Newsletter November 2008

When the financial planet goes mad, enterprise budgets go down, and among them the IT budget. The existing hardware useful life is extended as long as possible, rather than renewing it and all efforts are made to cut down on software costs. In such a situation, open source software is tempting since it allows saving money on licenses costs as well as support costs. Moreover, the variety on offer of open source systems ideally suited for aging hardware allows the same hardware longer to be used for longer, an aspect frequently overlooked by proprietary editors.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, thinks that the open source ecosystem will be in a much better shape than its proprietary competitors at the end of the crisis. The attraction caused by open source during crisis seems to be confirmed by, among others,Alfresco noticing a growth in its number of users since the beginning of the financial crisis, or the financial results of Sun Microsystems which, although impacted by the crisis (general revenue down by 7%), observes a growth in its open source activities (their traditional activities, hardware and high-end systems, declining the most). As for Rolf Schuster, he declares that"cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by far the lowest". In fact this German diplomat is involved in the migration of 11'000 desktops of the Foreign Ministry to Linux and open source software, started in 2004. Since then, the total cost of maintenance per desktop has gone down from more than 3000€ per year to a 1000€ per year.

In addition, a new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) has been issued by the European Commission, in partnership with governments from all 27 members of the E.U. It is about software interoperability in the public sector and advice to use open formats, without making it mandatory. Yet some governments, such as the Netherlands, have gone as far as calling to use open source software whenever possible. Governments more and more see see open source as a way to be independent from software vendors, to boost the local economy and to further cut costs. Large software vendors are not happy with this decision andconsider taking the issue to court to prevent the spreading of a definition of open standards that they find discriminating. For instance, Microsoft's office format (Office OpenXML), which became an ISO standard after much efforts and controversies, was not considered as an open format by the EIF, and as such would be excluded from invitations to tender in the public sector.

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Open Source Business Intelligence is a significant growing area of interest for a lot of the companies we have been speaking with recently. We are therefore pleased to announce that Linalis is now not only a Pentaho Certified System Integrator partner but also the only Pentaho Accredited Training Partner. We are now able to offer Pentaho training in three areas, Data Integration, Reporting and Systems Administration. Courses will be available both in a workshop environment and online, instructor led courses.

See the services we provide related to Pentaho / See the training courses we provide related to Pentaho

We are also very pleased to announce that Linalis is a certified Canonical Silver Partner, the editors of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This further strengthens our ability to provide leading edge Open Source solutions with the key vendors providing quality solutions with license free software. If you are using or planning to use these products, Linalis can Make IT Happen.

In the field of Grid Computing, we are now a business partner of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, and grid computing enters our catalog of training courses.

In addition, we now provide courseware for all three levels of LPI under a cost effective license agreement, allowing organisations to make as many copies as they need for internal use. This offering is helping our clients save costs for large training programmes and is also helping enable other LPI Approved Training Partners to provide cost effective solutions to their clients world wide.

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Zimbra supports Exchange

Yahoo!'s Zimbra Collaboration Suite already makes the best out of its new extension framework : the first module developed allows Zimbra to work side by side with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and to interact with it. Thanks to this framework, Zimbra is expecting to see new modules for integrating with other collaborative suites, such as IBM's Lotus and Novell Groupwise.

(Source: Zimbra blog)

See our services related to Zimbra

Alfresco is leading interoperability

In september, IBM, Microsft and EMC announced the creation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification, which has been elaborated in cooperation with Oracle, SAP, OpenText and Alfresco. CMIS is an attempt to harmonize the way the ECM programs are accessing to data, in order to ease interoperability between the existing solutions. The specification will be submitted to the standardization body OASIS to become a standard, following the example of what SQL became in the area of relational databases.

A few days later, Alfresco announced a new test version of its product, implementing the current state of the CMIS specification, thus becoming the first open source product to do so. It will allow Alfresco to access to data from other ECM solutions (and conversely) and to ease the migration from one to another. As usual with open formats, the user is the one who benefits.

(Source: Alfresco)

See our services related to Alfresco

New components for eXo Platform

eXo Platform enterprise portal get 2 new applications, at beta stage for the moment: Knowledge Suite (KS), including a forum and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) component, Web Content Management (WCM), which completes the ECM component, as well as the community management component, eXo Social, implementing the OpenSocial standard. Updates were brought to the portal's core, the ECM and the Collaborative Suite (CS) components, as well as eXo Web Services and eXo JCR. eXo's rapid development confirms eXo as one of the fastest growing amongst the enterprise portals, being one of the biggest open source projects by number of contributors, since it recently got above the mark of 100 contributors (a level comparable to Firefox).

Before the end of the year we should see the final versions of eXo Knowledge Suite 1.0 (eXo KS), eXo Liveroom 1.0 (eXo LR), eXo WCM 1.0 and eXo Social 1.0.

(Source: eXo Platform's blog)

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

The new version of the always popular Ubuntu from Canonical, released on October 30th, has some important new features including an easier management of 3G connections, installation from and to USB sticks, a "Guest" session for temporary users, multimedia content from the BBC, and of course the latest version of supported programs.

(Source: Ubuntu)

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out

The much awaited version 3 of the open source office suite is now available. If you read our article on this subject (in French), you already know that the major advantages of this version are native support of Mac OS X, PDF document import, and improved support for VBA macros to ease migration from MS Office. OOo 3.0 has also a refreshed interface, support for Microsoft Office OpenXML format, better support for multilingual documents, wiki syntax editing with Writer and screen differentiation between the presenter's view and the projected view with Impress.

Wikimedia Foundation is migrating to Ubuntu

In order to standardize their IT infrastructure, the Wikimedia Foundation is migrating to Ubuntu Linux. Historically they have been using several versions of Red Hat and Fedora, but have now decided to migrate to a distribution with Long Term Support whilst releasing new versions frequently enough to support new hardware. This migration includes Wikipedia, one the the 10 most visited websites in the world.

Blender 2.48

The famous 3D suite gets the benefits of the work on the video game and technologic demo "Yo Frankie!". Consequently the main improvements are on the game engine, real-time rendering and animations. Thanks to this kind of project, Blender matures to become a first grade 3D suite, allowing the ability to do modeling, animation, rendering, video montage (Big Buck Bunny) as well as game creation (Yo Frankie!) in the same application.

Gimp 2.6

Graphic designer and photographers will be glad to hear that Gimp 2.6 is now available, with improvements to the look and feel of the interface and a new engine supporting images with a greater depth of color (16 bits per pixel) and CMYK (for professional printing). With this version The GIMP become more of a professional solution.

Python 2.6

2.6 is also the version number of the new Python, the popular programming language, heavily used by Google, among others. This version is overall a way to smoothly make the transition to Python 3, a full rewriting of the language which will not be backward compatible with former versions. Python 2.6 allows to smoothly adapt your code by introducing new features from Python 3 while keeping the compatibility with Python 2.

Mono 2 it out

The Mono project announces the availability of Mono 2.0, an open source implementation of the .NET platform from Microsoft. This version supports some APIs from .NET 2.0 (XML, ASP, graphics, databases) as well as C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 8. It also includes its own API to create multi-platform applications, giving access to system and graphic resources of UNIX systems, including Linux.

Android is open source

The mobile platform Android is now available under the Apache 2.0 licence. Like OpenMoko, it provides a completely customizable open source system for mobile phones. The project is built around the Java language and was initiated by Google, which was joined by several manufacturers under the Open Handset Alliance (including Intel, Motorola and Samsung).

As it is open and very easy to add new applications, the future seems bright for this kind of solution. A phone embedding the Android platform is already available (T-Mobile G1). This project allows a more open and modular alternative to the iPhone. Android aims at running on a wide range of hardware.

Java 1.4, c'est fini

From October 30^th, Java 1.4 is no longer supported by Sun Microsystems. Issued in 2002, Java 1.4 brought a lot of business-orientated functionalities and was a great success. All programs and services still using Java 1.4 will have to migrate to a newer version - keeping in mind that the end of the support period for Java 1.5 is also not so far away.

Drupal wins for the second time

Drupal is a CMS we like a lot because of its flexibility and its ease of use. So we have been very glad to hear that it has just won the Packt award for the best open source CMS for the second year in a row. Plone, another CMS we're using, won the award for the best non-PHP CMS.

Concerning Drupal, the recent 6.6 and 5.11 versions are correcting a lot of bugs, so don't forget to update your installation.

Mozilla Fennec makes its firsts steps

The mobile browser from the Mozilla foundation made its first alpha available. The most adventurous can already have a first look at this browser which aims to be the Firefox of the mobile world.

LSB 4.0 beta

If there is a criticism often made of Linux by businesses willing to release their software on this operating system, it is the lack of homogeneity between the distributions ; a program running on one could very well be unable to work on another. The Linux Standard Base was created to solve this problem, defining a set of guidelines for a base system guaranteeing that a LSB compliant program will run on all LSB compliant distributions (all the major ones). This fourth version aims at answering the criticisms made to the project. It includes new testing and package creation tools and extends the specification, such as for cryptography.

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Société Générale is trying Linux.

The BHFM branch of Société Générale announced that it would migrate 20% of its 54'000 desktops to Linux. More precisely, Novell Suse Linux Entreprise Desktop 10 (SLED) was selected, mainly for its interoperability with Microsoft environments. Linux was chosen for its greater security and its lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), thanks to the lower price of software licenses and the lower hardware requirements allowing the use of the same hardware for longer. This migration occurs at the same time as an upgrade to Vista to a portion of their desktops, which requires the replacement of numerous machines to more powerful ones. The Société Générale group is considering a larger migration to Linux.

(Source: LeMagIT)

The Linux ecosystem would amount to 25 billion US Dollars.

A report from the Linux Foundation estimates that the software ecosystem around Linux would have cost 25 billion US Dollars if it would have been developed by conventional proprietary means. A Linux distribution such as Fedora 9 would cost 10.8 billion US Dollars, with 1.8 billion US Dollars for the Linux kernel. The estimation was based on the average cost per line of code.

(Source : Linux Foundation)

Linux netbooks facing more returns than their Windows counterparts.

Started with the Asus EEe, the netbook phenomenon, ultra-lightweight and cheap notebooks, seems far away from calming down. Given these machines aren't very powerful and must be very cheap, Linux is the operating system of choice, which could be considered as the first mass spread of Linux to end users. But MSI, manufacturer of the Wind notebook, which proposes Linux and Windows XP, told that return rates are higher for Linux versions than for Windows ones. This was confirmed by Canonical, Ubuntu's editor.

Canonical explain that this is not a big issue, but a normal consequence of introducing new technology to the public, which will reduce once people get used to seeing Linux along side Windows. The absolute number of returns remains low, therefore it is likely to happen because the OS isn't the same as Windows, rather than because it's not working or difficult to use. This phenomena will reduce over time with the large number of educational establishments switching to Linux distributions.

(Source : ZDNet UK)

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