Archive for May, 2010

Andrew Katz has asked us to pass on details of the above event. Apologies for the short notice!

Andrew Katz, partner at Moorcrofts, and a former programmer himself, will be giving a brief presentation on the practical steps that companies can take to avoid the “viral” issues that many people perceive to be an issue with open source software, and will demonstrate that by taking some simple steps, companies can take advantage of the vast pool of high quality software code and use it to their own commercial advantage, after which he and the rest of the Moorcrofts team will be available to discuss the issues, and there will also be an opportunity to network over a pint and some nibbles.

When

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 6:00 PM (GMT+0100)

Where

George and Dragon The Causeway (Lower High Street)
SL7 2AA Marlow
United Kingdom

Further details at http://moorcrofts.eventbrite.com/

4th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE CERTIFICATION

Location and date

Pisa, Italy – 17-18 September 2010
Satellite Event to SEFM 2010

Website

http://opencert.iist.unu.edu/

Submission deadline

28 June, 2010

News

A special issue of Science of Computer Programming with selected papers is planned.
A final decision on this issue depends on the number and quality of the submissions.

CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on
the way software systems and and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed.
Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs,
as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL serve, among many other examples,
as a testimony to its success and resilience.

However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed
development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly
hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and
the managerial points of view.

This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength
applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and
a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods in software analysis and engineering.

In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry
who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open source software projects, ultimately leading
to the establishment of coherent certification processes, at different levels.

Following the success of the three previous editions (colocated to ETAPS’07, in Braga, and OSS’08,
at IFIP WCC, in Milan, and ETAPS’09, in York), the workshop will focus on formal methods and
model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate OSS certification.
Both foundational, methodological and pragmatic issues will be addressed, through both standard
technical communications and reports on concrete case-studies and experimental data.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification, integrating
techniques and elements from areas as different as

• product and process certification
• certification standards
• formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving)
• software quality and reverse engineering
• static analysis, testing and inspection
• safety, security and usability certification
• language design and evolving systems
• automated source code analyses
• empirical studies

SUBMISSION

The two-day workshop will feature invited talks, a pannel discussion and contributed
paper presentations. All contributions, in the form of either full technical papers,
between 10 and 16 pages, or short position papers, will undergo a peer-review process.
All papers should be written in English and in ECEASST format.

Detailed information on the submission procedure are available at http://opencert.iist.unu.edu

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be published in Electronic Communications of the EASST (ECEASST)
A special issue of Science of Computer Programming with selected papers is planned.
A final decision on this issue depends on the number and quality of the submissions.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Abstract submission: 21 June, 2010
• Paper submission deadline: 28 June, 2010
• Acceptance notification: 27 July, 2010
• Final version due: 14 August, 2010

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• B. Aichernig, Graz, Austria
• A. Abdurahmanovic, PrimeKey, Sweden
• L. Barbosa, Minho, Portugal (co-chair)
• A. Capiluppi, East London, UK
• A. Cerone, UNU-IIST, Macau, SAR China (co-chair)
• G. Ciobanu, A.I. Cuza, Romania
• E. Damiani, Milano, Italy
• J. Davies, Oxford, UK
• R. di Cosmo, Paris Diderot, France
• F. Fabbrini, ISTI-CNR, Italy
• M. J. Frade, Minho, Portugal
• J. Fisteus, Madrid Carlos III, Spain
• D. Ghica, Birmingham, UK
• T. Janowski, UNU-IIST, Macau, SAR China
• P. Krishnan, Bond, Australia
• P. Milazzo, Pisa, Italy
• J. Miranda, Multicert, Portugal
• J. Noll, LERO, Ireland
• A. Petrenko, ISP-RAS, Russia
• S. Pickin, Madrid Carlos III, Spain
• S. Shaikh, Coventry, UK (co-chair)
• S. K. Sowe, UNU-MERIT, The Netherlands
• R. Treinen, Paris Diderot, France
• J. Visser, SIG, The Netherlands
• D. von Oheimb, Siemens, Germany
• T. Vos, UP Valencia, Spain
• A. Wasserman, CMU, USA

CONTACTS

opencert-2010@iist.unu.edu

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Zenoss provides comprehensive Open Source network and systems management and uses a Commercial Open Source business model.

Jane Curry has been working with Zenoss for two years after a long background with IBM Tivoli products. She was made a Zenoss Master by Zenoss Inc. in February 2009. She will introduce Zenoss to the audience through a combination of presentation and demos.

This Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) event is free and open to all and will be held at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf)) on Friday 21st May 2010, from 1800 to 2030.

Free buffet and refreshments available on the night.

To book a place to attend this event please contact Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

Jane’s presentation intends to show that with Zenoss you can monitor all your servers and network devices:

* Know when a critical device goes down
* Alert operations staff when urgent action is needed
* Know how much traffic is flowing on critical network links
* Know how hard your servers are working
* Watch load trends and plan for the future
* Verify SLA compliance

Zenoss has a web interface so you can use it from anywhere. It uses industry-standard protocols like SNMP, ssh and WMI so it can monitor almost anything – Windows, Linux, Cisco, HP and more. There is an extension mechanism so it can adapt to new requirements.

The core functionality is available free of charge so you can get started with no risk. A fully-supported commercial version is available for Enterprise deployments. Zenoss is an excellent replacement for products like IBM NetView, HP Openview, and Nagios.

In the style of the BBC program “Question Time”, join us for an evening of Q & A on Open Source software.The Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) joins forces with BCS Bedford – for an entertaining evening debating this hot topic. Is Linux the answer to everything? Can Open Source software provide a real viable alternative in the business world?

A panel of “experts” detailed below will be available to answer your questions and adjudicating events will be the OSSG Chair, Mark Elkins. If you have a question please submit this before the event to mark_elkins@bcs.org although, just like the real program, we will take some questions on the night.

Click on this link to Register for this event

Time – 7pm for 7:30pm start

Location – Room J110, First Floor, Vicarage Street Campus, Vicarage Street, University of Bedfordshire, Luton LU1 3JU. Use Mall (Arndale) shopping centre car park (free from 6pm)

Directions – http://www.beds.ac.uk/contactus/directions

Contact details: Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

Panelists

Jane Curry a consultant with 29 years experience in operating systems, communications and systems management. Highly experienced in many business sectors with an IT skill-set ranging from microcomputers to mainframes. An IBM Certified Tivoli Consultant and Instructor dedicated to providing high quality systems and network management consultancy with a commitment to education and training. More recently, Jane has been working with Open Source systems management offerings such as Zenoss, OpenNMS and Nagios and was recently awarded the title of “Zenoss Master” by Zenoss Inc. A professional member of the British Computer Society well versed in educating others regarding technical roles in business computing. Jane is also very interested in promoting IT as a career, especially for women. To this end, she is a Science Engineering Technology (SET) Ambassador and has acted as mentor to a female postgraduate student in the IT department at Oxford Brookes University.

Peter Dawes-Huish, CEO for LinuxIT, has been part of CRN’s A-List for two years in a row and is a member of the Society of Industry Leaders (SIL). In 2006 LinuxIT was chosen ‘IT Services Supplier of the Year’ at the Computing Awards for Excellence. LinuxIT helps companies throughout Europe by delivering IT consulting, technology and support services through the integration of Open Source solutions.

Michael Kay develops the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor for manipulating XML; he is the founder of Saxonica, which develops and licenses both the open source and commercial versions of the product. Both versions have a large user base, including many high-throughput and high-profile applications especially in publishing and financial services. As an open source project there are probably two distinctive features worth noting about Saxon: the fact that the software (200K lines of code) is almost entirely developed by one person, and the successful use of a dual-licensing business model. Before starting the development of Saxon ten years ago, Michael was an ICL Fellow, having spent nearly 25 years with ICL as a software product designer and in a variety of other systems architecture and senior engineering roles. As well as developing Saxon, he is editor of the W3C XSLT language specification, and has written the definitive book on the language. He is a frequent conference speaker, and his contributions to the XML community were recognized in 2005 by the award of the XML Cup.

Richard Taylor is a System Architect and Technology Analyst at QinetiQ, he has a background in software systems research with a particular interest in the fields of Systems of Systems Architectures and Open Source Software.As well as doing research work he has hands on implementation experience as an Integration Architect for multi-site, multi-tier, fully redundant enterprise information systems for high transaction rate Internet applications. Richard has been advising the MOD and central government on Open Source issues for more than a decade. He advised the OGC on the formulation of the eGif standards, was co-author of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council report into Open Source Software and part of the QinetiQ team that helped to develop the UK government policy on use of Open Source Software. His main area of research has focused on achieving desired emergent properties in large scale Systems of Systems through novel architectural assessment approaches that can be applied in the public sector acquisition cycle. He has worked with organisations to exploit an appreciation of the emergent properties of complex Systems of Systems to achieve enterprise goals through the practical application of IS policy. He is also a developer of Open Source software including contributions to a number of projects and he helps to run the PyConUK and EuroPython Python programming language conferences.