Free Software Linux

One of the hot areas in 2008 was cloud computing, and 2009 looks likely to be a year that is equally occupied with the subject. But cloud computing represents something of a conundrum for the open source world. On Open Enterprise blog.

There's no question that the open source community is a passionate one - and one with significant influence on technology directions and options. We're way past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe for a business. Open source is now a mainstream part of the technology fabric.

Martyn, from Severn Delta Ltd, emailed me saying he had an Open Source story to tell. I’ve had this in my inbox for a while now, but have finally got round to publishing it. Alan, I own 50% of a manufacturing company in Bridgwater. When we bought the company out of receivership in ‘03 we had no systems at all. Our former parent company was running a character based ERP system called MAX on Unix and a Windows file serving network. So day 1 (ish!) we set up two RH servers and installed samba, sendmail, apache etc on one for file print intranet and email and the Linux port of MAX on the other. See this post for some other detail.

Next week, I’ll be moderating a panel on Open Source Content Management at the fifth annual Gilbane Boston Conference - “Where Content Management Meets Social Media.” It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

The XOOPS Project has released the newest version 2.3.1 of its open source Web CMS. Only two weeks after the release, the company has reported over 5,000 downloads already. Better yet, the new release has some awesome features necessary to keep XOOPS at the top of the list. Some bugs are still there as well.

Claromentis has recently made all Linux users much happier by releasing a collaboration and information management platform for Linux. It includes the brand new Project Manager application, content and document management, as well as process management using e-forms.

This article, Part 1 of a series, describes the features and concepts of the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework and demonstrates how you can use it to create dynamic JAR bundles. Learn about building and packaging components as OSGi bundles and running them in the Apache Felix runtime environment. Also, look at creating bundle Manifest files, which act as a communication interface between bundles.

Discover the techniques and technologies you can use to build a mashup application using Apache Geronimo, a REST-based protocol, and data from multiple sources. The mashup combines data from Google Maps and Twitter tweets to pinpoint Twitter users as they update their Twitter status.

If the prospect of another week stretching out before you is getting you down, I've got good news. There's a post about GNU/Linux that is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. It's a real stonker - try this for a start....On Open Enterprise blog.

Here are two small, but significant moves by Microsoft....On Open Enterprise blog.

As I listen to all this talk of lack of trust in the banking system, of inflated values ungrounded in any reality, of “opacity”, and of “contaminated” financial instruments, I realise I have heard all this before. In the world of software, as in the world of finance, there is contamination by overvalued, ungrounded offerings that have led to systemic mistrust, sapped the ability of the computer industry to create real value, and led it to squander vast amounts of time and money on the pursuit of the illusory, insubstantial wealth that is known as “intellectual property”....On Linux Journal.

Discover the updated version of LanguageWare, a set of run-time libraries and an Eclipse-based development environment for building custom text analyzers in various languages. Deployable in Apache UIMA, LanguageWare makes it is easy to build dictionaries, ontologies, and rules for identifying key information, relationships, and meaning.

mod_spamhaus is an Apache module that uses DNSBL in order to block spam relay via web forms, preventing URL injection, block http DDoS attacks from bots and generally protecting your web service denying access to a known bad IP address. http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-block-spammers-with-apache2-mod_spamhaus-debian-etch

The JRuby project is making Ruby faster and more scalable than ever. One advantage to running Rails on the Java Virtual Machine is that you can leverage other Java libraries, like the Apache Derby database. The blend of Derby, JRuby, and Rails allows for rapid prototyping of dynamic Web applications. Learn how to use these technologies together to prototype your next great idea.

This article explains how you can install and configure apache2-mpm-peruser on a Debian Etch server. apache2-mpm-peruser is an MPM (Multi-Processing Module) for the Apache 2 web server, very similar to apache2-mpm-itk, but faster (almost as fast as apache2-mpm-prefork). mpm-peruser allows you to run each of your vhosts under a separate UID and GID - in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts. It is based on metuxmpm, a working implementation of the perchild MPM. The result is a sane and secure web server environment for your users, without kludges like PHP's safe_mode.