Open Source

Sony hacked again. Should go open source

Sky reports that Sony got hacked and lost some of its customers data:

Sony has once again been targeted by a group of hackers who claim they gained access to details of one million customers.

By now, I think it is obvious that Sony’s security issues are architectural. It is not a matter of firewall misconfiguration or missed out input validation check. That would have been closed and forgotten months ago. Repeated attacks and extensive downtimes of PlayStation Network indicate that the problems are much deeper and much harder to find and fix.

I think the best option for them now is to go open source. If they open the protocols they use and server software they have – plenty of people will jump on it and create alternative servers and networks. All that will be needed after that is a firmware update that would allow gamers to connect to those alternative networks.

Terminator in PHP

I’ve mentioned a few times in this blog that one particular bit I love about open source software is humor in documentation. While most commercial applications stick to a strict, official language in their manuals, open source developers often expose their humane side with jokes, references to movies, television shows and so on.

Today I came across yet another example of that. Not strictly in a software manual, but close enough. Here is a partial screenshot of a comment on PHP.net website, page about get_object_vars() function.

A well places Terminator references – how cool is that!

On Linux philosophy

Here is a brilliant passage from an article “Too Smart for Git“:

Git follows Linux’s philosophy of refusing to protect you from yourself. Much like Linux, Git will sit back and watch you f*ck your sh*t right up, and then laugh at you as you try to get your world back to a state where up is up and down is down. As far as source control goes, not a lot of people are used to this kind of free love.

Excellent!

Red Hat contributions to Gnome

Via this rant, I learned about this report, which shows who contributes the most to the Gnome project. I knew that Red Hat was doing a lot of Gnome, but I never knew how much it actually was.

Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.

Way to go, Red Hat!

Open Source Survey Results from The 451 Group

Last year I participated in the Open Source Survey ran by The 451 Group, who are well known for their analysis and research technology and business trends. Back in December they emailed me the results of the survey. Unfortunately, it sort of got lost in my mailbox and never had the time to read it. Now, cleaning up the stuff, I came across the PDF file with survey results. While parts of it are rather predictable it is still an interesting read.

Lower cost is still the top reason an organization decides to use open source software, but flexibility has become a more significant factor in recent years, and is now cited as the biggest post-adoption benefit of open source. Meanwhile, vendor lock-in appears to have become less of a concern. With nearly half of our survey respondents citing cost, we believe it will continue to be the leading factor driving consideration of open source. While flexibility, mitigation of vendor lock-in and even reliability will continue to be significant factors, the cost element is reinforced by the time-to-market and time-to-value advantages of open source software.