http://www.bikalabs.com Home page area that contains items created and collected by Joris Goudriaan. Mostly Open Source articles. hourly 1 2006-04-06T16:24:00Z http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/Itmanjourn_13062006 Fear and loathing in source code licensing Monday June 13, 2005 (12:00 PM GMT) Topic: Legal and Regulatory By: Andy Singleton No publisher admin 2006-07-10T16:39:46Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/limsfinder_20051011 A fellow consultant recently turned me on to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a fascinating look into the philosophy of quality. While the premise of the book (at least I think it is the premise) is that science and art are not entirely inseparable, one of the effects the book had on me was that it made me revisit the "scientific method". No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:54Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/Itmanjourn_18072005 Launching an open source project is complicated -- not just in terms of creating a new technology, but also in getting developers and future customers to pay attention and support the efforts. To most developers, marketing is a black art, one filled with expensive advertising and PR and lots of frantic people talking about "the brand" and "the competition." However, it's fairly easy to follow the path to success just by paying attention to how other projects have done, and how they have gone about building interest and community in their projects. No publisher admin 2006-05-10T23:02:54Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/itmanjourn_17102005 Continuing where we left off yesterday -- careful assessment of integration and customization costs in many ways is the key to avoiding an open source nightmare. Unlike commercial products, open source projects are not usually created with the modern IT infrastructure environment in mind. Integration with single sign-on or support for monitoring protocols such as SNMP might not exist. Support for databases might be narrow and limited to a few choices or to one database. Support for standards might be lacking. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/bcs_18092005 From its humble origins in the 'hacker' culture of US computer science laboratories in the 1970s, open source software (OSS) has grown to become arguably the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor. At the heart of OSS is a wonderful idealistic notion that appeals to our caring, sharing side. The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support. Instead, there are communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind. Unsullied by the sordid world of commerce, the code that they produce is somehow purer and more ethical than proprietary software. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/munichlinuxvsmicrosoft_092005 Governments like open-source software, but Microsoft does not No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/itmanjourn_11102005 One of the first things that is asked of any new project in a modern IT department is that a cost benefit analysis be created to determine if the investment of time and resources makes sense. This takes many forms, but at many companies the idea of return on investment, or ROI, is king. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/get-the-facts-linux-vs-windows-on-tco ''For too long, special interest groups have attacked the manageability of Linux, and fuelled the F.U.D. that Linux environments are somehow more difficult or labour-intensive to manage than Windows environments,'' says Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. ''In fact, Linux system management tools are in many cases outpacing Windows management tools.'' No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/the-first-web-browser-based-lims With all of the benefits of a web browser based LIMS and most importantly all of the product choices, the LIMS consumer should look at all of the choices. The web browser based LIMS provides a richer, easier to use interface than windows and functionality that Windows simply cannot compete with. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:56Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/plone-content-types-with-archetypes Plone is an excellent content management system. You will probably find everything you need in the system itself, or from third party content types. If you don't, however, it is very easy to create your own content types, as this article will explain. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:56Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/implementing-lims-a-how-to-guide A laboratory must devote the necessary time and resources to planning, selecting, and implementing a new system. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:56Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-but-not-as-usual As “open-source” models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:56Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/gpl-wins-in-court-battle A US federal judge has ruled against antitrust claims that the General Public Licence promotes unfair competition, and in doing so has promoted its cause. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-software-aids-healthcare-leader Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in California, needed to consolidate its IT systems and bring greater efficiency and consistency to the infrastructure. CHW decided the best way to do that was to move away from proprietary solutions and toward open source. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/considerations-in-selecting-and-deploying-a-lims-in-a-wastewater-laboratory As laboratories are facing increased regulatory pressures and directives to do more work with fewer resources, automation is the key to reaching the productivity goals. Utilities such as wastewater treatment facilities share these same challenges. Many laboratories begin with paper logbooks in various departments with disparate numbering scheme, supplemented with Microsoft Excel and Word as they are required to collect more data and also compare analytical results to permit limits for various clients. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/web-2-0-scientists-need-to-mash-it-up Web 2.0 can bring us back to original idea of the Web as a collaborative workspace. Just as developing nations bypassed copper-wire telephones and leapfrogged directly to cell phones, “the biggest revolution on the Web is passing science by,” he warned. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/lims-in-a-refinery Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is positioned in an impeccable location in the maze of automation and computational systems in a refinery setup. LIMS is a donor of data to numerous mission critical systems such as the Distributed Control System (DCS), real time database system (such as Aspen’s Info Plus 21), material balance reconciliation software system (such as OSIsoft’s Sigmafine), tank information system, blending & optimization supervisory system, terminal automation system, enterprise resource planning systems (such as SAP) etc. In this article, let us explore the objective of LIMS in a refinery, how important is LIMS for the healthiness of refinery operations and finally, how it caters to the demanding needs of other linked 24x7 systems. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/lims-pharmaceutical-industries LIMS work as the core unit [Fig. II] for the distribution and analysis of data generated in lab by any source and work as interface between different systems and tools used in laboratories from instrument to ERP with respect to there geographical location and technical differences. It streamlines data flow within an organization, and centralizes the information into one primary database. This information is further sorted and organized into various report formats based upon the type of report required. A full-featured LIMS will manage the various lab data from sample login to reporting the results. No publisher joris 2006-05-10T23:02:57Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/new-technology-center-mixes-business-with-linux Linux has different meanings in the corporate and collegiate worlds, but a new Linux Technology Center (LTC) in upstate New York is bridging that gap and bringing both students and small business the benefits of Linux and open source. No publisher joris 2006-05-11T16:09:32Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-makes-2018business-sense Open source events like LinuxWorld, held at the Sandton Convention Centre last week, have expanded beyond the “geek zone”. No publisher joris 2006-05-22T12:01:38Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/michlmayr-qa-brings-together-the-cathedral-and-the-bazaar In the last two years, Martin Michlmayr has gone from serving as Debian Project Leader to studying for a doctorate at the Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management," is sponsored by Google, Intel, and other companies with an interest in free software development. Michlmayr told NewsForge he sees the need for quality assurance as the price that many projects must pay for their popularity and growing maturity. However, in order to perceive this need correctly, he believes, projects need to take a revised look at the familiar dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar. <from NewsForge> No publisher joris 2006-07-18T20:29:54Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/why-linux-isn-t-mainstream With the ease of installation, maintenance, and use of many recent Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, some are left wondering why Linux still isn't more widespread. Here's my theory. By: Toby Richards from NewsForge No publisher joris 2006-07-22T11:25:56Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/mercy-hospital-opens-arms-to-open-source-enterprise-systems-management Going the open source route has saved Mercy a lot of money. Stalder says that a comparable proprietary solution would have cost 15 times as much as Zenoss. "We didn't have to go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a big package," he says. "Some of those packages do a lot more, but at the same time, I don't know if we would have been able to bite it all off at once. You're buying a lot and using very little of it at the end of the day." No publisher joris 2006-08-09T09:12:32Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/marketing-foss-projects Why should you market your free and open source software (FOSS) project? After all, your project isn't selling anything. Besides, programmers notoriously don't get along with marketers. Yet a little marketing makes sense for many projects. Listing your project on Freshmeat and SourceForge.net is a good start, but greater efforts let users and organizations know that your code is available, so that they can start using it. No publisher joris 2006-08-13T16:40:15Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/extending-the-gpl-for-application-service-providers Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco is scheduled to announce a draft version of a modified GNU General Public License (GPL) today that would add a provision requiring service providers to distribute changes to code, even if they don't "distribute" the code beyond their own servers. Capobianco calls this the Honest Public License (HPL), and the additional provision could add an entirely new wrinkle to free software. There's little question that the the software landscape is changing, and companies are using free and open source software in ways that weren't considered when the GPLv2 was written more than 15 years ago. This is why the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is revising the GPL and working towards a GPL version 3 (GPLv3) -- which may end up addressing the question of GPLed software being used by Application Service Providers (ASPs) to provide Software as a Service (Saas). No publisher joris 2006-08-14T13:30:39Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-project-adds-no-military-use-clause-to-the-gpl GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). No publisher joris 2006-08-14T16:29:59Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/a-pacifist-version-of-the-gpl Open source project GPU (Global Processing Unit) is trying to make it easy to share spare CPU cycles, but the developers don't want their tool put to military purposes, and they've modified the GPL to make that clear. This move has brought them into conflict with the Free Software Foundation, which points out that modification of the license is not allowed. No publisher joris 2006-08-15T23:22:34Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-heads-for-global-domination The open source software phenomenon has spread far beyond Linux and is gaining "enormous momentum", according to a report from IDC. No publisher joris 2006-08-18T10:07:07Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/why-proprietary-software-is-dangerous-for-business-critical-applications ... What Stan wanted from the card-processing software publisher was simple: an "unlock" key for the new installation. It's the kind of request software company customer service departments handle all day long. They check to make sure the caller has actually purchased the software in question, then email a new key or read it over the phone. But this software company said, "No, we can't give you a new registration for your old software. You need to upgrade to our latest version, and the upgrade will cost you [several thousand dollars]." ... No publisher joris 2006-08-28T21:44:46Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/10-common-misunderstandings-about-the-gpl The GNU General Public License (GPL) is one of the most widely used software licenses -- and, undoubtedly, the most misunderstood. Some of this misunderstanding comes from hostile propaganda, but some also comes from a lack of experience in licensing issues on the part of both lawyers and lay users, and the use of standard language in conventional end-user license agreements that are unthinkingly coupled with the GPL. In all cases, the confusion is frequently based on misreadings, rumors, secondhand accounts, and what is convenient to believe. No publisher joris 2006-08-29T09:28:00Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/as-venture-dollars-flow-to-oss-companies-ceos-urged-to-be-picky It's no secret that the open source business model is attracting the attention of venture capital dollars. The list of companies that have received millions in funding recently includes JBoss, SugarCRM, SourceLabs, Hyperic, Zenoss, and Digium, to name a few. Still, if your OSS company is hoping to catch the eye of a venture capitalist, don't just jump on the first offer that comes in, say the experts. No publisher joris 2006-09-05T20:44:11Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/one-python-per-child The $100 laptop project has chosen Python as the primary development language for The Laptop. No publisher joris 2006-09-06T06:47:41Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/dispute-over-gpl-could-be-headed-to-court ...IChessU's legal response is available for download from the Jin Chess web site, and it is relatively bizarre. It includes some very peculiar claims that are downright surreal. This little nugget is my personal favorite, "[T]he software is not yet available for commercial distribution and therefore the GPL license does not apply to it." The software can be downloaded for free from the IChessU web site, but Rabinovich seems to think that the GPL doesn't apply to it simply because it isn't commercially distributed. Rabinovich's lawyers also seem to think that the GPL's statement that the licensee isn't "responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties" somehow legally justifies linking against a proprietary library in a GPL-licensed application.... No publisher joris 2006-09-06T13:09:39Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-globalization-benefits-organizations-individuals Open source software can help manage large software projects of globally distributed, individual contributors with virtually no management overhead. As open source blends more and more with the commercial software industry, this property of the open source phenomenon, which I will refer to as "open source globalization," may have an even higher impact on engineering jobs than IT offshoring. But this time, the news is not so bad for those who embrace the change. No publisher joris 2006-10-17T07:41:58Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/the-beekeeper There is much media coverage and water-cooler talk about open source software and professional open source companies but these companies and their business models are so new that most people do not have direct personal experience of them and consequently many people have numerous misconceptions about how they work. In almost all cases I think people underestimate not only the potential of the professional open source business model but also how much it differs from the proprietary/commercial software business model and how much it affects the roles and functions within the organization. Pentaho was founded in 2004 to provide Business Intelligence (BI) under a professional open source business model. After spending the last few years immersed in professional open source I am sharing my thoughts about the workings of this business model. There are numerous business models around professional open source software (POSS). The model described here applies to those companies that operate with a model where the company is the main source code contributor. This model is used by companies such as Pentaho, MySQL, Alfresco, JBoss, Digium, Zimbra etc. No publisher joris 2007-06-19T13:44:06Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/the-web-is-messy The Web is messy. Your website is a constant beta. You can’t just publish a webpage or launch an application and think that’s it. That’s only the very beginning. Every page and application you launch is the beginning of a journey of continuous improvement. No publisher joris 2007-07-09T14:49:47Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/oh-what-a-tangled-web-we-weave Who’s REALLY behind the LIMSfinder curtain? No publisher joris 2007-07-19T13:16:04Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/bika-labs-blog What used to be my personal effort on MS's Live Space, has now become a blog on Blogger - check it out! No publisher joris 2007-08-14T10:16:42Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/open-source-cmses-prove-well-worth-the-price We look at five free offerings boasting solid Web publishing features that challenge their commercial competitors; Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal and Joomla, and Plone. Plone 3.0 comes out second to Alfresco with a score of 8.6 No publisher joris 2007-10-15T15:16:55Z Link http://www.bikalabs.com/Members/joris/hikes Google Earth files to see the Hike's paths. No publisher joris 2008-03-04T06:45:22Z Folder