The Flex SDK is already available to the open source community, but under the control of Adobe, meaning that they solely have the power to actually make any changes to Flex. Now Adobe has officially decided to relinquish this control and send Flex off into the great wide, open source world. . . .In order to cement ongoing commitment to Flex in the community, Adobe has a proposal in place with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to guide the future of Flex.

Under Apache’s program, changes to software development kits are voted on by contributors in the community. We applaud Adobe for taking this step.

What about HTML5? We’re still not there yet. Stay tuned for further developments. Open source may not be a life saver for either Adobe or Hewlett Packard. What is it? A way out with some face saving?

Cynthia Murrell, February 11, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

“LucidWorks Cloud helps businesses of all sizes conquer even the most daunting data and business quandaries by rapidly firing up cost-effective, flexible, and scalable enterprise search applications that help users find the information they need, when they need it. More than 30 companies used the pre-release version of LucidWorks Cloud, shaping the new product to meet even the most rigorous demands of cloud-based enterprise search.”

Both versions of LucidWorks add a lot of features to their open source foundations, like an improved user interface, monitoring and reporting tools, and an open connector framework that bridges to alternative data sources.

Founded in 2007, Lucid Imagination focuses exclusively on Apache Lucene/Solr search technology.  Eight out of the 30 core committers to that  open source project work for Lucid. The company also offers free developer software. Many of its clients around the world are huge household names, like AT&T, Ford, and The Smithsonian, to name just a few.

Cynthia Murrell, February 9, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Lawson is pretty sure Talend is the first data integration specialist vendor to venture into this area. She asked Talend’s VP of marketing, Yves de Montcheuil, how the use of BPM contributes to  integration. The write up states:

Data governance. To use a master data hub as a system of record, you’ll need to load it from multiple sources, which will have conflicting data. The MDM and data quality tool will resolve many of these conflicts automatically through matching, but for more complicated conflicts, you’ll need a workflow. BPM can drive this workflow, sending the data to business users who can resolve the conflict by validating the correct data.

That does sound more efficient. Another way Talend expects BPM to help is to manage and automate data integration and data quality services.

Talend provides both open source and SaaS big data solutions to organizations around the world. BonitaSoft also offers both open source and paid solutions, but its realm is business process management. Best wishes to the happy couple!

Cynthia Murrell, February 8, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The company developed the processing data platform to handle its own research business and wants to expand to other markets. However, that goal may be difficult to achieve following in open source Hadoop’s shadow. The competition is not stopping LexisNexis from attempting to add open source technology, according to the ComputerWorldUK article, “Hadoop Challenger LexisNexis Wants to Add Open Source Developers.” The article asserts:

The company has opened sourced the HPCC platform, and says it is challenging Hadoop in benchmarks. The company says there are now about 1,000 HPCC Systems developers worldwide, most of who have been trained since the platform was opened sourced in June, By contrast, a Hadoop developer conference last summer drew a crowd of some 1,700.

LexisNexis is finally embracing open source? Don’t want to rush do we? Clearly, the company faces a difficult battle here attempting to follow in Apache’s footsteps. It just might be a little late in the game. But a little open source jazz for marketing? Seems okay and trendy.

Andrea Hayden, January 24, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

According to the post, Nichols obtained this opinion after creating a free Letter from Santa site over this Christmas holiday. Despite the 1,000,000 page views and 50,000 free Santa letters created, Nichols noticed that his customers refused to follow simple directions and fagged his follow up thank you letter as spam.

Nichols concluded:

Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers. I think it’s because they aren’t paying, they show little or no attention to directions. I focused on making the UI of the site drop dead simple and easy to use. I created a pretty thorough FAQ to answer 99.9% of the questions people might have. I even linked to the FAQ in the email response they got with their download links to the letter they created. I still had hundreds of free customers ask for help with simple questions that were answered in the FAQ.

It’s no surprise that paying customers place a higher value on their products and services than the one’s that receive it for free. But we wonder if this frustration over the freemium business model will inevitably spill over into open source search. We are monitoring, which is a free activity.

Jasmine Ashton, January 21, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

According to the post, Nichols obtained this opinion after creating a free Letter from Santa site over this Christmas holiday. Despite the 1,000,000 page views and 50,000 free Santa letters created, Nichols noticed that his customers refused to follow simple directions and fagged his follow up thank you letter as spam.

Nichols concluded:

Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers. I think it’s because they aren’t paying, they show little or no attention to directions. I focused on making the UI of the site drop dead simple and easy to use. I created a pretty thorough FAQ to answer 99.9% of the questions people might have. I even linked to the FAQ in the email response they got with their download links to the letter they created. I still had hundreds of free customers ask for help with simple questions that were answered in the FAQ.

It’s no surprise that paying customers place a higher value on their products and services than the one’s that receive it for free. But we wonder if this frustration over the freemium business model will inevitably spill over into open source search. Only time will tell.

Jasmine Ashton, January 7, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

According to the article, the Aadhaar project is a 12-digit individual identification number issued in behalf of the Indian Government by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Each number is unique, will remain valid for life, and serves as a proof of identity and address anywhere in India.

In addition to being the largest attempt at e-governance of its kind, this project is also unique because the FOSS technology team has indicated a preference towards open standards and open-source.

Regunath Balasubramanian, principal architect of the UIDAI project, explains why open source software (OSS) became the first choice for the project:

The primary technical requirements of the project were of scale and vendor neutrality at all levels. FOSS helped us achieve vendor-neutrality in many of our application components, which is very important for an initiative of national importance. The use of open standards has encouraged multi-vendor participation. This has driven costs down and improved the quality.

It is exciting to see the government of India utilizing open source technology to help address the issues facing its people. Open source in 2012 seems poised to be increasingly disruptive in a large market which existing US and European vendors have to find a way to penetrate. Challenge ahead.

Jasmine Ashton, January 6, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

If you’re interested in open source issues, check out this quality write up: “Lucene & Solr Year 2011 in Review” at the Sematext Blog http://blog.sematext.com/ . This is a thorough account of the important 2011 moments in Lucene and Solr history. The article notes:

This year saw numerous changes and additions both in Lucene and Solr.  As a matter of fact, we’d venture to say we saw more changes in Lucene & Solr this year than in any one year before.  In that sense, both projects are very much like wine – getting better with time.

See the write up for the whole listing, but some highlights include: near real-time search; field collapsing; the ability to model parent-child relationship in indices; and broad language support. The piece also has kind words for Solr’s Extended Dismaz query parser and SolrCloud.

Apache has had a good year with both Lucene and Solr. Will there be even more on the list this time next year? We anticipate significant open source activity in 2012.

Cynthia Murrell, January 6, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The blogger reports:

They (Elsevier) haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material.

Splash page of arxiv.org shows the seal of Cornell University and the phrase “We gratefully acknowledge supporting institutions. See http://arxiv.org/

Social media and copyright are inherently opposing concepts. User-submitted material, as it is referred to above, will almost always infringe upon copyright. In fact, very few submissions aside from the users own thoughts and words will not infringe upon copyright. If the legislators supporting SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) make good on all their promises, eventual showdowns with social media heavy hitters like Facebook or YouTube could occur.

American copyright was established by the founding fathers in our constitution to balance the protection of intellectual property with the ability to foster creativity and innovation. However, copyright has evolved in the modern era into a blanket protection policy, primarily serving corporations. Libraries and other institutions of learning champion the cause of open access, but even these civic organizations are threatened by corporate lobbyists in their constant quest to have copyright protection extended tighter and longer.

Original American copyright protected works for 14 years, with one optional renewal if the creator was still alive. Now, countless revisions later, copyright protection extends to the life of the author plus 70 years for individuals, and 120 years past origination for corporate authors. Legislation like SOPA is just one more step toward stifling creativity and controlling information for the sake of a profit.

In the case of academic literature, academics and librarians are moving toward open access journals and institutional repositories in an attempt to stop the information bottleneck of academic publishing.

Back to the Quantum Pontiff:

We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine. There is another concrete way to stand up for open access. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has requested comments on the question of public access to federally-funded scientific research.

If open access is cause of interest to you, let the White House hear your opinion. Tell them a librarian sent you, and that she did her research on Wikipedia.

Emily Rae Aldridge, MLS, January 3, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Is this a retelling of the Santa Claus myth? InfoWorld describes “How HP and Open Source Can Save WebOS.” Familiar with WebOS? Me, neither. Apparently, it debuted in 2009 as the operating system for Palm, which HP acquired in 2010. Recently, HP was attempting to sell its Palm division, including WebOS.

Now, the company suddenly declares it intends to support the platform as an open source project. Writer Neil McAllister can be excused for doubting the company’s commitment to the endeavor. The article notes:

“It seems HP may only be truly committed to the platform if it can offload the cost of developing and maintaining it. Yet if that’s what HP hopes to achieve by opening the WebOS source, it’s bound to be disappointed. Most open source projects rely on dedicated developers to set their tone and direction, not casual contributors, and effective management of an active open source community can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

Just in case HP is serious about the project, though, McAllister has some advice. For example, the company should fix the branding; the name “WebOS” is kind of silly when every OS now supports Web standards. Also, he writes, it should release plenty of code under permissive licensing, like that found under Apache or BSD.

So, is HP for real here? The cynic in me says no, but perhaps they will surprise us. Open source is a significant resource. I am not sure a community will coalesce when Android is sort of open and “good enough.”

Cynthia Murrell, Janaury 2, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com