Linux Is Ready

The Federal Government has released a new version of its AUSkey authentication software that promises to support Linux software packages for the first time.

As previously reported on iTnews, Treasury was working with Linux Australia to make its AUSkey and Standard Business Reporting (SBR) systems compatible with open source platforms.

AUSkey was launched in April and intended to be a single authenticator for businesses in their dealings with 11 government agencies, including the Offices of State Revenue, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and the Australian Taxation Office.

The ATO previously deemed Linux too “cost-prohibitive” to support, with deputy commissioner Bettina Konti estimating Linux users to comprise only one percent of Australian business users.

But it has now announced that the AUSkey registration, download and installation process had been successfully tested with Ubuntu 10.04 and Firefox 3.6, and may also work with other versions of the software.

“The latest release will assist software developers to integrate AUSkey into their financial and accounting software packages for Linux users,” the tax office announced.

However, “if you are a Linux user, having an AUSkey may not automatically guarantee Linux-based access to the government online services that accept AUSkey.”

Users that wish to identify agencies that accept AUSkey should select “Where AUSkey accepted” from the left-hand navigation menu of www.abr.gov.au/auskey.

Only the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Business Register currently accept AUSkey for their online services.

Oracle has unveiled the open source-based Oracle Cloud Office – a suite of business applications based on the ODF format available for users over the web or on mobile devices.

The company has also updated the existing open source Open Office suite, featuring a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet application, a presentation application and a graphics programme, to version 3.3.

Oracle inherited the sponsorship of Open Office when it acquired Sun Microsystems at the start of the year. It has now chosen to revamp the suite and make it available both online and on mobiles, claiming it would enable users to “significantly improve productivity, reduce costs and achieve greater innovation across the enterprise.”

Businesses wanting to take on the suite will have the choice of keeping the application on premise or accessing it through a software as a service (SaaS) model.

“Oracle Cloud Office and Oracle Open Office 3.3 deliver complete, open and cost-effective office productivity suites that are designed and optimised for our customers’ needs,” said Michael Bemmer, vice president of Oracle Office.

“Customers now have the flexibility to support users across a wide variety of devices and platforms, whether via desktop, private or public cloud.”

As Kevin McEntee, Netflix’s VP of Systems & ECommerce Engineering explained on a recent blog posting, Why we use and contribute to open source software, “Our budget, measured in dollars, time, people, and energy, is limited and we must therefore focus our technology development efforts on that streaming video software that clearly differentiates Netflix and creates delight for our customers. These limits require that we stand on the shoulders of giants who have solved technology challenges shared in common by all companies that operate at Internet scale. I’m really just articulating the classical build vs. buy trade off that everyone deals with when developing software.”

McEntree continued, “We do utilize some commercial software but there is often the alternative choice of utilizing open source software, preferably open source software that implements an open standard. Open source software projects often originate as a labor of love by software developers who are tired of seeing a shared problem solved over and over again in one off solutions, or perhaps they realize that they can offer a more simple and elegant alternative to a commercial product. The great thing about a good open source project that solves a shared challenge is that it develops its own momentum and it is sustained for a long time by a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. At Netflix we jumped on for the ride a long time ago and we have benefited enormously from the virtuous cycles of actively evolving open source projects. We benefit from the continuous improvements provided by the community of contributors outside of Netflix. We also benefit by contributing back the changes we make to the projects. By sharing our bug fixes and new features back out into the community, the community then in turn continues to improve upon bug fixes and new features that originated at Netflix and then we complete the cycle by bring those improvements back into Netflix.”

That’s about a good summing up as I’ve ever read about why open-source software and development is good for business.

The Linux Foundation has published its third annual report about Linux kernel authorship. The statistics included in the paper illustrate growth trends in the kernel development process and provide insight into how the labor is distributed among individual contributors and corporate sponsors. The kernel has seen modest growth in its base of contributors over the past year, though the rate of development has seen a marginal decline.

The latest version of the Linux kernel currently consists of approximately 13 million lines of code across over 33,000 files. The rate of development peaked with version 2.6.30 last year, which saw an average of 6.40 patches per hour. The rate declined to an average of 5.30 patches per hour in version 2.6.35.

The Linux Foundation attributes the decrease to a shift in focus from heavy development to stabilization on major components like GEM and ext4 that are reaching maturity. The merging of the staging tree into the mainline kernel (read our coverage of 2.6.28 for more details) inflated the volume of new code that was added last year, thus contributing to the appearance of a decline in activity this year. An informed analysis of the statistics indicates that the Linux kernel development community is still healthy, vibrant, and diverse.

The Linux Foundation report highlights the kernel’s top individual and corporate contributors. Between version 2.6.30 and 2.6.35, approximately 19 percent of kernel development was done by independent contributors with no corporate affiliation. These volunteers collectively contribute more code than any single corporation that funds kernel development. The undisputed top corporate contributor is Red Hat, whose employees are responsible for 12 percent of the kernel changes that were made between .30 and .35. The next most prolific corporate contributors during that time period are Intel with 7.8 percent, Novell with 5 percent, and IBM with 4.8 percent.

Although Google uses Linux as a base for its Android and Chrome OS mobile platforms, the search giant’s number of contributions over the past year are somewhat low relative to other mobile companies. Google’s contributions account for 0.7 percent of the changes made to the kernel between .30 and .35. By comparison, Nokia’s contributions represent 2.3 percent of the changes during the same period. Texas Instruments contributed 1.5 percent and Samsung contributed 0.6 percent.

These numbers are based largely on commit count and don’t necessarily provide a crystal clear representation of a corporate contributor’s significance in the Linux ecosystem. It’s worth noting, for example, that despite a low commit count over the past year, Google employs some key kernel developers like Andrew Morton and Ted Ts’o.

Although a lot of the work on the kernel is being done by a small handful of companies, the Linux Foundation estimates that over 500 total companies are participating in Linux development in some capacity. Novell, which is undergoing a pending acquisition by Attachmate, is one of the most active participants. It’s unclear if Novell’s prolific kernel activity will continue in the coming year as it is integrated into Attachmate’s business. We might see a decline in the numbers in next year’s report if Attachmate doesn’t share Novell’s commitment to upstream kernel development.

Readers might be surprised to learn that Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds is not among the top individual contributors. The Linux Foundation says that this is because Torvalds (who is employed by the foundation) spends an increasingly significant amount of time managing development and merging contributions from other developers rather than developing new features.

The kernel subsystem maintainers individually account for most of the effort to merge contributor patches, however, as they play a more direct role in reviewing the code that enters the kernel. Red Hat is the most prolific code reviewer, accounting for roughly 37 percent of all patch signoffs. Red Hat’s David S. Miller (who is known for his work on the network stack and his role in porting Linux to SPARC) accounts for almost 11 percent of total patch signoffs by himself.

As the Linux Foundation concludes in its report, the Linux kernel is one of the biggest and most successful open source software projects ever. Linux’s growing dominance in the consumer electronics market is attracting more corporate contributors. For additional details, you can refer to the complete report, which is available for download from the Linux Foundation’s website.