Tag: open source

NGINX announces new partner network

Posted on October 19, 2018 by - News

NGINX has announced a new partner programme that expands on its offerings and is inspired by a more open saucy vision.

NGINX VP Sales Mary Jane (MJ) Shutte said:  “Our new NGINX Partner Network offers membership to anyone who wants to be part of the ecosystem, whether or not their business involves selling NGINX technologies. It offers members the ability to engage how they need to when they need to, and doesn’t limit them by tiers and categories.”

She said that public cloud and SaaS adoption have changed the way that solution providers engage with customers, creating space for new types of businesses and go-to-market strategies in the partner landscape. Partners are responding with updated and diversified business models, including shifting business investments towards professional and managed services, developing their custom systems or IP, and targeting new buyers outside of the IT organisation, she said.

Shutte said that where traditionally vendors have offered siloed programs to partners based on industry category or business model, the NGINX programme identifies ways partners look to engage with the company, and then allows members to mix and match as best suits their business. In this way, the programme can accommodate partners interested in:

  • Creating integrations and certifying interoperability with their platforms
  • Developing modules that extend NGINX products with advanced capabilities
  • Offering NGINX products as part of a portfolio of technology solutions and services
  • Building custom solutions with NGINX products embedded
  • Growing a technology consulting practice as a recognised NGINX associate

The NGINX Partner Network framework encapsulates its existing programs, bringing them additional resources and providing a commitment to their ongoing development and support. The new programme also makes room for resellers, solution providers, MSPs, consultants, and others who want to market and sell NGINX technologies.

“As NGINX continues its global expansion, we are opening up new routes to market and relying increasingly on our partner community to help us provide a world-class experience to our customers in key markets”, said Shutte.

“Partners that sell and recommend NGINX technologies are going to be an important component of our go-to-market strategy moving forward, and we’re looking to grow the size of that partner community in 2019 aggressively.”

 

Ubuntu is the cloud king

Posted on August 31, 2015 by - News

cloud 2Ubuntu is more than twice as popular on the Amazon cloud as all other operating systems combined, according to a new analysis.

According to the Cloud Market which looked at operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In second place is Amazon’s own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Windows is third with 17,600 instances.

By dominating AWS, Ubuntu is the most popular cloud Linux.

Ubuntu has been available on HP Cloud, and Microsoft Azure since 2013. It’s also now available on Google Cloud Platform, Fujitsu, and Joyent.

Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is also putting considerable efforts behind OpenStack for the private and hybrid cloud. Indeed, Canonical has also worked with Microsoft to bring Windows Server to OpenStack and with Oracle to bring Oracle Linux to the Ubuntu take on OpenStack.

Apparently, 53 percent of all production OpenStack clouds are running Ubuntu. CentOS is far in the back with 29 percent.

Red Hat does better than expected

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

red-hatRed Hat has surprised the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street by being able to stick to its profit forcast, despite the US dollar shooting through the roof.

Red Hat predicted it would make a profit for the first quarter that matched analysts’ estimates despite warning on a strong dollar hurting its revenue.

Red Hat shares were up five percent in after-market trading after the company’s profit beat the average analyst estimate for the eighth straight quarter.

The company also said a $500 million share buyback program will replace an existing $300 million programme.

Red Hat gets nearly half its revenue from international operations and expected to suffer from the US dollar’s strong gains. HP, Microsoft and IBM had estimated a significant impact from the dollar’s gains.

The company, whose customers include Adobe and Verizon, forecast an adjusted profit of $469 million-$474 million for the first quarter.

Red Hat also forecast a revenue of $1.99-$2.02 billion for the full year. Analysts were expecting  revenues of $2.02 billion.

The company’s billings revenue was $688 million in the fourth quarter. Analysts had expected $646.2 million.

 

Open saucers chase away the girls with DICSS gags

Posted on March 23, 2015 by - News

1024px-Musée_Picardie_Archéo_03Male open sourcers, with the sense of humour of 12 year olds, have managed to chase women from the work place by infecting software with jokes about their willies.

While it is mostly “brogrammers” threatening to rape women programmers which have been hitting he headlines apparently the medieval gags about a project called DICSS are getting out of hand.

For those who came in late there is a software hosting site GitHub called “DICSS”.
Github, if you remember, was under fire about a year over accusations of how a female employee was treated.

Offended people point out that this is exactly the sort of thing that makes tech unwelcoming to women, and not just because of the original project, but because of some of the comments that might take the joke too far.

Ironically the DICSS site was created by a bloke called Randy Hunt, who apparently managed to get around gags about his own name by running lots of “brohumour” projects.

Hunt said that the project started as a joke amongst coworkers, after a particularly impassioned argument between religious zealots for LESS, Sass, and Stylus, and why it’s suicide to pick an alternative when “my favourite” is clearly the best.

DICSS was “directly injected CSS” and it became an office joke around the office, that eventually manifested itself online and then in the comments of open sauce software.
It is the sort of thing that creates twitter wars and apparently there are a lot of DICSSHEADS out there.

Of course there is no such thing “directly injected CSS” Hunt was just playing around with the acronym.

As far as one liners go that sound have been the end of it but it seems Hunt could not resist Hunt thrusting his DICSS further.

He told Business Insider after he hacked off people with his Brototype project he thought he would do another wind up so he got his DICSS out publically.

Hunt claims that people want to be offended so when they see his DICSS they get out raged.
“It’s reverse privilege and that people should spend less time complaining about the community and more time encouraging people to push the boundaries of technology a bit and learn to see things in different ways.”

Apparently you can see things differently by looking at Randy’s DICSS.

“The point of all of my joke repo’s is that they’re actually useful code. They just happen to have funny names,” he said.

He denies he is a brogrammer and says he is just a fun guy – which his odd really because if you say that really fast it sounds like he is a fungi — get it?

Randy said that the only people that moaned were those who spend more time policing political correctness than they do making useful software.

True but really it cant be much fun to work with people who constantly make gags about their DICCS.

Open Source hardware needs a supply chain

Posted on March 12, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1The Open Compute Project, which wants to open up hardware the same way Linux opened up software, needs a supply chain badly.

OCP President and Chairman Frank Frankovsky said it formed OCP four years ago to spread the gospel of open hardware and eventually build a market for it.

It now has an impressive array of vendors and customers, including HP, Cisco, Juniper, Broadcom, and Samsung.

While companies looking to adopt this kind of gear include some blue-chip names Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Capital One are members, the weakness in the set up is the supply chain.

“You can’t download servers or boxes in the same way you can open source software,” Frankovsky said.

OCP is looking to business realities when members propose new contributions to the project. It wants the name of a lead customer that wants to buy the technology and the lead supplier that’s willing to build it, as well as whether it’s available from multiple channels so users will have a choice of where to buy it, he said.

VMWare sued for GPL violations

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

VMWare has beenrms-meets-open-sauce-detail (1) sued in Hamburg for failing to comply with Open Source rules.

The Software Freedom Conservancy said that Christoph Hellwig’s lawsuit against VMware has started in the district court of Hamburg.

In a statement the Conservancy said that it was a regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy’s ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2.

For those who came in late, GPLv2 is the licence of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware’s ESXi products.

Hellwig is a key Linux kernel developer and one of the earliest members of Conservancy’s GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers. He has been muttering about VMware’s misuse of GPL-licensed code since 2007.

In 2011, Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide nor offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware’s ESXi products (as required by BusyBox’s licence, GPLv2).

Hellwig joined Conservancy’s GPL Compliance for Linux Developers in late 2012 and helped provide an analysis of the non-compliant releases of ESXi that VMware provided.

The conservancy said that it became apparent that VMware’s current ESXi products infringed many of Hellwig’s own copyrights, due to VMware’s failure to comply with Linux’s licence, GPLv2.

But VMware’s legal counsel finally informed Conservancy in 2014 that VMware had no intention of ceasing their distribution of proprietary-licensed works derived from Hellwig’s and other kernel developers’ copyrights, despite the terms of GPLv2.

The Conservancy and Hellwig claim that VMware has combined copyrighted Linux code, licensed under GPLv2, with their own proprietary code called “vmkernel” and distributed the entire combined work without providing nor offering complete, corresponding source code for that combined work under terms of the GPLv2.

Hellwig is an extensive copyright holder in the portions of Linux that VMware misappropriated and used together in a single, new work without permission.

HP intros open network switches

Posted on February 19, 2015 by - News

HPHewlett Packard said it has launched a line of open network switches for the data centre that gives service providers and Web scale organisations more flexibility for coping with cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.

The network switches include options such as choice of hardware and software and branded switches giving access to worldwide local support and services through HP Technology Services.

HP said the products are amongst the first in the category of branded white box switches.

The network switches will be sold to Web scale data centre customers through its partners Acton and Cumulus.

HP’s deal with Cumulus means it will provide Linux OS to cloud based data centres using tools and management from open source and commercial Linux communities.

The first in HP’s line with be two open network switches supporting 10G/40G spine and 10G leaf data centre deployments. The switches come with Cumulus Linux OS.

In the second half of this year, HP will expand the line, hardware and OS software options.

Microsoft buys Revolution

Posted on January 26, 2015 by - News

Hungarian Revolution-ASoftware king of the world Microsoft announced a deal to buy Revolution Analytics, the top commercial provider of software and services for the open-source R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.

Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft corporate vice president for machine learning,  said the acquisition was to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Revolution Analytics is based in California with offices in London and Singapore.

David Smith, Revolution Analytics’ chief community officer, said that he was excited the work done with Revolution R will come to a wider audience through Microsoft.

“Our combined teams will be able to help more users use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platform solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. And just as importantly, the big-company resources of Microsoft will allow us to invest even more in the R Project and the Revolution R products.”

However Revolution is Open Source and uses the R programming language, which is a  data analysis tool widely used by both academics and corporate data scientists.  Revolution Analytics was best known for offering developer tools for use with the R language, and though Microsoft already works with R it is a huge change in direction to own something like Revolution.

Revolution was founded in 2007 by Yale University computer scientists to create a suite of tools for working with R. The company develops both a free, open source community version of its Revolution R suite of developer tools, as well as paid commercial versions of the software.

Revolution Analytics created tools that extended the open source version of the R language to help it get under the bonnet of big data.

Microsoft will continue to support Revolution’s existing products and customers.

 

Linus Torvalds rejects calls to be nice

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

torvaldsThe creator of Linux,  Linus Torvalds, has been explaining his comments to a New Zealand conference about having to be nice.

Torvalds shocked the conference when he fielded  a question from Nebula One developer Matthew Garrett that accused Torvalds of having an abrasive tone in the Linux kernel mailing list. “Some people think I’m nice and are shocked when they find out different,” Torvalds said in response. “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”

Apparently this was deeply shocking as apparently open sourcers secretly believed that Torvalds really loved them and they were heart broken.

Torvalds sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica  responding to statements he made in Auckland, New Zealand earlier that day about diversity and “niceness” in the open source sector.

“What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail.

“I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”

Torvalds then seems to have made matters worse by daring to point out that Open Source is not a religion and you don’t need to have faith.

“‘Open source’ as a term and as a movement hasn’t been about ‘you have to be a believer.. It’s not a religion. It’s not an ‘us vs them’ thing. We’ve been able to work with all those ‘evil commercial interests’ and companies who also do proprietary software. And I think that was one of the things that the Linux community (and others—don’t get me wrong, it’s not unique to us) did and does well,” he said.

He sent a second e-mail to Ars about the topic of “niceness”.

“I don’t know where you happen to be based, but this ‘you have to be nice’ seems to be very popular in the US,” Torvalds continued, calling the concept an “ideology.”

Torvalds lambasted the “brainstorming” model of having a criticism-free bubble to bounce ideas around.

“Maybe it works for some people, but I happen to simply not believe in it… I’d rather be really confrontational, and bad ideas should be [taken] down aggressively. Even good ideas need to be vigorously defended.”

He admitted that maybe it was just because he liked arguing and was not a huge believer in politeness and sensitivity being preferable over bluntly letting people know your feelings.

“I understand that other people are driven away by cursing and crass language when it all gets a bit too carried away.” But he thinks that the open source movement might simply need more “people who are good at mediating rather than just asking developers to calm their own tone or attitude.

Github too open saucy for porn companies

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1Open Sauce depository Github is being hit in a crossfire between porn companies and torrent sites.

Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by the porn companies have taken down dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs.

GitHub support pages, entire code repositories, and user profile pages have all been purged from Google and Tomasz Janczuk, a former Microsoft employee, had part of his GitHub repository ​removed from Google’s search results by a company representing Adam & Eve, a porn production company.

Janczuk said that removing GitHub pages from Google’s search results could harm the open source software community by reducing its visibility online.

Apparently Adam&Eve thought that Janczuk’s URL, “https://github.com/tja​nczuk/edge,” was apparently too close to The E​dge, a 2001 flick made by the company.

Of course it is not just the porn companies doing this. Other GitHub pages have been taken down by the music companies for similar reasons.

All of it is because the content groups are using the dumbest method to find P2P content – that of URLs rather than actually checking if the site infringes their copyright.

GitHub does have a DMCA ​policy​ requires that users be notified of complaints levied against them and given time to correct the issue. Google handles its 345 million yearly takedowns nearly automatically .

Nicky Case, developer of Nothing​ to Hide, an open source indie game was target​ted by Total Wipes in September for having the word “hide” in its GitHub​ URL, in an email. In the end however his software was not taken down from Google’s search results.

But he said that if his GitHub repository was less famous, maybe it wouldn’t have gone as well.

 

Microsoft Xbox SDK leaked by open sourcers

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

rms-meets-open-sauce-detail (1)Software giant Microsoft has had the embarrassment of having its Xbox One SDK leaked to the great unwashed by an open sauce group calling itself H4LT.

H4LT insists that it is not a hacker group, but is distributing the SDK to improve the software.

“Progress is achieved faster than alone. Something kept between us will not achieve anything. Share it with the community equals creativity and research. Shared is how it should be. The SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One,” the group announced to Hot Hardware .

The SDK for any given product is available behind some degree of registration and does not necessarily cost users. So getting your paws on a copy was not a matter of sneaking it out of a heavily guarded back vaults using minis.

The SDK includes Microsoft’s Pix which shows that the Xbox One’s has an optional seventh core for game programming. There are also multiple Xbox Kinect tools, including the Kinect Studio and the Kinect Visual Gesture Builder.

Kinect also has an app for testing and creating applications that listen for speech.

The group has also claimed that once the SDK is out, people who have knowledge or has in the past reversed files related to the Windows 8 operating system should definitely have a go at reversing some files in there.

The Xbox One is practically a stripped Windows 8 device and has introduced a new package format that hasn’t had much attention. This format is responsible for updating the console and storing applications Games are under the category of ‘Applications’ on the Xbox One and is a modification of Virtual Hard Disks.

Apple App store safety is a myth

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

tumblr_mc8zb8BqH31rttlrno1_400If you believe the Tame Apple Press you would think that the Microsoft and Google App stores were a terrible place full of Apps poisoned with malware, while the Apple App store is so rigorously checked, that all is completely safe.

But a study by InfoWorld has poured cold water on that particular myth claiming that the store has just as much malware inside.

Simon Phipps, who is an Open Saucy blogger, wrote that developers who are competing with Apple find that getting their apps into the store nearly impossible and those writing Apps for Apple find that the rules are constantly changing.

“But if you’re a scammer looking to make a fast buck, it appears that Apple process can be defeated and the scale of the problem became apparent in the the Apache OpenOffice community,” Phipps said.

For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions from people seeking support for an iPad app. Apache OpenOffice doesn’t even have an iOS version, so people wondered how there could be questions about supporting it.

It turned out that there was a $2.99 app in Apple’s iTunes Store and the developer who posted this app has used all sorts of tricks to populate the entry. He dubbed it Quickoffice Pro, which was the name of a genuine app bought by Google in 2012 and finally discontinued in 2014. Buyers would likely have an instinctive trust for the name, especially because the app uses the icon from the real Quickoffice product.

It simply displays a gray screen with the word Tap. When you tap the screen, the app exits. The developer has pointed angry customers at an innocent open source project whose ethos is to treat all user queries seriously and that doesn’t have the resources to mount a response for lack of volunteers.

It was posted under Lee Elman’s personal Apple developer account without permission or his  knowledge.

But how did this happen if Apple claims to meticulously screen all submissions to the store? InfoWorld found other examples. Again real accounts are being used for fake products.
Apple is not saying anything about the allegations.

 

Debian says there is no place like Gnome

Posted on September 24, 2014 by - News

gnome-sweet-gnome.0Open Sauce operating system Debian, which defaulted to the Xfce desktop in the past after switching from GNOME, has decided to go back.

Debian developer Joey Hess said that the decision to go back to the GNOME camp was based upon the accessibility, systemd integration, and other factors mentioned on the Wiki for the Debian desktop requalification for Jessie.

This is not to say that GNOME is all great and everything is a bunch of fluffy bunnies for Debian and the interface, which has been getting a bit of a bad press lately.

Hess said that Debian could still go back if things do not improve. Some desired data is not yet available, but at this point he was around 80 per cent sure that GNOME is coming out ahead in the process.

“This is particularly based on accessibility and to some extent systemd integration… The only single factor that I think could outweigh the above is media size, if there was a strong desire by Debian to see a single CD with a standalone usable desktop,” he said.

The Debian live team doesn’t care about fitting on a traditional CD and Hess does not care enough about any more to make it a hard blocker on the default desktop.

The GNOME community is still larger and GNOME 3 has improved a lot.

Debian 8.0 Jessie will likely be released next year. GNOME 3.14 stable is coming this week and should be ready for the next major Debian update.

 

Turin places a shroud on Microsoft

Posted on September 15, 2014 by - News

turinThe Italian city of Turin, famous for its medieval Jesus shroud hoaxing, is dumping Microsoft and heading toward something more Open Saucy.

Turin is currently running Windows XP which goes to show that not only is its famous shroud mediaeval.

Apparently Turin thinks that it can save €6 million over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices.

The plan is to install it on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine. This figure is made up by the cost of Windows and Office licences.

Another good reason why Turin did not want to upgrade to Windows 8 is that its computers were so old their designs were found in Leonardo Da Vinci’s scrapbooks and it was not believed that the new Windows would run very well on them.

The switch to Ubuntu was officially approved in early August and is expected to take around a year and a half to complete.

The move has been talked about for two years. The project was temporarily put aside due to economic concerns — it probably would have been too costly switching from XP while Turin still had valid and paid licences running. Now that those Windows licences are expiring, however, the time is ripe to experiment with new products.

Turin is one of the biggest municipalities in Italy to switch to Open Source and it could be an example for other cities to follow.

Munich mulls Microsoft agreement

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

munich-agreemnetThe poster child for open sauce goodness, the German city of Munich, might be thinking of abandoning the plan and going for Microsoft.

According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche, deputy mayor Josef Schmid says the city is considering the move because users miss the functionality that Voleware had.

For example, users are cross they do not have an integrated contact, calendar and email application. Süddeutsche claimed that Munich has set up an external email server to allow the City’s mobile devices to send and receive messages.

These are not little complaints either, in fact they are so bad that the city council will create an expert panel to assess the performance of its chosen software.

Schmid is quoted as saying that if the panel recommends a return to Microsoft, he will not say no.  Of course they could always pay someone to write a more integrated mail programme for them.

Munich decided to go with Linux back in 2004 and spend about 10 years installing it, however it is at the desktop level were Linux still has to make much impact, unless you count Android.

It is also bad news for the British government which also recently has issued an order moving towards desktop Linux.