Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

5 Ways to Get Open Source Software Support

One great irony of proprietary software is that you pay to have less freedom and flexibility than you would get if you downloaded free open source software.

That's particularly true when you consider support. If you buy a commercial software package, you're usually able to get different levels of support from the software vendor. This may be included in the license fee, or you may have to pay extra for it.

In almost all circumstances, though, you're restricted to whatever the vendor offers. If you don't like what's offered, that's just too bad.

Free Software, Free Market Dynamic

The situation is quite different with open source software, as the source code is freely available for anyone to examine and modify. Support may not be available from a vendor in the way that it is with proprietary software - although vendors such as Red Hat do provide support as part of their subscription offering - but that certainly doesn't mean it isn't available at all.

Far from it. "The way to think about it is that support is unbundled (from the software) but widely available," says Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative and founder of open source management consultancy Meshed Insights.

If you're an Oracle customer, for example, you're effectively locked in to Oracle support. If you use Apache software, on the other hand, a number of support suppliers compete on quality and price.

[ Tips: How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software ][ Counterpoint: 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software ]

It's hard, then, to avoid the fact that commercial software companies that restrict access to their source code have a monopoly on the provision of support. With open source software the polar opposite is true. "With open source, there's a free market dynamic to support," Phipps says, "and prices are controlled by the market."

This is a theme taken up by Simon Bowring, a director at open source support provider Transitiv Technologies. "We have customers who were previously using proprietary software and they were locked in. If they needed new features they had no option but to wait for the vendor to write them," he says. "With open source software, we can write code for our customers very quickly, and contribute it back to the community, if the customer agrees."

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5 Ways to Get Open Source Software Support

Results

From March 31 to April 4, Free Software desktop hackers from many of the largest desktop projects (including GNOME, KDE, Unity and LXDE-Qt) met to collaborate on specifications and tools to improve application interoperability between the desktops. Clarified standards are expected not only to improve the experience of running applications designed for one desktop inside of another, but also to provide a clearer picture of what is required from third party application developers approaching the Free Software desktop for the first time.

This was the second time the annual event occurred. Both times, it was sponsored and hosted by SUSE at their offices in Nuremberg.

The meeting accomplished a standardization of the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable for allowing applications to know in which desktop environment they are running. The meeting also produced the first formal specification of how applications should be associated with given mime types and URI schemes, including how to select the default application in a way appropriate to the current desktop environment, respecting the choices of the OS vendor and the local system administrator as well as the user.

Small progress was made on a simple common inhibit specification that applications can use to prevent events such as locking of the screen or powering down of the network interfaces, but with improvements on fine-grained power control capabilities on forthcoming hardware devices, additional research (and perhaps time) is required before a complete specification can be produced.

The meeting also produced an agreement on the future of startup notification in the Wayland world. A protocol based on broadcast of D-Bus signals will be used instead of the current approach with X client messages. This approach is expected to integrate nicely with future frameworks for sandboxed applications. Improvements were also made to the protocol to allow for tab-based applications that make dynamic choices about creating a new tab or a new window depending on the workspace in which a document was opened.

The introduction of the long-awaited "Implements=" key in desktop files was also finalized. This is used to express support of a given interface by an application. Among other things, this is expected to be used to advertise supporters of the provider side in a future "portals" system for exchanging data between sandboxed applications.

Also discussed was the possibility of defining a "resource base" for desktop files so that application resources such as icons can be accessed without being merged into the 'hicolor' icon theme. The lack of certainty over how future sandboxing approaches would deal with this situation prevented any progress on this point.

There were significant cleanups of the xdg specifications (and their build system) and to deal with bug backlog on some freedesktop components such as the shared-mime-info database.

The meeting was also used to discuss details of the API of the forthcoming memfd interface in the kernel that will be used to support efficient sending of very large kdbus messages. kdbus and GVariant were also discussed, as were the desktop file index and systemd support for time-based activation of applications that want to exit when idle (such as alarm clocks). The possibility of standardizing the new notification interface based on D-Bus activatable applications was also briefly discussed.

After the meeting, work continues on publishing updated specifications and writing implementations. The meeting is expected to happen again, in 2015.

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Results

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