6 Myths About Open Source

By Emma McGrattan, SVP of Engineering, Ingres

In every poker game, there comes a moment of truth – when one opponent calls another’s bluff. Everyone lays down their hand and a winner is declared based on the cards they hold. Well, we think it is time now to call the bluff on closed-source vendors, which have long argued that open source is a niche IT option, unable to support mission-critical applications, and that any update to the code is unregulated. It is time to tell the truth about today’s open source software.

1. Open source is a niche IT sector
2. Open source cannot support mission-critical applications
3. Open source companies do not own their intellectual property
4. Open source technology does not offer professional level support
5. Open source is unregulated and anyone can contribute code
6. Open Source software is not secure

Summary
The open-source market has evolved and grown in leaps and bounds. Open-source is a viable option for large enterprises and small businesses alike, and this realization poses a real threat to the bottom line of closed-source providers. What the closed-source players lack is the recognition that the open source movement is a result of years of collaboration with the customer, involving them in every step of development, and delivering premier class support and services – a completely different business model to what they are accustomed to. So today, the open source providers like Ingres, who have over 30 years relational database heritage, are set to be the disruptive technology of the future.

more detail could be downloaded here

Opentaps OSS ERP + CRM

opentaps is a complete open source solution for your enterprise. Its sophisticated features and modern architecture will help bring together your entire organization, automate business processes, and improve efficiency. Download opentaps today and see what it can do for you.opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM brings you the advanced features and power of Tier 1 ERP and CRM software with the flexibility and low cost of ownership that only open source can deliver. You can use opentaps as an alternative to expensive and inflexible commercial ERP solutions, as a replacement for in-house solutions that are difficult to maintain or extend, or as a starting point to build your unique business model and processes.

opentaps is also ideal for hosted on-demand ERP and CRM offerings. It is easy to customize, can be delivered over the web, and it can be deployed on a low-cost open source stack, using MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, or FreeBSD, or commercial databases and operating systems such as Windows, Oracle, or SQL Server. As your business grows, it can be scaled without limits through clustering.

Key features of opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM include:

• A complete suite that deliver a 360-degree view of your business, from customers to orders to inventory to accounting. opentaps is one application running on one unified data model with over 700 tables, so you’ll never have to do messy integration again.
• Compatible all major open source and commercial relational databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• Runs on Linux, Unix, and Windows operating platforms.
• Service-Oriented Architecture for easy interoperability with external or legacy applications.
• Modular and tiered architecture allows for easy modifications or additions. An add-on application could be unzipped into a directory and start running.
• Remote and local synchronization for scalability and high availability.
• Workflow for adapting to unique business processes.

Carnap Programming Language (for the next generation of many-core devices)

Carnap is a general purpose programming language for the next generation of many-core devices, many many-core systems and their applications. It introduces a process oriented programming model that allows programmers to seperate the concerns of data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them.

“The primitive process of a Carnap program is called an action. An action determines a local or shared state. Actions are assembled by construction to form the component processes of a program. Programs consist of concurrent processes that construct and interact via logically shared data structures and resources called contexts.

In this way the application programmer is able to separate concerns, reasoning separately about the two primary aspects of Carnap programs: data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them.

The primary goal of Carnap is to ease the general purpose programming of applications that can utilize the concurrency of future many-core and many many-core systems.”

This project is a part of IASE’s Process Interaction Models Research .

Carnap is Open Source and freely available to the research community.

Free and Open Source Software Portal

An gateway to resources related to Free Software and Open Source Technology movement from UNESCO, here is the link

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Bagaimana developer menguji Software Opensource

Andy Zaidman et.al, dalam papernya mengemukakan bagaimana developer menguji software-software open-source. Sistem rekayasa perangkat lunak (SW-Engineering) merupakan sebuah aktivitas multidisplin, dimana sejumlah “artifacts” dikreasi dan dimaintain, secara sinkron. Dalam paper mereka diselidiki apakah kode produksi dan test-test yang terkait berevolusi juga, melalui eksplorasi sistem versi proyek, code coverage reports dan size-metrics. Dari hasil pengujian tiga open source sebagai case studies diperoleh hasil bahwa a) aktivitas-aktivitas testing biasanya dimulai berikutnya selama waktu hidup (lifetime) dan lebih terfasekan, dan b) tidak terobservasi adanya peningkatan aktivitas testing sebelum ada releases. Bahkan, teramati bahwa c) terdapat perbedaan yang besar pada tingkat-tingkat “test coverage” ketimbang proporsi kode test yang ada.

Lebih detail silahkan download paper (pdf)

Talend: Open source data integration

Talend is the first provider of open source data integration software. Our open, innovative and powerful data integration solutions come pre-packaged, so you can install them easily and quickly put them to work for your business.

Talend’s technology and business vision shatters the traditional proprietary model for data integration solutions. by delivering our solutions on an open source platform, we make data integration available to all types of organizations – regardless of their size, level of expertise or budgetary constraints. Now organizations of all sizes can find the right data integration solution for their needs.

alend Open Studio provides advanced capabilities that dramatically improve the productivity of data integration job design; and proven scalability to ensure optimal execution.

Our Talend’s flagship product, Talend Open Studio, is the most open, innovative and powerful data integration solution on the market today.

Provided as a packaged, out-of-the-box, ready-to-install platform, Talend Open Studio can meet your data integration requirements — regardless of your organization’s size or its level of data integration expertise.

Talend Open Studio consistently delivers robust capabilities that allow you to run complex integration processes even in the most demanding environments.

Talend Open Studio key benefits include:

Business Modeling, Graphical Development, Metadata-drivn Design, Real-time Debugging, Robust Execution.

Download software please go http://www.talend.com/index.php

PASSaGE: Software for Searching Biological Image

Researchers at the Arizona State University (ASU) are working on software tools to analyze databases of biological images, that’s called PASSaGE (Pattern Analysis, Spatial Statistics and Geographic Exegesis). One of these projects is using machine learning technology to compare the expression patterns captured in the images. So far, the software was used to explore a database of embryonic fruit flies images to see if the genes share the same spatial patterns. This would indicate that these genes also share similar functions. The goal of the developers is to build a tool able to search biological image databases as fast as Internet search engines are doing.

If you want more information about this project, you can read a paper presented last year at the Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (CSB), “Classification of Drosophila embryonic developmental stage range based on gene expression pattern images” (PDF format, 6 pages, 2.52 MB).

Overview of PASSaGE

Spatial analysis is a fundamental part of scientific inquiry, including ecological, evolutionary and environmental science, epidemiology, geology, geography, and mathematics. Recent technological advances in genome sequencing, global positioning systems, and remote sensing have led to a rapid expansion of the number and size of spatially explicit datasets available for analysis. These new data have advanced the scope of spatial analysis to an even braoder variety of human endeavors, but have also rapidly outpaced the capabilities of traditional spatial analytic software and methods.

The need to overcome data limitations inherent in much of the specialized spatial analysis programs commonly available led to the development of PASSaGE: Pattern Analysis, Spatial Statistics, and Geographic Exegesis, a free, easy-to-use program for general spatial analysis. With a fairly simple point-and-click, mouse- and menu-driven interface, but flexible and powerful analysis customization, PASSaGE has been a very popular system for analyzing data in spatial context in both the laboratory and the classroom. The first version of PASSaGE has been downloaded by thousands of users from over 57 countries and 145 U.S. universities.

The Software PASSaGe is free (Windows, Linux, and Macintosh) and could be download here

As an example, you can see on the left a collage of fruit fly gene expression images. “The proper development of each football-shaped fly embryo depends on the coordinated expression of thousands of genes. By studying the expression pattern of single genes, typically displayed in wide bands or narrow striped patterns, scientists can gain insight into the control and regulation of large genetic networks. Similar gene networks are found throughout biology, and break downs in these processes may result in birth defects, heart disease, cancer and aging. (Credit for image and caption: Biodesign News at ASU)

StreamIt: Bahasa Pemrograman baru yang mudah untuk mesin multicore

Dengan perkembangan teknologi mikroprosessor, kita jumpai sekarang terdapat PC, Laptop maupun Gagdet memiliki prosessor lebih dari 1 atau istilahnya multicore, ada yang dual-core atau quad-core. Pada saat ini mesin dengan multicore tersebut lebih banyak digunakan untuk aplikasi-aplikasi yang memang memerlukan banyak proses komputasi, seperti video processing dan gaming. Namun, pada dasarnya mesin multicore ini merupakan superkomputer skals-kecil. Agar kita dapat memanfaatkan keuntungan dari kekuatan komputasinya, software atau program harus dikoding bagi mesin tersebut harus berbasis algoritma paralel (pemrograman paralel). Dan para pakar yakin, apabila pemrograman paralel tidak dapat dibuat lebih mudah, progress komputasi akan menjadi tersendat-sendat dan bahkan terhenti.

Peneliti dari MIT memperhatikan hal ini. Dan mereka telah berhasil mendesain sebuah bahasa pemograman dan compiler yang memberikan kemudahan dalam pemrograman paralel, khususnya bagi mesin-mesin mutlicore. Bahasa Pemrograman dan Compiler disebut StreamIt , dikembangkan oleh Saman Amarasinghe, professor teknik elektro dan ilmu komputer MIT.

StreamIt saat ini berjalan pada mesin multicore khusus yang dikembangkan di MIT. Pada musim panas tahun ini diharapkan dapat berjalan pada chip-komersial dari IBM, Sony, dan Toshiba.

Pada mesin single core, kode software (tasks)akan berjalan sekuensial; pada mesin multicore task-task akan dipecah diantara core-core. Jika task yang berbeda perlu mengakses ‘chunk’ memori yang sama, task tersebut harus bekerja bersama-sama untuk mensinkronisasi akses-akses.

Debugging sekuesial program adalah mudah. Pada sistem paralel proses debug cukup kompleks dan sulit, karena sifat-nya menjadi probabilistik. Setiap kali program berjalan, multicore mengeksekusi tugasnya secara independent, memungkinkan terjadinya jutaan orde eksekusi yang mungkin bagi program.

Data flow, menurut Amaransinghe, merupakan solusinya. Pada data flow, data di stream secara sekuensial melalui sebuah ’sort’ pipeline fungsi-fungsi. Ketika data mengalir compiler akan melihat fungsi mana yang independen. Dengan demikian, compiler dapat memisahkan task-task pada core yang berbeda, tanpa khawatir bahwa task-task akan berinterferensi satu sama lain atau menempati ruang memori yang sama.

Programmer hanya perlu menulis program yang beroperasi secara sekuensial. Compiler yang akan melihat seluruh interaksi-interaksi yang perlu dilakukan, berdasarkan kode yang ditulis programmer, dan mengalokasikan instruksi-instruksi yang tepat.

Lihat lebih jauh tentang StreamIt
StreamIt is a programming language and a compilation infrastructure, specifically engineered for modern streaming systems. It is designed to facilitate the programming of large streaming applications, as well as their efficient and effective mapping to a wide variety of target architectures, including commercial-off-the-shelf uniprocessors, multicore architectures, and clusters of workstations.

Komentar:

It is a sound idea based on well-known concepts, says Ras Bodik, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you want programmers who are not experts in parallelism to be productive, if you want them to effectively write programs, you want to give them a language like StreamIt,” he says. However, Bodik suspects that software engineers will need to rely on a hierarchy of tools that operate at different levels. For instance, transactional memory, which allows numerous tasks to share the same memory at the same time, could operate behind the scenes, helping maximize StreamIt’s
potential. (See “The Trouble with Multi-Core Computers.”)

Prefuse Visualization Toolkit

A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization
applications.

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Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The visualization gallery and demonstration video provide numerous examples of the types of applications that can be built with the prefuse toolkit.To learn more about prefuse, take a look at the user’s manual or the frequently asked questions. For users of the alpha version of the toolkit, there is also a porting guide for migrating to the beta version. Prefuse is an extensible software framework for helping software developers create interactive information visualization applications using the Java programming language. It can be used to buildstandalone applications, visual components embedded in larger applications, and web applets. Prefuse intends to greatly simplify the processes of representing and efficiently handing data,mapping data to visual representations (e.g., through spatialposition, size, shape, color, etc), and interacting with thedata. Some of the features of prefuse include:

• Table, Graph, and Tree data structures supporting arbitrarydata attributes, data indexing, and selection queries, all with an efficient memory footprint.
• Components for layout, color, size, and shape encodings, distortion techniques, animation, and more.
• A library of interaction controls for common interactive, direct-manipulation operations.
• Animation support through a general activity scheduling mechanism.
• View transformations supporting panning and zooming, including both geometric and semantic zooming.
• Dynamic queries for interactive filtering of data.
• Integrated text search using a number of available search engines.
• A physical force simulation engine for dynamic layout and animation.
• Flexibility for multiple views, including “overview+detail”and “small multiples” displays.
• A built in, SQL-like expression language for writing queries to prefuse data structures and creating derived data fields.
• Support for issuing queries to SQL databases and mapping query results into prefuse data structures.
• Simple, developer-friendly APIs for creating custom processing, interaction, and rendering components.

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Squeak Virtual Machine

Squeak is a modern, open source full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment. Squeak is highly-portable – even its virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development

The list of features in Squeak is astonishing. What would, in other environments, be third party extensions downloadable elsewhere comes fully integrated in the standard Squeak release. Click on the links below to take a short tour of a small part of SqueakVille…

• Development
• Education
• Fun and Games
• Internet
• MultiMedia
• Research
• The Squeak VM

Smalltalk, the language, is:

• Dynamically Typed, Strongly Typed,Garbage Collected, Interpreted, Purely Object-Oriented,Open Source, Reflective, Extensible, Cross-platform, Cross-OS, Cross-hardware

Some features of Squeak

Squeak’s virtual machine is developed using Squeak itself. It is possible to execute and debug Squeak inside Squeak.

Squeak can be used for Web Application Development.

Squeak has superb multi-media potential!

Squeak is internationalised. It supports Unicode and Localization for multi-lingual applications.

Squeak is a persistent environment – when you save your image, every thing right down to the position of windows and text is saved.

Squeak itself is an IDE. You can code, run and debug in the same environment.

Squeak uses incremental compiling – once you’ve saved your code, it’s ready to run!