ACM Queue - Open Source

Opening up the Baseboard Management Controller

Jessie Frazelle — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 11:40:44 GMT

In 2011 Facebook announced the Open Compute Project to form a community around open-source designs and specifications for data center hardware. Since then, the project has expanded to all aspects of the open data center. This column focuses on the BMC and is an introduction to a complicated topic. The intention is to provide a full picture of the world of the open-source BMC ecosystem, starting with a brief overview of the BMC's role in a system, touching on security concerns around the BMC, and then diving into some of the projects that have developed in the open-source ecosystem.

Open-source Firmware

Jessie Frazelle — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 16:33:39 GMT

Open-source firmware can help bring computing to a more secure place by making the actions of firmware more visible and less likely to do harm. This article's goal is to make readers feel empowered to demand more from vendors who can help drive this change.

A Chance Gardener

George Neville-Neil — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 10:22:35 GMT

It is a very natural progression for a company to go from being a pure consumer of open source, to interacting with the project via patch submission, and then becoming a direct contributor. No one would expect a company to be a direct contributor to all the open-source projects it consumes, as most companies consume far more software than they would ever produce, which is the bounty of the open-source garden. It ought to be the goal of every company consuming open source to contribute something back, however, so that its garden continues to bear fruit, instead of rotting vegetables.

Queue Portrait: Robert Watson

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:39:27 GMT

Robert Watson is a security researcher and open source developer at the University of Cambridge looking at the hardware-software interface. He talks to us about spanning industry and academia, the importance of open source in software research, and challenges facing research that spans traditional boundaries in computer science. We also learn a bit about CPU security, and why applications, rather than operating systems, are increasingly the focus of security research. What are the challenges in the evolving hardware-software interface? Could open source hardware provide a platform for hardware-software research? And why is current hardware part of the problem? George Neville-Neil, Queue's Kode Vicious, interviews Robert to learn about an exciting computer science research project at Cambridge.

KV the Loudmouth

George V. Neville-Neil — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 10:57:58 GMT

KV the Loudmouth

A koder with attitude, KV answers your questions. Miss Manners he ain’t.

To buy or to build, that is the question. Of course, it’s rarely that cut and dried, so this month Kode Vicious takes time to explore this question and some of its many considerations. He also weighs in on the validity of the ongoing operating system wars. Have an equally controversial query? Put your thoughts in writing and shoot an e-mail to kv@acmqueue.com.

Dear KV,
I was somewhat disappointed in your response to Unclear Peer in the December/January 2006/2007 issue of ACM Queue. You answered the question, but I feel you missed an opportunity to look at the problem and perhaps expand Unclear’s professional horizons.

Thread Scheduling in FreeBSD 5.2

Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:38:01 GMT

Thread Scheduling in FreeBSD 5.2

To help get a better handle on thread scheduling, we take a look at how FreeBSD 5.2 handles it.

MARSHALL KIRK McKUSICK, CONSULTANT

GEORGE V. NEVILLE-NEIL, CONSULTANT

Desktop Linux: Where Art Thou?

Bart Decrem — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:26:19 GMT

Desktop Linux: Where Art Thou?

Bart Decrem, Open Source Applications Foundation

Catching up, meeting new challenges, moving ahead

Linux on the desktop has come a long way—and it’s been a roller-coaster ride. At the height of the dot-com boom, around the time of Red Hat’s initial public offering, people expected Linux to take off on the desktop in short order. A few years later, after the stock market crash and the failure of a couple of high-profile Linux companies, pundits were quick to proclaim the stillborn death of Linux on the desktop.

Then a funny thing happened: the GNOME and KDE desktop environments kept getting better, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org reached their 1.0 milestones, and a new batch of Linux desktop companies sprang up (Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris). Rumors of the death of Linux on the desktop had been greatly exaggerated. Over the past year, a steady stream of new developments and announcements has added to the desktop Linux drumbeat. Perhaps most important, big IT companies, including Novell and Sun Microsystems, have placed bets on desktop Linux.

There's No Such Thing as a Free (Software) Lunch

Jay Michaelson — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:25:00 GMT

There's no such thing as a free (software) lunch

Jay Michaelson, Wasabi Systems

What every developer should know about open source licensing

“The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software to make sure the software is free for all its users.”1 So begins the GNU General Public License, or GPL, which has become the most widely used of open source software licenses. Freedom is the watchword—it’s no coincidence that the organization that wrote the GPL is called the Free Software Foundation—and that open source developers everywhere proclaim, “Information wants to be free.”

As the GPL indicates two paragraphs later, however, “To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.”2 As most open source software developers know, this means that, in practice, the GPL is actually one of the less “free” software licenses out there because it requires anyone who modifies a GPL’d program to make the program’s code freely available, if the program is “distributed” to others.

IS THE SKY FALLING?

Is Open Source Right for You?: A Fictional Case Study of Open Source in a Commercial Software Shop

David Ascher — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:23:51 GMT

Is Open Source Right for You?

A fictional case study of open source in a commercial software shop

David Ascher, Activestate

The media often present open source software as a direct competitor to commercial software. This depiction, usually pitting David (Linux) against Goliath (Microsoft), makes for fun reading in the weekend paper. However, it mostly misses the point of what open source means to a development organization.

In this article, I use the experiences of GizmoSoft (a fictitious software company) to present some perspectives on the impact of open source software usage in a software development shop. My intention is to help managers, architects, and developers answer these questions:

Open Source to the Core

Jordan Hubbard — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:22:05 GMT

Open Source to the Core

John Hubbard, Apple Computer

Using open source in real-world software products: The good, the bad and the ugly

The open source development model is not exactly new. Individual engineers have been using open source as a collaborative development methodology for decades. Now that it has come to the attention of upper and middle management, however, it’s finally being openly acknowledged as a commercial engineering force-multiplier and important option for avoiding significant software development costs.

To put it another way, what object-oriented programming often promises in terms of encouraging “code re-use,” open source software is definitely delivering. This does not come without certain costs and potential pitfalls, of course. This article describes the open source adoption process at a typical commercial software operation and discusses some of the more important checklist items that any evaluation of open source as an engineering option should include.