American Fiber Systems (AFS), with headquarters in Rochester, NY, provides fiber optic network services directly to enterprises and to carrier resellers. Bill Ciminelli, vice president of network development and services for AFS, noticed that internal communications were becoming increasingly difficult because the number of mobile company workers like field technicians and salespeople was growing so fast. With an old-fashioned voice messaging system separate from email and other collaboration tools, AFS workers had to manage communications from cell phones, laptops, office workstations, and company phones. Ciminelli began looking for a solution that would move AFS into the 21st century. To his surprise, he found it in Asterisk, an open source product. (more…)
Space enthusiast and engineer Paul Wooster wants to open the source code for outer space, because, he says, it should be easier for everyone who wants to contribute to human activities in space to do so, not just people with advanced degrees in rocketry. To that end, Wooster has established DevelopSpace, a community based on open source philosophies, designed to attract anyone interested in sharing their skills in order to make more space exploration possible. (more…)
In the world of Linux, many things have changed in the last decade. The operating system itself has grown up, and is no longer an “upstart.” But one mainstay of the Linux community, the Linux user group (LUG), appears to be on the decline in some areas. Attendance is down, LUG presidents say, and some groups have stopped meeting. Does this mean we don’t need LUGs anymore? (more…)
Ten years ago, when Metadot founder and CEO Daniel Guermeur was working for a large technology company, he discovered that the Web-based content management systems he was developing were too complicated for his customers, who kept saying they needed a Web-based portal application that was easy to learn and easy to use. Guermeur wanted to provide that, but he was stymied by the closed aspect of the technologies he was developing with: with no access to the source code and long waits for product upgrades from vendors, it would be too slow and expensive to roll out more efficient solutions. So Guermeur started looking at open source. (more…)
ScienceLogic launched three years ago with a mission to bring to market an IT appliance that could monitor every aspect of a company’s network infrastructure. CEO David Link calls it “dial tone service quality,” a term that has come to mean high reliability and easy accessibility. To accomplish that mission, Link knew that open source software was the key, both internally and in ScienceLogic’s flagship product, the EM7. (more…)
Joe Brooks is your average 23-year-old capitalist and sick freak (a.k.a., fan of conservative radio talk show host Glenn Beck). He’s not a geek, but he believes free software is a “great way to create software that the average Joe can use.” Brooks proved that point recently, after becoming disgruntled with Wikipedia administrators who kept reverting posts made by Brooks and other Beck fans at the popular community encyclopedia Web site. Brooks, an open source neophyte, downloaded Mediawiki software, configured it, and started his own site called Glennpedia. Read more at Newsforge.com.
Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) is a wireless broadband service that offers throughput of up to a theoretical maximum of 2.4Mbps. Verizon’s service, which provides the best EVDO coverage in the US, is designed to work only with Windows. However, you can use Verizon’s EVDO service to connect to the Internet with Linux with a little bit of tweaking. Read more at Linux.com.
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Dapper Drake, the next Ubuntu release, is going to be different, say the developers working on the release. So different, in fact, that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has proposed a six-week delay for final polishing on the distribution that has captured the hearts of new and expert Linux users alike. Shuttleworth and the rest of the developer community surrounding Ubuntu call Dapper the first enterprise-level release. Read more at Newsforge.com.
There’s been some discussion lately about whether Ubuntu is suitable for Linux beginners. If you raise this issue, someone is sure to tout a script called Automatix as the solution to any perceived notions of the user-unfriendliness of Ubuntu. Automatix automatically installs a laundry list of applications, plugins, and utilities that are supposed to turn a barebones Ubuntu install into desktop perfection. That sounded like something I should try. I already thought Ubuntu was pretty easy to use. Although it doesn’t come out of the box with everything I need, I quickly found out how to get just about everything I needed by pointing and clicking. The Synaptic Package Manager helped me set up extra repositories, and update-notifier made it easy to get the latest version of whatever it told me I needed. (more…)
Professional Mortgage Partners in Downers Grove, Illinois, runs a technology consulting side business helping realtors set up office portals and inexpensively access the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) database through the use of open source software. Read more at Newsforge.com.
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