August 2012 Archives

Could open source financial analysis software shake up Wall Street?

This is what financial analyst Marc Joffe is hoping as he champions his new open-source methodology for rating sovereign debt.

Insurgent (open source) guerrillas

Working for San Francisco based Public Sector Credit Solutions, Joffe has produced a piece of software called the Public Sector Credit Framework (PSCF). He is now calling on insurgent guerrillas from the open source community to help perfect this simulation model.

Joffe claims that major credit rating agencies who provide fixed income investors with analysis and guidance as they decide which debt instruments to buy or sell only provide "limited insight" into exactly how the analysis they produce is derived.

This means that investors (like you and me) would so generally be putting their cash forward based largely on faith.

NOTE: A credit rating agency (CRA) is a company that assigns credit ratings for issuers of certain types of debt obligations as well as the debt instruments themselves. In some cases, the servicers of the underlying debt are also given ratings. Credit rating agencies often rate credits with proprietary, black box models; or in the case of government issuers, with no models at all.

European sovereign debt crisis

Joffe asks, "Rating agencies played a major role in the 2008 collapse of the municipal bond insurance industry in the U.S. and are now key players in the European sovereign debt crisis -- so are these agencies the best source of information when predicting something as critical as the next government default?"

"PSCF is hoped to enable analysts to perform multi-year fiscal simulations that go beyond traditional single-scenario analysis of debt-to-GDP ratios. Analysts can consider a variety of ratios (such as the interest expense-to-revenue ratios), and create budget projections that incorporate socioeconomic factors such as the impact of an aging population on social insurance costs," he said.

This approach supports thorough analysis by making use of all the budget, economic and demographic data and forecasts available from governments and private forecasters.

The question of course now is, will it work?

Let's look at the facts, PSCF is open source and this model is promised to be "completely transparent" -- it is available free of charge.

Unlike proprietary models used elsewhere, Joffe is adamant that there is no chance to "fudge the numbers" (as he puts it) or quietly revise methodologies to cover up modelling errors.

Social network Twitter has signed up as a member of the Linux Foundation.

The non-profit Linux consortium welcomes the social network on the back of its extensive use of Linux servers and other open technologies in its data centres and operational office headquarters.

The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson for Linux and generates original research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform.

The foundation itself relies on corporate sponsorship from a variety of IT vendors who manufacture and ultimately profit from commercially supported versions of open source software.

Reports suggest that Twitter has joined as a "silver member" for a mere US$15,000 or just less than £10,000. Good news then for the group as it eyes its annual LinixCon convention scheduled for next week in San Diego from August 29-31.

Twitter open source manager Chris Aniszczyk has Tweeted the following:

"... it's been in the works for awhile... press is coinciding with #LinuxCon next week, that is all, we sponsored@TheASF (The official Twitter feed of The Apache Software Foundationhttp://www.apache.org/) months ago!'

Twitter has already got its open source credentials over and above its use of Linux-based servers, the company uses MySQL as its database of choice for tweet storage and also uses the free and open source Memcached distributed memory object caching system to the extent that it has even developed its own (publically available) fork known as Twemcache.

Twitter is also said to be a user of other open source technologies including the Iago load generator testing service, the Zipkin distributed tracing system and the Scalding Scala library.

Below image courtesy of the Twitter Engineering Blog.

Big Data is becoming an increasingly important and sensitive factor in terms of every large firm's ability to pinpoint and control their competitive advantage. Managing Big Data and analysing it correctly takes the skill of a modern day Sherlock Holmes...

So in the news this week we hear rumblings from Jaspersoft. The company is offering free business intelligence (BI) training for users who want to deploy the Hadoop open-source data-intensive distributed applications software framework.

The new training offer is presented through Big Data University, an online on-demand educational site established by IBM that offers Hadoop and Big Data training courses.

Jaspersoft says that skills needed to work with big data proficiently are "reporting and analytics" -- and that with these talents on board users will better understand big data and be able to use it to improve business performance.

Impediments to adoption

Managing and analysing large and complex data sets needs special skills among a firm's staff base. Lack of skills in this area has been labeled as an "impediment to adoption".

But Big Data management requires more than Hadoop skills, so the university offers additional courses in analytics, database and data integration.

The first Jaspersoft training module to be offered is "Hadoop Reporting and Analysis" and it is available now. Additional BI for Hadoop training modules will be available in the coming months.

"As an open source company, Jaspersoft understands the importance of helping the Hadoop community and we are delighted to offer free business intelligence training," said Karl Van den Bergh, VP of technology and alliances at Jaspersoft.

"After completing this free Big Data University training, even more people can realize fast insights from their data through our industry-leading suite that provides easy reporting, analytics, and dashboards."

IBM Big Data evangelist James Kobielus lists information on this subject on his 'Big Data Hub' blog quoting IBM distinguished engineer Stephen Brodsky.

Brodsky suggests that the data scientist is the 21st century Sherlock Holmes and that in the future, we may have Data Science as a college degree.

"Quantitative decision making will increasingly be based on Data Science. Economies with more Sherlock Holmes/Data Scientists will have significant competitive advantage. With a mix of domain expertise and analytics skills you can turn data into the right insights. Analytical skills will be important - data analysis as well as data structures in comp science study. Probability and Statistics as well as Machine Learning will be great core skills," predicted Brodsky.

STORY REACTION:

Upon posting this story, the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider received the below reaction from Geoffrey Taylor, head of academic programme, SAS UK & Ireland.

"No-one disputes the potential of Big Data, but a more important question is: do organisations have the skills to turn this tide of data into economic opportunity? My own experience confirms widely held views that there is a huge chasm between the amount of people needed to analyse data, and the amount of talent trained in the art of doing so."

"Consider the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University - the first of its kind. On average, each member of the class of 2011 had 14 interviews and two job offers, and the average base salary offer was $81,500. In a tough job market, this illustrates the increasing demand for those trained in high performance analytics."

"The problem is deep rooted and we must 'catch them young' by encouraging uptake of STEM subjects in schools if we are to ensure that the UK can compete on the world stage. Working with businesses and government to base syllabuses around the applications and software used in real-life scenarios will help give students a head start when it comes to gaining employment in an information age. Equally, the onus should also be on universities to provide courses that are fit for purpose; making sure their courses are aligned to the needs of the marketplace."

Microsoft has opened its door to a greater proportion of open source technologies and open standards, specifically within its Office 2013 suite of 'productivity' applications.

Office 2013 will now offer 'full support' for the Open Document Format (ODF), variants of Open XML and for PDF formats.

The news was broken by principal program manager lead for Office standards Jim Thatcher. "[The next version of Office]... will support strict Open XML and Transitional Open XML, ISO 32000 (PDF) and OASIS ODF 1.2.," he said.

With OpenOffice and LibreOffice both having backed ODF for some time now, one wonders if the greater weight of pressure from industry also supporting the standard (IBM and Oracle to name two) has finally brought the 'suits' in Redmond to a new open realisation.

NOTE: RedmondDeveloper reports Microsoft's Thatcher claiming that it was the ISO/IEC organisation that created the dual "strict" and "transitional" Open XML standards. So today, although the strict version is not reliant upon Microsoft-specific data types, full support for both types will feature.

Industry comments suggest that this move towards openness with relation to ODF has taken six, perhaps even seven years.

Open standard inflexion point

As electronic paper archives (many of them governmental) now come into increased focus and usage, this is arguably an extremely important tipping/inflexion point for open document standards. Microsoft's moves in this space are unlikely to have been driven by pure altruism or philanthropy, so the deeper implications and ramifications here are surely quite telling.

Microsoft's Thatcher has also explained plans to introduce the "PDF reflow" feature in Office 2013 so that PDFs can be worked upon as if they were "editable Office documents" -- although Thatcher is also quick to point out that PDF reflow is not designed to "replace" Adobe Reader or Acrobat.

"The goal is not to make Word into a PDF reader or PDF editor. The goal is to help you to bring the contents of PDF files back into an editable format using Word 2013," Thatcher said.

Currently in preview release, market predictions anticipate a formal launch of Office 2013 in early 2013, which should suit the product's brand name ideally.

Ubuntu One referrals is a way to earn free cloud storage up to 20GB by "simply spreading the word" and inviting family and friends to join Ubuntu One.

NOTE: It's actually not as "simple" as it could be, but it is possible.

Users can now see a referrals invite link in their Ubuntu One web dash.

To put that in layman's terms, this is the section of the page where it says 'Get more storage free!' on the right.

Canonical says that by sending this referrals link to friends and family via email, Twitter or Facebook, users will receive 500MB of extra free cloud storage for each person who signs up for an Ubuntu One account.

Each of those people will also get 500MB of extra free cloud storage on top of their initial free 5GB obtained when signing up.

"Ubuntu One users will be allowed a maximum of 40 invites, which could earn an extra 20GB of cloud storage at no cost," said Canonical.

A YouTube clip has appeared on the web apparently taken from Disney Channel sitcom 'Shake It Up' which has been labelled by some parties as nothing less than anti-open-source propaganda.

The show's original concept was for Disney to create (and please bite your tongue before you read this) a "female buddy comedy, only with a dance aspect" for television.

In the episode clip that is currently posted online we see a bespectacled nerd pre-teen geeky kid offering computing advice to his friends.

He asks, "Did you use open source code to save time and the virus was hidden in it?"

When he gets the answer "maybe" in reply he says, "Rookie mistake!"

What is Disney's beef with open source one wonders?

Is community contribution model computing not politically correct enough for the proprietary puritans in charge?

Video Credit: Disney Channel

Computer Weekly has reported on both the highs of Nokia Qt's developer conferences and the lows of uncertainty that have surrounded the parent company's position regarding the cross-platform application and user interface framework.

Nokia Qt's SVP of strategy Sebastian Nystrom has now confirmed that Qt will cease to be used in future Nokia products due to a so-called "sharpening of strategy" -- readers will also note that Nokia plans to cull up to 10,000 positions globally by the end of 2013.

Digia will now acquire the Qt technology, copyright and trademarks -- and a number of Qt staff.

Previously, Qt had reached an agreement with Digia to provide Qt under the terms of a commercial licensing agreement. This version of Qt is called Qt Commercial and is presented from the <=qt.digia.com portal.

"We are looking forward to welcoming the Qt team to Digia. By adding this world class organization to our existing team, we plan to build the next generation leading cross-platform development environment," said Tommi Laitinen, SVP of international products at Digia.

"Now is a good time for everyone to revisit their perception of Qt. Digia's targeted R&D investments will bring back focus on Qt's desktop and embedded platform support, while widening the support for mobile operating systems."

"Nokia is proud of the contributions we've made to Qt over the past four years. We are pleased that we've been able to work with Digia to secure continued development of Qt by the current core team," said Nystrom.

"Digia's plans to acquire Qt mean that it can continue as a successful open source project and also offer continuing employment for many people in the community."

An increasing number of stories are appearing in the tech press attaching the term open source to seemingly bizarre items such as fridges, traffic lights or even sports cars.

Highlighting the use of open source in the manufacture process for these products can make a good headline; we normally expect to see open source used to denote its use in software in the first instance of course.

But open source is a "design philosophy" not a technology.

So this is precisely why we have groups such as the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) pushing to promote the development of hardware whose design is made publicly available.

So with that housekeeping out of the way, let's get down to super powered open source racing cars in the desert shall we?

Co-located in both Wareham, Massachusetts and Chandler, Arizona is Local Motors, makers of what is claimed to be the first 'crowd sourced' open source motorcar.

The company has engendered and fostered a community of petrol head enthusiasts who include automotive engineers, chassis designers and pretty much every other member of the auto production line to come together and submit informal sketches and more fully-blown designs to produce the final product -- theTWiST Rally Righter.

Road legal (well, in Arizona at least), the Rally Fighter is 6.2 litres of V8 engine fun with 430 of open source horsepower to get you into trouble.

Reports suggest that the machine costs around £50,000, so open source is not free in every sense.

There's an optional 'comfort package' for drivers who just have to have SatNav, fluffy carpet and leather trim.

What would an open source car company use as its tagline then in the good old USA these days?

It could only be... MADE BY YOU IN AMERICA.

Photo credit: http://rallyfighter.com/

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has reportedly flagged a potential trademark infringement brought about by one of its closest mindset neighbours, the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).

The open hardware group's "gear logo" has been in use since the faction was established earlier in 2011.

The OSI has highlighted the similarity of the OSHWA's logo to its own given the "key" opening at the bottom of the design.

What is open source hardware anyway?

NOTE: The OSHWA's statement of principles explains, "Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware's source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it."

OSHWA's logo has started to appear on "boards and circuits" to signify a piece of equipment's ability to be modified and alerted openly in a shared format.

OSI has approached OSHWA regarding the "infringement" of trademark license in a slightly bizarre move, given that one might have assumed that:

a) the proximity of the two groups should positively be reflected in similar logos.
b) The OSI's logo (if issued as part of the Creative Commons License) should itself be as open to modification and augmentation in this way as any of the software that the group stands to promote and develop.

The OSHWA responds on its website to the situations as follows, "As the founding board members of OSHWA, we feel that it is not our right nor our place to decide this issue for the community without further input. This "founding" OSHWA board was elected by the OSHWA organizers simply to do the hard work of the bootstrapping the organization: to get a bank account, to fill out IRS paperwork, to clear other organizing hurdles, and (finally) to establish membership so that we can legally vote in board members by future membership."

No real "conflict" here

President of the OSI Simon Phipps has confirmed that OSHWA has approached the OSI regarding the "relationship" concerning the logos -- and not vice versa. But Phipps is it pains to emphasise that "no schism" exists between the two open-source organisations.

Phipps is quoted as having said, "The discussions are ongoing and it's unhelpful to treat this as a conflict; neither OSI's board nor - as far as I have been told - OSHWA's board do."

CLARIFICATION:

Open Source Insider has received additional clarification on this story from Simon Phipps as follows:

OSI has not sent any legal notice to OSHWA, does not want to and has no plans to do so.
OSHWA approached OSI last year to ask about the relationship between the OSHW and OSI logos, which their internal discussion [openhardware.org] had identified as a problem.
Since then, there has been an ongoing conversation between OSI & OSHWA. It's not been perfect, but everyone involved is a volunteer doing their best in a complicated situation.
Last week OSHWA decided to consult its members/stakeholders about the matter before next steps with OSI.
The template trademark agreement from OSI that they published was not a proposal or demand, it was just an example document to assist them in making a proposal to OSI. It was requested by OSHWA prior to a meeting between OSI & OSHWA on June 29.
The discussions are ongoing and it's unhelpful to treat this as a conflict; neither OSI's Board nor (as far as I have been told) OSHWA's board do.
OSI is very keen indeed to devise an approach that brings maximum benefit to the whole open source community and which builds bridges to strengthen it.
When OSHWA's data-gathering ends (August 16) OSI will be ready with a strong proposal that fixes things.

Walt Disney is bringing Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy into the world of open source.

More accurately, Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) is making its BRDF Explorer technology available to the industry through an open source distribution at github.com/wdas/brdf - as of now.

Ever-increasingly computerised in its animation studio work, Cinderella and friends enjoy the benefits of BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) when shapes are built on screen as this is the mathematical description of how a surface reflects light.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Disney news website LaughingPlace.com reports that Disney's BRDF Explorer is an advanced physically-based shading and rendering toolset that evaluates BRDFs (a four-dimensional function that defines how light is reflected at an opaque surface) and how they compare to real life.

Principal engineer from WDAS software group Brent Burley says Disney artists have found this to be a very useful tool for crafting materials. "We are happy to contribute this back to the graphics community and are excited to see what new BRDF innovations this tool will inspire," he said.

The Github distribution website linked above details this technology as follows:

"The Disney BRDF Viewer is an application that allows the development and analysis
of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs). It can load and plot
analytic BRDF functions (coded as snippets of OpenGL GLSL programs), measured
material data from the MERL database, and anisotropic measured material data from
MIT CSAIL."

Industry specialists have suggested that this technology will prove "immensely useful" for improving CG realism in film and games.

Below is a good example of how far CG (computer generated) realism has come as of now.

The world of data storage is changing and open source is helping (well, trying extremely hard) to shake up a few traditional technology standards.

For many years, storage has been about big boxes from big name storage vendors. Usual suspects here might include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Oracle Exadata and obviously we could extend this list ad infinitum if we started to add hard drive manufacturers, big data players and database shops.

But could things really be changing now?

Nexenta specialises in industry standard, software-only, open architecture, hardware-agnostic storage solutions. The company suggests that an open source software-based approach to storage systems has the potential to free developers from the ties that bind them to dungeon-like onsite corporate storage systems.

Could open source developers be the new dragon slayers?

NOTE: These storage options are bringing technologies like Sun's Zetabyte File System (ZFS), which Sun transferred to the open-source community, back to the forefront.

"While Oracle, which took over Sun, still offers ZFS in its Solaris products, the technology appears to have been shunted to the sidelines. But a new generation of companies are using a fork of OpenSolaris, known as Illumos, to provide the foundation for a storage-focused Solaris distribution based on ZFS," said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta Systems.

"While the larger storage vendors (and their customers and developers) are locked in to old file systems on proprietary hardware, open source software is providing customers and developers with the opportunity to break free of this lock-in and combine new file systems with commodity hardware," added Powell.

The shift to an open source-based storage world is argued to be able to give developers the potential to have much more freedom and choice in their work. As ZFS is based on open source, developers are able to dip in and out if they need to work on any problem in the system and upgrade it individually by themselves.

Because their peers are handling open source software code development, developers who join the open source community have the opportunity to create and enhance code with people on the same wavelength as them.

Once developers begin to use open source software for one part of their infrastructure, it can make them much more open to the prospect of using other open source-based applications and help to keep costs down.

"Open source is also much better suited to the virtual world because ZFS is more flexible for developers using virtual machines to create, run and test pilot projects or programmes. By using open source storage software based on ZFS, all the testing can be handled separately and then brought online when it works," said Nexenta's Powell.

Can the open source-based storage approach really help developers break out of the proprietary box that vendors have locked them into?

Or... will storage always be too much of a ground level infrastructural element in any software architecture and therefore retain its inertia, sluggishness and inability to move to more nimble open models?

Nexenta aren't angels, they're still out to make a buck after all -- but we hope the open approach will triumph.

It has been a good week for fonts.

The London 2012 font been made available online at this link for download.

Open source projects wanting to evidence complete adherence to community developed technologies will want to use FOSS elements in their work from their programmers' shoe leather to the fonts used in the production of any written or textual elements.

This new free and open source font from Adobe is provided under the SIL Open Font License, which is classified as free to use by the Free Software Foundation.

Source Sans Pro actually comes in a total of six formats (or weights) and font author (or creator) Paul D. Hunt has said that the intention with here was always to provide a technology component that would be "production available" from the start.

Total open source font fans can of course visit SourceForge's FontForge, where you can find an outline font editor to build your own fonts or edit and modify existing ones with lots of cross-format convertibility.

Having just spent the last 36 hours with my head in Ubuntu Server 12.04 I think I have my Ubuntu radar about as fully tuned as is humanly possible right now.

Analysing Ubuntu Server 12.04 is a pleasant enough experience, the free and open source operating system's commercial parent Canonical has clearly put lots of effort into making the form and function of this technology not only taste good, but look good too.

The application window animations are a case in point. It all runs pretty fast - and there's the interesting part.

Although a forthcoming Computer Weekly review will look at predominantly the server-based side of the equation, I decided to take the desktop end of things as seriously as possible and so...

I KILLED a MacBook Pro...

... well, more accurately, I killed off any Apple OS X installation in my old MacBook Pro and went for a 100% wipe with a new clean install of Ubuntu and here's the funny thing.

This machine was next to dead and just so slow that it had become practically unusable.

Now Ubuntu today is said to have progressed onwards from the system that people might use to "pep up an old machine" -- and Canonical is at pains to suggest that users really should be looking at installation on a new machine.

But I have to say that this has breathed new life into this little silver box and the functionality AND THE SPEED are both very pleasing.

One little niggle from me I suppose. I found that I kept hitting GUEST account by mistake every time I wanted to mess with the System Preferences. So I used this handy guide through Terminal and lightdm from the UbuntuGeek website and it works a treat - link here for your use.

Interesting news then this week to see that the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is scheduled for Copenhagen in Denmark from 29 October to 1 November.

These are important events as they are staged as work is about to start on the next major version of the operating system.

According to Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon, "We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project. We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu."

The current drive within the Ubuntu community seeks to encourage new member sign ups and increase the diversity of attendees - and this means both technical and non-technical - so that means you!