Stories about: CVS

Greg Royal founded Cistera Networks six years ago to provide a convergence server platform that connects a company's enterprise applications to telephone users, using voice over IP. Greg continues at Cistera as CTO and EVP, and writes a blog We spoke to Greg to discuss his company and its embrace of Linux in his industry.

Drivers tend to be a world unto themselves, with bugs only affecting a subset-often a tiny subset-of kernel users. Until a driver gets merged into the kernel though, anyone wishing to test it, or help clean it up, has to jump through some hoops. To try and help reduce those barriers, Linus Torvalds and others have been advocating early merging of drivers; getting them into the kernel and incrementally improving them from there.

Just a few years ago, the world of open source packages for generating database reports was a quiet secret shared by programmers on a deadline. Anyone could spend a few minutes linking in a library to start generating relatively clean tables filled with data pulled from an SQL database. I've personally made a few clients happy by adding JasperReports to some projects with just a bit of XML and a JAR file.

We hear from SourceForge and SourceForge.net Marketplace Vice President Mike Rudolph about the world's largest Open Source software development web site, which, as of today, claims 162,855 registered projects and 1,732,552 registered users.

Linux buffs tend to scoff at one of the major reasons that Windows users like me haven't switched yet: We don't want to give up our favorite applications. With countless open-source options, plus a rising number of commercial apps for Linux, their argument goes, we can certainly find a replacement for whatever software we're running on XP or Vista.

Professional video editing software may cost thousands of dollars but one open source project, Jahshaka, is aiming to change the game by providing all the features in a real time, networked environment. Jahshaka is a video and film compositing, editing and special effects system that uses hardware rendering to give users real time interactivity. Computerworld spoke with the project's founder, Jah Shaka, about the little application that could change the content creation game for good.

To some, vulnerability researchers such as H.D. Moore are knights in shining armor for their efforts to discover security flaws in software products. Opponents argue that the only ones being helped are the malicious attackers.

Considering that a high-end BRMS (Business Rule Management System) costs about US$50,000 just to get started, and that annual maintenance, runtime fees, and professional services can drive the total toward a hefty half-million or more, organizations on a tight budget have incentive to seek alternatives. Thankfully, good options exist. Two of the better low-or-no-cost tools are Jess from Sandia National Laboratories, and JBoss Rules from JBoss, a division of Red Hat.

In today's networked enterprise, development managers can easily harness resources from any location. Collaborative development platforms allow developers - scattered around company locations, working from home, or with partner organizations - to contribute to projects the same way they would from a central site.

The Digital Preservation team at the National Archives is looking to migrate its Xena preservation software to the new OpenDocument format with the next release of the software, in turn being the first Australian government agency to do so.

Oracle, with the newly shipping version of its free JDeveloper Java development tool, is looking to compete with the Eclipse open source juggernaut. The company is shipping an upgrade to its application server, bundled with a rules engine and an ESB (enterprise service bus).