Tuesday, September 30, 2008

GPL Project Watch List for Week of 09/19


The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for September 12th to September 19th 2008.

This Week:
  • Week Summary
  • New Projects
  • Interop 2008 and Open Source
  • User Contributions
Moving along

Thanks to the hard work of the research team, we have noticed an increase in project conversion. This week our GPL v3 count is at 3184 GPL v3 projects, an increase of 184 GPL v3 projects. The AGPL v3 count is at 130 AGPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 number is at 294 LGPL v3 projects, an increase of 8 LGPL v3 projects.
















New project conversions this week include:
  • Ongame Hand Converter: Ongame Hand Converter is a tool to convert poker hands, played at a skin of the Ongame poker network, into a more readable format. This can be useful if you want to discuss your hands with others, for example at a forum.

  • PyMaTi: PyMaTi is a simple and easy to use GUI for numerical and scientific computing in Python. It surrounds well know packages NumPy and Matplotlib and provides possibility to immediately play with numerical python from intuitive user interface.

  • StorYBook: Are you novelist, writer or author? StorYBook is a scene-based software for all creative writers that helps to organize your story. StorYBook assists you in structuring your book.
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Interop 2008 and Open Source

This year's Interop exhibition in New York City has just ended a little over a week ago from September 15th to September 19th. Interop is a tech expo where more than 300 leading technology exhibitors come to show off their stuff. It is a good look into what is coming up in IT in the near future from business leaders such as IBM, Cisco, Oracle and many others. So what was the big buzz at this year's exhibition? Two of the largest subjects that came up were Web 2.0 and cloud computing. High speed internet is spreading to more homes everyday and will soon be as common as cable TV, so it is no surprise that the experimental fields of Web 2.0 and cloud computing are the main focus of the IT community. It is no doubt that these new areas of IT will affect open source and also be affected open source software.

First off, IBM revealed their Center for Social Software, which is a collaboration between IBMers, clients, partners, students and others at their Cambridge Massachusetts location to further research Web 2.0 applications. The center will test new and current Web 2.0 tools to enhance their usage for business networks. Their goal at IBM is to use Web 2.0 to better connect people so that information can be access easier. Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM's Lotus Software believes that workers are going through an information overload trying to locate information. However, Web 2.0 should help ease the overload by connecting people to share information over social networks. By using social networking at the work place, efficiency can be boosted and increase productivity.

On the other side of the booth, Cisco was taking on virtualization and cloud computing. Cloud computing has been a hot button topic over the past year. People are still wondering what exactly it is and how we are going to get there. Marie Hattar of Cisco Systems outlined the workings of virtualization and said it will evolve into cloud computing. With both technologies her concern was security, advising companies to start small and plan ahead for security. As cloud computing continues to evolve, the commercial side of it will rely heavily on security and trust. If consumers are storing data on a virtual machine that can be accessed from any computer, it opens the door to a multitude of security risks and concerns. The companies offering these cloud services are going to have to convince their customers that their data will be save from attack on their servers.

Both Web 2.0 and cloud computing are going to affect and be affected by the open source market. Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian said, "To us the future of IT is based on open source and open standards". Open standards are already widespread in wikis and social networking sites such as facebook. Much of Web 2.0 was and is being built on open source software. Web 2.0 is still in its early stages and the space and need for open source software is growing quickly. Cloud computing is also a space that open source software should take off in. Many open source software already generate revenue by providing the software for free but charging for the service. Cloud computing will be on demand and service based. Saas is a large market place for open source software as people are migrating from paying for the software to paying to the service. While these new experimental fields are coming to the main stream there are going to be many opportunities for open source software to gain a foothold on the market place.

-Antony Tran

References:

http://www.interop.com/

http://www.crn.com/software/210602265

http://www.crn.com/networking/210602222

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3772276/Interop+Its+All+About+Collaboration.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/hosted_apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210602225


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