provider claims that cloud is safer than your traditional datacenter. Is it though? In his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, McAfee expert Rishi Bhargava will help you explore and address the security challenges and considerations for public cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). read more

In the week ending 18 May ? Microsoft is reading what you type in Skype's chat, an exploit for the Linux kernel is discovered, Google unveils its new IDE for developing Android applications, and the International Space Station is using more Linux

Call me crazy, but I like using the native Gmail web view. Thanks to a tip from my buddy Bryce Hewett, I started to using an open source tool called Gmail Notifr for Mac OS X. It’s pretty simple and tucks neatly away in your system tray and even supports multiple accounts. If you want to try it out, download it here. Gmail Notifr was originally written in RubyCocoa, then MacRuby, and recently Objective-C. The post Gmail Notifr, an open source Gmail notifier for OS X appeared first on The Changelog.

The development cycle of openSUSE 13.1, codenamed "Bottle," was officially kicked off today when Andres Silva announced Milestone 1. He said, "As early version, it is expected that this Milestone is not fully functional or very stable. The most prominent changes in openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 come from the upgrades that packages are going through." This release features Linux 3.9.0, Xorg X Server 1.14.1, GCC 4.7, GNOME 3.8.1, and KDE 4.10.2. It also ships with LibreOffice 4.0.2, Firefox 20, and GIMP 2.8.4. Future plans for 13.1 include upgrading GCC to 4.8, testing kmscom, and finish moving everything to systemd (completely removing SysVinit and initscripts). mkinitrd would then be replaced with Dracut. AppArmor will be "promoted further as a preferred security suite" and SELinux will be dusted off and oiled up. GNOME will be upgraded to 3.10 and get a green theme to display as default. KDE should be the latest 4.11.x release possible and will lose Kopete for Telepathy (so getting Phonon to support GStreamer 1.0 is also on the menu). openSUSE 13.1 Release Schedule * 2013-05-16: Milestone 1 * 2013-06-13: Milestone 2 * 2013-07-11: Milestone 3 * 2013-08-08: Milestone 4 * 2013-08-12: Stabilization Freeze * 2013-09-01: Toolchain Freeze * 2013-09-19: Beta 1 * 2013-10-07: Pre-Release Freeze * 2013-10-10: Release Candidate 1 * 2013-10-31: Release Candidate 2 * 2013-11-08: Gold Master * 2013-11-19: General Availability Get your copy of Milestone 1 at openSUSE.org. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever (post comment) Critical Linux Exploit In The Wild (post comment) Antergos Erases Cinnarch with Inaugural Release (post comment)

The Google Developer Group (GDG) Lahore hosted their fourth event on the afternoon of April 18th with support from Plan9 (Tech Incubator) and P@SHA. The event had a variety of attendees, from early Computer Science students to soon-to-be graduates, to industry professionals and faculty members from various universities in Lahore, Pakistan. As part of the event agenda, GDG Lahore hosted a panel about Google Summer of Code where Muhammad Adnan shared his experiences from Google Summer of Code as a both a student and a mentor. Muhammad was a Google Summer of Code student in the 2010 program for phpMyAdmin and a Mentor for RTEMS in Google Summer of Code 2012 and Mentor for Google Code-in 2011 and 2012. Adnan shared his story about how he first discovered the program through Twitter and ultimately applied for the Google Summer of Code program. He motivated students who were interested in applying for Google Summer of Code and gave them tips on writing their applications. Adnan explained how Google is providing opportunities for student developers to show their skills and how to increase the chances of their proposal being accepted by the mentoring organizations involved in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The session ended with questions from attendees about Google Summer of Code and its many benefits. Historically, Google Summer of Code hasn’t had very many entries from Pakistan, possibly because many students are not familiar with Google Summer of Code here. The main purpose of this session was to let students know more about the program and encouraging students to apply. GDG Lahore plans to brings a similar session Google Summer of Code in many other universities in Lahore in the coming months. By Haris Nadeem , GDG Lahore Manager

The In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) System is the most complex electronic system in the car.  It collects data from all of the car’s sensors and integrates functions as diverse as navigation, climate control, media playback, cellphone connectivity and more. Yet automakers have focused on IVI as their first target for open source software collaboration. Both the Automotive Grade Linux working group and GENIVI alliance are pioneering collaborative efforts to develop a Linux-based open source platform for IVI software development. Wouldn’t it be easier to overhaul the software behind a single task such as engine control or the door locks, before tackling the IVI behemoth? Well, yes, say representatives from both initiatives. But the potential cost savings and efficiency gains with an IVI overhaul are big incentives for automakers. The number of lines of software code in the IVI system has exploded in recent years. As a result, “the cost (of manufacturing) has been shifting to the software, away from hardware,” said Roger Lanctot, associate director of the global automotive practice at the Strategy Analytics consulting firm. A simultaneous increase in consumer demand to accommodate mobile devices has put “tremendous pressure” on automakers to keep up with the mobile market’s faster product cycle, he said. And so some of the world’s largest automakers, including General Motors, Jaguar Land-Rover, BMW Nissan and Toyota, are turning to open source software, and more specifically to the Linux operating system, in order to meet these challenges. “There is much effort going towards Linux development at the moment and it’s advancing rapidly,” said Matt Jones, a Senior Technical Specialist in Infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover and Vice President of GENIVI. “Over the next 5 years (automakers) will be increasing the functionality of the Linux IVI offerings, and some are even rolling it out across all of their car lines.” Here are five reasons open source software development makes sense for the IVI system. 1. Rapid evolution At present, each component of the IVI system is based on a different operating system with its own proprietary software on top. This means anytime the system is updated, developers must start from scratch. An IVI system based on Linux allows software developers to leverage the work that has already been done with the operating system in other areas, such as incorporating multimedia functionality from Linux video and media players, said Rudolf Streif, Director of Embedded Solutions with the Linux Foundation and AGL. “Anytime anyone builds something with Linux right now they’re building on years of experience in the server, desktop and mobile markets; building on what came before. That’s the difference,” Jones said. “They’re adding functionality all the time, not using effort to recreate existing services.” 2. Cost savings and new revenue opportunities In addition to the potential cost savings from eliminating redundant code development, automakers have new revenue opportunities from a faster development cycle. “After a year or two a car’s infotainment system is outdated. Customers would love to update it to keep up with technology, but currently that’s not really feasible,” Streif said. At a faster development pace, instead of waiting out the typical 4- to 5-year product cycle, customers could expect technology updates closer to the mobile product cycle of roughly 6 months, Lanctot said. And, crucially, they would pay more for the convenience. 3. IVI is new technology Engines have been around for more than 100 years and the control functions have been finely tuned to the point that they work very well already, Streif said. Mobile phones and Internet connectivity, however, are relatively new and the industry has much less certainty about how they should operate – making them a good target for innovation. Open source components will throw the gates wide open for application developers to contribute their own solutions, speedi

The beat goes on in the Apple v. Motorola appeal of Judge Richard Posner's ruling dismissing both parties' claims with prejudice, saying neither was entitled to damages or an injunction. Both are appealing, but for different reasons. Motorola has now filed its redacted reply brief [PDF] in response to Apple's response and reply brief [PDF]. And as soon as Judge James Robart issued his Microsoft-friendly ruling in Microsoft v. Motorola in the Seattle litigation, Apple sent a letter to this appeals court, bringing it to the court's attention, because it supports Apple's position and calls Motorola's patents a trivial contribution to the standard. Motorola defends the value of its patents and then tells the Federal Circuit that RAND patent holders have to be able to seek injunctions against "intransigent" licensees like Apple. Otherwise, they'll take advantage, delaying by litigation any reckoning for years while benefiting from the technology without paying for it. What exactly should happen to a company that refuses to pay and won't accept an offered rate or a court-set rate? The RAND patent holder *still* can't do a thing? No injunction? Nothing? Apple began its infringement, Motorola points out, in 2007. It's now 2013, and it still hasn't paid a dime. "Motorola should have the opportunity to seek an injunction to stop Apple's six years of ill-gotten gains from stretching into a decade or more," Motorola says.

Greg Putrich With Firefox 22 now in beta Mozilla has decided not to enable its new third-party cookie-blocking feature by default. The feature, aimed at preventing cross-site tracking of browser users with cookies not originating from the sites users visit, will still be available in the next Firefox release (due  in June) but will be turned off by default. Cookies are small sets of data stored locally by the web browser, originally intended to help keep track of where a user was (his or her “state”) within a web application. They’re associated with a particular domain name and carry a set of values such as an application name, a unique identifying number or string for the user or the web session, and an expiration date. While most cookies are increasingly short-lived some can be essentially “immortal” (or last at least until a user purges them) with expiration dates far off in the future. Web sites can also query cookie data from a visiting web browser to gather analytical information about the user as well—and to target specific ads based on identity or web visit history data revealed by them. Precision strike In a blog post Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich explained the reasons for the delay in turning on the feature (a patch submitted by Stanford computer science graduate student Jonathan Meyer) by default. He said there were still issues to be resolved in how the feature avoided both “false positives," such as blocking cookies from the companies behind sites visited by the user because they were associated with a different domain name. There’s also still an issue with “false negatives”—unwanted cookies that users pick up from sites they’ve visited that then follow them to other sites. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Adam and Andrew talk about linux containers, Docker, and dotCloud with Solomon Hykes – Founder & CEO of DotCloud and the creator of Docker. Listen to this episode on 5by5! We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST. The post #89: Doing incredible things with linux containers and Docker with Solomon Hykes appeared first on The Changelog.