Newsletter February 2009

Kern, what's next for Bacula's technical roadmap?

Right now, the most important thing is that we are just a couple of months away from the GA of Bacula 3.0. It's the next major release of the Bacula project, and reflects some great contributions from the Bacula community.

What's important about Bacula 3.0?

It has a lot of exciting new features that will make it even more attractive to large enterprises and commercial users, while at the same time building on Bacula's core principles; to be highly scalable, modular yet with highly integrated features, and to have a core framework that embodies the most modern architecture possible in the industry today.

Why do you think Bacula has been so successful around the world?

Probably because there's no other fully Open Source backup solution out there that can scale up to meet the needs of a truly large enterprise. Large enterprises seem to represent the majority of our users. What can I say? People just like it!

Why is Open Source so popular today?

The concept of free software and Open Source is not new, but in the last few years the Internet has powered a great open source momentum. Firstly, Open Source software is better quality software than the closed source approach! And then because leading government agencies and corporations have so successfully adopted Open Source, that the mainstream market is now keen to follow.

But if open source is just made of code from contributors, how can it attain such high quality?

If, instead of having just a couple of eyeballs reading the source code you have hundreds or thousands of programmers that can read, modify, and contribute to the source code, the software evolves very rapidly. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. Then mix in the lead developers that manage the open source projects at Bacula, for example, and you get an idea of the secret recipe.

Interview by Rob Morrison, Bacula Systems

5th edition of the LinuxDays, Open for Business, will take place from June 3rd to June 5th at the Varembé Conference Center in Geneva. Organised by Linalis in partnership with the State of Geneva, Canonical,LPI Ernst and Young and the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) project, 40 conferences and workshops will take place on the following topics: Open for Business, Education, Public administrations and Grid Solutions.

Last month, we announced that we were moving offices. To celebrate our move, we would like to invite you for an apero in our new offices on 26th February 2009. Don't forget to register at events@linalis.com!

Alfresco 3.0

The new version of the open source ECM program has a lot of new features:

1. First implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) norm
2. First implementation of the Microsoft Sharepoint protocol
3. SURF, a new framework based on the AJAX Yahoo YUI librairies
4. Alfresco Share, which is the new collaborative application built with WCM which provides websites integrated with SURF, and Microsoft Office thanks to the SharePoint protocol.
5. Document preview
6. Website management though e-mails
7. A new version of Web Studio

(Source: toolinux.org)

See the services we provide around Alfresco

Canonical: a new Landscape in April

A new version of Landscape, Canonical's assets management tool, will be out in April. The project will then follow the same release cycle than Ubuntu (a release every 6 months). In this version the focus will be on ease of management of large infrastructures and integration with Amazon EC2.

(Source: workswithu.com)

eZ Publish 4.0.3

The open source CMS eZ Publish was updated to 4.0.3, fixing more than 150 bugs, in particular with URL management. Don't forget to update your installation if you are using this program.

(Source: ez.no)

See the services we provide around eZ Publish

What's new at eXo Platform?

Here is the first stable release of eXo Knowledge Suite (KS), including a forum and a F.A.Q. It is completely integrated with eXo Platform and its multiusers abilities.

Their document management suite, eXo ECM, was reorganised in order to separate the document management component from the workflow component, and now includes the new eXo WCM, the websites management component.

Finally, eXo's base system has had several updates concerning portlets management, data storage and web infrastructure.

(Source: blog.exoplatform.org)

Red Hat: RHEL 5.3, agreements with Microsoft, and virtualisation

There are a lot of news concerning Red Hat recently. First, they released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, an upgrade which brings improvements on support for new hardware (Intel Core i7 CPUs, up to 1 To RAM, up to 126 CPUs), virtualisation (computing power limits for virtual machines were increased), and encryption (a disk can now be entirely encrypted).

Then, Red Hat signed agreements with Microsoft about virtualisation. Red Hat is going to validate Windows and Microsoft is going to validate Red Hat on their respective virtualisation platforms. It means that Red Hat will make sure that Windows runs well whenvirtualised on a Red Hat host, and that Microsoft is going to do the same with RHEL virtualised on a Windows host. This interoperability agreement also includes a support offer for clients with such a setup. In contrary to the agreements Microsoft signed with other Linux editors (notably Novell), this one is not in any way related to patents.

Speaking of virtualisation, shortly after they also announced their future strategy on the topic. RHEL 5.4 will make the switch from Xen to KVM as the main virtualisation solution, KVM being a solution built into the Linux kernel itself, and largely developed by Red Hat.Xen will still be supported for all the RHEL 5 lifetime though. To leverage their virtualisation strategy, they are going to launch three new products: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, a complete management solution, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops, its counterpart for virtualised desktops (VDI), and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, which provide a lightweight, bare metal solution for virtualised guests. This set of solutions will be the first of its kind in open source.

(Source: redhat.com)

See the services we provide around Red Hat

Zimbra's co-founder leaves

Satish Dharmaraj, one of Zimbra's founders, left Yahoo!, which had bought the company for 350 M$. Since then he had worked on improving Yahoo!'s webmail. He stepped back some time ago from its leadership activities and promoted Scott Dietzen to replace him. Scott Dietzen is Zimbra's former president and CTO.

See the services we provide around Zimbra

Debian Lenny for Valentine's Day

First planned for September 2008, the new Debian was released February 14th. The project has had to face numerous unexpected issues in its internal organisation as well as at the technical level, and true to itself the team decided to delay the release rather than delivering a product of insufficient quality. Debian is the Linux distribution which has the biggest number of contributors and the more packages. It is used on a sizeable part of servers through the world and serves as a basis for Ubuntu.

Debian Lenny includes a lot of software updates, a better user experience, strengthened security and support a new hardware architecture. With 12 supported architectures it is the Linux distribution that can run on the widest range of hardware, from embedded systems to supercomputers.

MySQL founder leaves Sun

Only a few months after Sun Microsystems bought MySQL, Michael Widenius, MySQL founder, announces he's leaving to create a new company, Monty Program AB. Although he's happy with MySQL acquisition by Sun, he says he felt frustrated with the intertia of a big company, which prevented him toreorganise as fast as he wished the way MySQL is developped and that the community was involved. He was already disappointed with MySQL 5.1, released following time objectives rather than quality and stability objectives. In his new company he wil keep on working on MySQL as well as a new engine for the database.

OpenERP 5.0

OpenERP 5.0 is here and goes far beyond management features only. This version is indeed a complete solution satisfying all the needs of a SMB. The software suite includes a wiki, a document management component, a Business Intelligence one, process management, a webmail, a shared calendar, an eCommerce component, etc. Moreover new features can be obtained from plugins (there are actually more than 350 of them), developed on a collaborative fashion by more than 1000 developers. A lot of work was put into ergonomics to make the tools really easy to use by inexperienced users.

VMware View Open Client goes Open Source

Losing ground to other virtualisation solutions, either free and/or open source (Xen, VirtualBox), or integrated into the operating system (KVM under Linux, Hyper-V under Windows Server), VMware's answer is to release its first open source client. VMware View Open Client, its desktop sharing solution's client, is available under the LGPL.

Talend secures $12 Million in funding

This is a real tour de force from the open source editor Talend, which managed to secure $12 Million to expand its activities. This proves how much open source solutions are now trusted, and that open source is neither new or uncertain anymore.

Mozilla foundation makes a $100'000 donation for Theora / Vorbis

The Mozilla foundation donated 100'000 dollars to the Wikimedia foundation to coordinate the development of the free video and audiocodecs Theora (videp) and Vorbis (audio). Indeed, nowadays the only way to take advantage of video and audio content on the web is to use closed source and patented technologies, through dedicated plugins like Flash Player or Silverlight. The Wikimediafoundationfavoured free and open formats by using Theora and Vorbis, and Mozilla Firefox will add native support for these formats in its next release (3.1). The reason behind it is that it should be as straightforward to play a video or a sound on a web page as it is to display an image, for which one doesn't need any plugin.

KDE 4.3 will be natively compatible with Exchange

If KDE 4.2 already put an end to users complaints about features and stability, the next release brings high hopes thanks to the work which is being done to make its collaboration suite completely compatible with Microsoft Exchange. Exchange compatibility still is ashowstopper for many companies considering to switch their desktops to Linux. The 4.3 release of the K Desktop Enviromnent is due in 6 months.

QT relicensed under LGPL

Starting from QT 4.5, expected in a few months, the toolkit will be available under LGPL 2.1 in addition to the current licenses (GPL v3 and commercial license). Concretely, it means that it won't be mandatory anymore to buy a QT commercial license if it's used in a proprietary program, as long as the modifications made to QT itself are published. This license change is part of Nokia's strategy to promote its mobile platform. One has to notice that once the LGPL 3 will be out, the latter will replace the LGPL 2.1 as well as the GPLv3.

Internet Explorer still drops market share

For the seventh consecutive month, Microsoft's browser is losing market shares, going from more than 73% to 67.55%, according to Net Applications measures. On the other hand, its competitors are gathering more and more users; Firefox, Chrome and Safari having all grown significantly. One can see that in a year's time, Firefox gained 4%, Safari more than 3%, and Google Chrome managed to go over 1% market shares in only 4 months of existence.

Firefox remains one of Open Source's greatest success, able to compete with products created by giant firms like Microsoft, Apple or Google.

(Source: zdnet.co.uk)

Web design trends for 2009

Smashing Magazine published an article in 2 parts about emerging trends in web design, and the ones the magazine considers as the great trends for the year 2009. If you plan to create or upgrade your website in the near future, it will interest you without a doubt.

First part of the article / Second part of the article

(Source: smashingmagazine.com)