Lacey Thoms

…all this and more in this week’s compendium of open source news!   Two Steps Forward, One Step Back Sounds like a Strauss Waltz? Almost. After 10 years the city of Munich’s love affair with open source may be coming to an end.  Despite saving $16 million by using the custom Linux distribution LiMux, the city is considering switching back to Windows due to user complaints.  Read more about the motives surrounding the discussion at Network World.    Governments on GitHub Governments across the globe have long been dabbling with open source software.  Use of Open Source products like OpenOffice, Linux and Drupal are becoming commonplace. To further this trend, many governments are beginning to open source their own code as illustrated by the 10,000 active government users on GitHub. You could argue that since it is our taxes, then the code should be open.  Read more abo... (more)

Is Open Source Becoming the De Facto Standard in the Data Center?

Is open source positioned to become the next mode of standardization in the virtualization world? It appears that might very well be the case following the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Industry Specifications Group’s decision to move forward with an open source project designed to meet that end. The group hopes that open source solutions can be leveraged to provide businesses with the interoperability in their data centers that previously resulted from standardization. The group’s project—Open Platform for NFV—wou... (more)

Need PCI Compliance? Try Open Source

There’s no shortage to the benefits open source software provides. Though the technology is certainly not without its criticisms—for example, depending on the product, you might run into a lack of quality support—lately, its proponents have been eying a new application for open source: compliance. In a recent presentation, security professionals unveiled a proposed Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance model that is based on open source technology. The system is designed, they said, to help reduce expenses, enhance scalability and make it easier to ... (more)

Open Source in Finance: Stock Exchanges Run on Linux

Besides their common daily handling of significant amounts of money, the New York Stock Exchange, New York Mercantile Exchange and NASDAQ have something else in common: All three exchanges now rely on Linux. In the world of finance, milliseconds matter. There is significant money at stake when one firm is able to make a trade a split second before another firm. High-frequency trading refers to using sophisticated technologies to facilitate the fastest trades possible. Because Linux is known for its low transaction and networking latency, financiers are increasingly relying on th... (more)

What Developers Need to Know About Open Source Vulnerability Management

As a resourceful developer, you're not writing code from scratch anymore. You probably have access to a vast amount of code you wrote at previous jobs, and a lot of your development probably relies at least in some part around third party or open source software. Every savvy developer knows their way around Sourceforge, Codeplex, or GitHub, and with access to readily available code that frees you up to tackle real challenges, there really is no downside to open source code. Sure, you're probably aware that many open source projects have license obligations tied to them. And lice... (more)