powdermonkey

Open Source as Business Model

Article about how some companies are making public their source code as an attempt to gain competitive advatage:
Open source: The newest competitive tool

  A few years ago, releasing once-secret source code to the public would have been a highly unusual first move for a company with a newly acquired software product line.

But that's exactly what Integrated Computer Solutions is announcing this week with the Project.net project management software it bought Jan. 1. And it's a move that today is downright ordinary. Open-source software has become not only increasingly mainstream, but it's also often a way for a company to gain advantage over a proprietary rival with a close guard over its software's underlying instructions.

Biowar for Dummies

the tech will get out there...
Biowar for Dummies:  How hard is it to build your own weapon of mass destruction?  We take a crash course in supervirus engineering to find out.

Anthrax. Smallpox. Ebola. For thriller  writers and policy crusaders, biological warfare was a standard what-if scenario long before anyone mailed anthrax to government and media offices in 2001. Pentagon war games like Dark Winter, held just before 9/11, and this year’s Atlantic Storm suggested that terrorists could unleash germs with the killing power of a nuclear weapon.

 

Scientists, though, have always been skeptical. Only massive, state-sponsored  programs—not terrorist cells or lone kooks—pose a plausible threat, they say. As the head of the Federation of American Scientists working group on bioweapons put it in a 2002 Los Angeles Times op-ed: “A significant bioterror attack today would require the support of a national program to succeed.”

Army leans toward Linux for FCS

about time, versus trying to build commodity tech from scratch:
"The Army is leaning toward Linux as the operating system for the service’s Future Combat System (FCS) program.

The Army said it believes Linux running on Intel-based computers provides the best common operating environment and central processing unit for computers in FCS. The Linux-Intel solution works best with the service’s current and future applications, said Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, the Army’s program manager for the FCS Brigade Combat Team."

Army leans toward Linux for FCS, thanks Roger
 

Open source's other advantage

Great post about open source software and how the structure of an organization influences software behavior and characteristics: Open source's other advantage, by nicholasgcarr.com

If you compare the way software is developed under an open-source approach and a traditional proprietary approach, you might reasonably conclude that both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses - and that those strengths and weaknesses spring from the very different organizational models they use. An open-source project has the advantage of mobilizing a whole lot of eyeballs: getting many different programmers with different perspectives and backgrounds - many of whom are also actual users of the software - to contribute to solving problems, adding features, and fine-tuning the code. But it has the disadvantage of relatively weak coordination - the programmers are usually at a distance from one another, which impedes collaboration. A proprietary project, by contract, has the advantage of rich collaboration - the programmers typically work for the same company, have the same bosses, go to the same meetings, and are even in the same building. On the other hand, the team is smaller and more homogeneous and probably not as tightly connected to the users of the software - there are a lot fewer eyeballs.

Krugle Update

update of Krugle, search for open source code: Developers can use Google and other search engines to find source code, but it's not easy. A Silicon Valley startup claims to have come up with a better alternative -- a search engine for source code and code-related information.

The tool, known as Krugle, is designed to deliver easy access to source code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, clean, easy-to-use interface, according to the company. Krugle works by crawling, parsing, and indexing code found in open source repositories and code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and Web pages.

It's based on a combination of open-source and proprietary technology, according to the company.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6361290460.html

Real Estate Look-up Mash-up: Zillow

very cool new web 2.0 start-up, mashes together GoogleMaps and real estate listings. A little slow from overuse, but give it a spin: Zillow

Open Source Geospatial Foundation Started

Good news for the GIS community: "After spending a full day in a hotel conference room in Chicago, the twenty five attendees at the "MapServer Foundation" meeting and many peers participating via Internet Relay Chat (IRC, a way of sharing typed comments via a group) and listening in via phone, offer up good news: there is enough common ground to set up a foundation and quite a lot of agreement on how to move forward. That's not to say every possible issue is ironed out, but a solid vision and structure was created in what's being called an "exciting and historic day for open source GIS." "

Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Krugle: Search for Open Source Code

Interesting start-up: Krugle, developing a search tool for code snippets:

findcode/findanswers/krugle makes it easy for developers to find source code and technical information—fast! enablesyou/01/to quickly find and review source code 02/find code related technical information 03/save, annotate and share your search results with others...all from within a single, easy-to-use, web application. learn more » Krugle.com

I think we'll be seeing more and more companies coming out focusing on search for various communities of interest.

DShield is Open Source

pretty funny:

"A little over a week ago the President of the United States visited the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland.  The visit came on the heels of allegations that domestic eavesdropping laws were broken, and that the administration had exceeded its authorized powers.  We aren't going to pick sides on that one but there was a really nice photo that showed up in the Washington Post as part of the story that we should all be proud.
- Super-secret spy agency sensor grid - $Billions
- Security for a visit from the President of the United States - $Millions
- Showing the President that your prime source of information is a bunch of volunteers - PRICELESS!

[The DShield is] the result of thousands of volunteers around the globe running sensors that feed information about data flows to a central database repository.  From there, DShield can detect early indications of new threat tools, worm activity, and other malicious trends.  It's no wonder that the NSA likes showing it off to the President!  But to make it work we need more volunteers. "
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1097

The map the President was standing in front of: http://securitywizardry.com/radar.htm

The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs

Really highly recomended reading: Article about the future of military affairs, weapons systems and national security:

The Counterrevolution  in Military Affairs
Fashionable thinking about defense ignores the great threats of our time.
by Ralph Peters 02/06/2006, Volume 011, Issue 20

REVOLUTIONS NOTORIOUSLY IMPRISON THEIR MOST committed supporters. Intellectually, influential elements within our military are locked inside the cells of the Revolution in Military Affairs--the doctrinal cult of the past decade that preaches that technological leaps will transcend millennia-old realities of warfare. Our current conflicts have freed the Pentagon from at least some of the nonsensical theories of techno-war, but too many of our military and civilian leaders remain captivated by the notion that machines can replace human beings on the battlefield. Chained to their 20th-century successes, they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities. Meanwhile, our enemies, immediate and potential, appear to grasp the contours of future war far better than we do.

From Iraq's Sunni Triangle to China's military high command, the counterrevolution in military affairs is well underway. We are seduced by what we can do; our enemies focus on what they must do. We have fallen so deeply in love with the means we have devised for waging conceptual wars that we are blind to their marginal relevance in actual wars. Terrorists, for one lethal example, do not fear "network-centric warfare" because they have already mastered it for a tiny fraction of one cent on the dollar, achieving greater relative effects with the Internet, cell phones, and cheap airline tickets than all of our military technologies have delivered. Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists, insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork sort remains the soldier or Marine; yet, confronted with reality's bloody evidence, we simply pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems we adore--purchased at the expense of the assets we need.

Stubbornly, we continue to fantasize that a wondrous enemy will appear who will fight us on our own terms, as a masked knight might have materialized at a stately tournament in a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Yet, not even China--the threat beloved of major defense contractors and their advocates--would play by our rules if folly ignited war. Against terrorists, we have found technology alone incompetent to master men of soaring will--our own flesh and blood provide the only effective counter. At the other extreme, a war with China, which our war gamers blithely assume would be brief, would reveal the quantitative incompetence of our forces. An assault on a continent-spanning power would swiftly drain our stocks of precision weapons, ready pilots, and aircraft. Quality, no matter how great, is not a reliable substitute for a robust force in being and deep reserves that can be mobilized rapidly....