Belgian software running the presidential website.
Software engineer Dries Buytaert should be very proud of his latest achievement. Quite surprisingly Whitehouse.org, the flag ship website of the U.S. government, relaunched with his Drupal open source sofware. Being an immensely important website as it is, considering the safety measures it has to undertake, could this be a sign that even important organizations are realizing that open source programming does not necessarely has to pose additional risks compared to proprietary sofware when used properly? If not, the iniative will certainly boost research and awarenessfrom other major companies and governments around the globe.
Are security and open source sofware getting along ?
Critics of open source software frequently highlight the statement that it would be more vulnerable to failure than proprietary software. Well are they right? According to revealing new research from application security firm Veracode only partly. Due to the large amount of co-workers enhancing open source software, who furthermore seem to take more pride in their work, bugs are repaired more efficiently and quickly. However, open source code is more likely to contain a severe flaw. The other side of this medal is thus certainly not to underestimate. Vanhaverbeke Johan
Open source software: Is it worth the trouble of converting ?
In these troubled economic circumstances, it is very thinkable that you might be tempted to cut costs by introducing open source software to your company. Sure its free, programmable, and it may be as easy to use as paid alternatives. But does that really outweigh the overall reliability and customer support paid companies provide? Im certainly not claiming that it doesnt, in fact that may very well be the case, but theres a lot more to it than just blindly embracing the fact that its free. Its up to you to decide wether you or your company will gain from it on a long term basis.
IBM has been a big supporter of open source software from the beginning and has now decided to work with several different universities on new computing research projects. The purpose is not to keep results as intellectual property, but to widely share their result.The researchers at IBM and the universities will particularly focus on domains such as privacy and security and then release their results as open source programming code that is available for everyone. Personally, I can only be happy with these efforts of IBM because now we can profit from new programs and use them in a more secure way
There has always been a disagreement concerning thesecurity of free and open source software and it is the main reason enterprises avoid using it. Matt Moynahan believes this reason is largely unqualified. besides, fixes are done more quickly and efficiently with open source programs.
In the end, its up to each company to compare the benefits and the risks of their software, be it open source or commercial. But the bottom line of the study is that with free and open source software it is easy to recognize problems and correct them as well.
As a result of the economic recession open source software began to become more attractive to enterprises.They have to be more careful and every enterprise tries to lower their costs and
using open source software is a good way of doing this. Experts are happy with this evolution but they think the downside to this evolution is that some enterprises without much knowledge will take advantage of it. Experts believe there are two roles for the governmentin this evolution. One the one hand they have to accept the new standards and on the other hand they also have to start acting like a role model.
The era has come, that even cars will be developed by open source
software. The German engineering office EDAG comes with a
quite futuristic concept: the Light
Car Open Source. Its an electric
car, built from basalt fibre, which is 100%recyclable. Under the glass at the front and back of the car, they putted
organic LEDs. Because of that, you can choose the form of your head lamps, or
even write a message to the car behind you. This technologies are very new! For
this reason, EDAG added open source to the name light car. EDAG hopes that
other offices and manufactures will help them develop the new technology.
MPCStar is an open source universal media
player, with many codecs. Because of that, it will play all your movies.
MPCStar has been developed using open source libraries, so you can customize it
if you want or you can just use it like the programmers made it. MPCStar is
completely free and does not contain any spyware or adware.
Ive
been using MPCStar for several years now, and Im very positive about it. The
media player is very user-friendly and easy to use. That is also the reason
that I recommend it to everybody who is searching for a good media player.
We all know some programming
languages like C++ or PHP, but now there is a new experimental open source
programming language: Go.
With Go, the technology of programming languages takes a fresh start. That was necessary,
since evolving from the older ones, was no longer an option, because of the
many restrictions.
One of the best improvements of the
programming language Go, is definitely the speed. The converting only takes a
couple of seconds, which is possible thanks to the combining of the freedom of
a dynamic programming language (such as PHP) with the security of a compiled
language (such as C++).
