March 8 celebrated Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Day in the Google Zurich office. Google employees gathered to listen to talks by Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source at Google, and Karsten Gerloff, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. The evening wrapped up with a FOSS game where the new hires proved they were better at answering tricky questions than old-timers.

Open Source at Google
As Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Google, Chris DiBona leads exciting initiatives like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in that encourage university and pre-university students, respectively, to participate in open source software development. Chris also spearheads other initiatives to encourage Googlers to contribute to FOSS projects - for example, he advises Google employees on how to open source their code and how to bring open source code into Google. Most importantly, Chris mentioned that the major FOSS licenses are in fact not difficult to comply with.

Chris’ talk is part of the internal training for new-hires at Google and focuses on various internal procedures and guidelines for how to deal with open source, licenses, and patents.

Free Software Foundation Europe
As president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Karsten Gerloff promotes Free and Open Source Software, educates politicians, regulators and businesses on the benefits of FOSS.

In his talk “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, Karsten explored the tremendous benefits a networked world is to society, information sharing, and personal freedom. Only within Karsten’s lifetime, we’ve gone from very expensive long distance phone calls, to virtually no-cost communication anywhere and anytime. He pointed out that the various technologies which make this possible came to be because they built on simple open standards. Thus, the Internet was based on mostly general purpose computers, the word-wide-web was realised on top of neutral networks and TCP/IP, and Wikipedia on top of WWW, and so on.

Karsten highlighted how Free Software Foundation works to promote an alternative to the locked-down centralised world through the use of free and general purpose and distributed systems and FOSS. Some examples includes the FreedomBox, GNU/Linux and other free operating systems, Diaspora, Bitcoin, YaCy, and GNUnet. Furthermore, FSFE will support developers, shaping the laws guarding against patent trolls. See fsfe.org/fellowship for information on how to give your support.

How much do you know about open source?
For the last part of the evening, a hand-full of FOSS contributors in the Zurich office demonstrated their work. This was based on both contributions related to Google projects, and projects people dedicate their free time to outside of work.

There was also a contingent of “Nooglers” (new Googlers), who had to answer rather tricky questions about FOSS. The game was set up so Nooglers and old-time Googlers were competing, and the new-hires won the game, remembering which printer it was Richard Stallman struggled with in 1980 (Xerox 9700), and that even though Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his native tongue is Swedish.

The evening was an eye opener for many in the audience who weren’t familiar with open source and with the inspiring talks from both Chris and Karsten, hopefully even more Googlers will release open source code and work on open source projects in the future.

By Havard Rast Blok-Monsivais, Software Engineer in Test

ArCon is a tool for architecture conformance validation of systems modelled in UML/SysML. ArCon can provide an easy to use and intuitive way of specifying architectural rules and a mechanism to automatically validate that the system under development conforms to the rules specified. ArCon can validate a model and detect errors in the models breaking the defined rules.

This generator allows you to produce Java source code from a UML model. This module uses the standard UML2 metamodel provided by Eclipse Foundation and as such is compatible with any UML tools using this standard like the UML Designer. It's based on the award winning code generation project, Acceleo.

Created by the members of the Acceleo development team, this generator is highly integrated in Eclipse with a dedicated launch configuration to keep track and your generations. This generator also includes a builder that can be activated to monitor your project and generate your code if your UML model is modified, keeping your code synchronized with your model. This module also contains an integrated documentation.

This generator is also customizable thanks to properties accessible in its launch configuration and, being based on Acceleo, you can also contribute dynamically to this generator to modify the generated code. This generator can also be used programmatically out of Eclipse from any Java application. This generator is not only free but open source and its source code is available on GitHub.

Paris, April 9th 2013

Dalibo is proud to announce the release of Ora2Pg 11.1. This major release adds support to multiprocessing so that you can now export data in parallel mode. Importing data from an Oracle database is now ten times faster. With this new feature, Ora2Pg performances are closer to the ones you'd get with any ETL.

Since 2001, Ora2Pg is the best solution to migrate data from Oracle to PostgreSQL and is used by thousands of companies around the world to switch from the most expensive proprietary RDBMS to the most advanced Open Source RDBMS!

Ora2pg 11.1 also brings important improvements :

• You can now generate XML transformation files for Kettle (see http://kettle.pentaho.com/).
• Faster scan of Oracle databases containing huge number of objects.
• Faster partition data export with direct import to tables partition.
• Bug fixes on RAW or LONG RAW data export.
• PL/SQL to PL/PGSQL code rewrite.

Gilles Darold, the project leader and main developer of Ora2Pg, explains: "The development of ora2pg is really fast because more and more companies are moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL. This new version brings speed improvements to migrate multi-terabyte databases faster. For most users, lowering the migration time is critical because it means less downtime during the switch from Oracle to PostgreSQL."

These performance enhancements were developed by Dalibo in collaboration with Photobox, Europe's largest online photo processing service and Bouygues Telecom, a major mobile network operator and ISP in France.

Dalibo would like to thank the developers who submitted patches and the users who reported bugs and feature requests, especially : Dominique Fourdrinoy, Ludovic Penet, Thomas Ogrisegg, Alex Delianis, Pierre-Marie Petit and mrojasaquino. Ora2Pg is an open project. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcomed. You just have to send your ideas, features requests, or patches using the GitHub tools at https://github.com/darold/ora2pg.

Useful Links:

• Website: http://ora2pg.darold.net/
• Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ora2pg/
• Development: https://github.com/darold/ora2pg
• Changelog: https://github.com/darold/ora2pg/blob/master/changelog

About Ora2Pg :

Ora2Pg is an easy and reliable tool to migrate data from Oracle to PostgreSQL. It is developed since 2001 by Gilles Darold, also author of pgBadger, a PostgreSQL performance tool. Ora2Pg can export most of the Oracle objects (table, view, tablespace, sequence, indexes, trigger, grant, function, procedure, package, partition, data, blob and external table).

Ora2Pg works on any platform and is available under the GPL v3 licence.

Docs, Download & Support at http://ora2pg.darold.net/

About DALIBO :

DALIBO is the leading PostgreSQL company in France, providing support, trainings and consulting to its customers since 2005. The company contributes to the PostgreSQL community in various ways, including : code, articles, translations, free conferences and workshops

Check out DALIBO's open source projects at http://dalibo.github.com

Congratulations to the 35 36 SourceForge projects (Looks like I left GNSS-SDR off of the list!) which were selected to participate in the 2013 Google Summer of Code. That’s 22.5% 23.2% of the 155 projects selected overall (up from 18% last year). We’re really looking forward to what they accomplish in the coming months.

• Apertium: machine translation toolbox

  Apertium is a toolbox to build open-source shallow-transfer machine translation systems, especially suitable for related language pairs: it includes the engine, maintenance tools, and open linguistic data for several language pairs.

• Battle for Wesnoth

  The Battle for Wesnoth is a Free, turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures.

• Blender

  Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

• Boost C++ Libraries

  Boost provides free portable peer-reviewed C++ libraries. The emphasis is on portable libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. See http://www.boost.org

• BRL-CAD

  BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform constructive solid geometry solid modeling system that includes an interactive geometry editor, ray-tracing for rendering & geometric analyses, network distributed framebuffer support, image & signal-processing tools.

• BuildBot

  Buildbot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects. Buildbot is no longer hosted on SourceForge. See http://buildbot.net for links and documentation, and http://github.com/buildbot for the source.

• Django

  A high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, MVC design. Includes a template system, object-relational mapper and a framework for dynamically creating admin interfaces.

• The Freenet Project

  Development of a Java application designed to allow the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet without fear of censorship of any kind.

• GNSS-SDR

  An open source software-defined Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receiver written in C++ and based on the GNU Radio framework.

• Inkscape

  A Linux, Windows & OSX vector graphics editor (SVG format) featuring transparency, gradients, node editing, pattern fills, PNG export, and more. Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc.

• JBoss Community

  Community driven projects featuring the latest innovations for cutting edge apps. Our flagship project JBoss AS is the leading Open Source, standards-compliant, Java EE based application server implemented in 100% Pure Java.

• LyX – The Document Processor

  LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

• MacPorts

  The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

• MLton

  MLton is a whole-program optimizing Standard ML compiler.

• Moodle

  Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. https://moodle.org/

• OGRE (O-O Graphics Rendering Engine)

  An efficient, object-oriented hardware accelerated 3D engine. It abstracts the differences between APIs and platforms and allows scene-oriented coding through an easy to use object model. Adaptable to multiple scene types (indoor, outdoor, whatever)

• OpenMRS

  OpenMRS is a community-developed, open source, enterprise electronic medical record system. Our mission is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community to creates and support this software.

• OpenNMS

  An Enterprise-Grade Network Management Application Platform that is 100% Free and Open Source Software.

• OWASP Source Code Center

  The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) software and documentation repository.

• PaGMO / PyGMO

  A C++ / Python platform to easily perform parallel computations of optimisation tasks (global and local) via the asynchronous generalized island model. Many state of the art optimization algorithms are included together with an extended set of optimization problems. A common interface is provided to other optimization frameworks/algorithms such as NLOPT, SciPy, SNOPT, IPOPT, GSL

• phpBB

  phpBB is the world’s leading Open Source flat style discussion forum software. It includes all the features you expect to find in today’s top of the line software.

• phpMyAdmin

  phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add columns, execute any SQL statement, manage indexes on columns.

• Pidgin

  See http://pidgin.im/about/ for more information. Pidgin is an instant messaging program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. It runs on Windows, Linux, and other UNIX operating systems. Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, MXit, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. It is written in C and makes heavy use of GLib and GTK+. Finch is a command line instant messaging program. It also lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat network simultaneously, and it is compatible with the same chat networks as Pidgin. It is written in C and makes heavy use of GLib and ncurses.

• RoboComp

  RoboComp is a robotics framework providing a set of open-source, distributed, real-time robotic and artificial vision software components and the necessary tools to create and manage them.

• ScummVM

  ScummVM is a cross-platform interpreter for several point-and-click adventure engines. This includes all SCUMM-based adventures by LucasArts, Simon the Sorcerer 1&2 by AdventureSoft, Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword 1&2 by Revolution, and many more.

• Simple DirectMedia Layer

  This project is an unoffcial and partial mirror of the SDL site. It only contains freely downloadable SDL materials. You can reach the official one at http://www.libsdl.org.

• SimpleCV

  SimpleCV is a python framework for creating a more human readable programming interface to OpenCV.

• Steel Bank Common Lisp

  A high performance Common Lisp compiler. In addition to standard ANSI Common Lisp, it provides an interactive environment including an a debugger, a statistical profiler, a code coverage tool, and many other extensions.

• SuperTuxKart

  SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game featuring Tux and friends. It is a fun-racer game, focusing on fun and ease of play.

• Scaffold Hunter

  Scaffold Hunter is a JAVA-based software tool for the analysis of structure-related biochemical data. It enables generation of and navigation in a scaffold tree hierarchy annotated with various data.

• TYPO3 Content Management Framework

  TYPO3 is an enterprise class Web CMS written in PHP/MySQL. It’s designed to be extended with custom written backend modules and frontend libraries for special functionality. It has very powerful integration of image manipulation.

• Wine Is Not an Emulator

  Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based Unixes.

• Wireshark

  Wireshark is a powerful network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts. It runs on UNIX, OS X and Windows. (Looking for Ethereal? You’re in the right place. We switched names in May 2006 due to trademark issues.)

• WorldForge

  Worldforge is a project aimed at developing “A Complete Gaming System for Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying.” More information is available at www.worldforge.org .

• XBMC Media Center

  XBMC Media Center is a free cross-platform media player software and entertainment system application framework for Linux, Mac, and Windows. XBMC is capable of playing back and streaming all popular video, audio, and picture formats out-of-the-box.

• XWiki

  XWiki is the next generation enterprise wiki, a feature rich tool that is secure, easy to use and more organized. At the same time it’s a light and powerful development platform that allows you to customize the wiki to your specific needs.

We are excited to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. It was tough, but after reviewing 417 applications, we have chosen 177 open source projects, of which 40 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2013 program website for a complete list of the accepted projects.

Over the next 14 days students interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code 2013 program can learn more about the 177 accepted open source projects before the student application period begins on Monday, April 22, 2013 at 19:00 UTC.

Each organization has compiled an Ideas Page that students will want to review carefully and consider how they might be able to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project on the Ideas Page that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization.There are points of contact listed for each organization on their Ideas Page so that students can contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 9th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Five talks were accepted from the early-bird submissions. Congratulations to the presenters! The deadline for submissions is next Monday, April 15.

We’re pleased to be featuring the following projects for the week of April 8, 2013.

• jVi – vi editor clone

  jVi is a vi/vim editor clone built on top of the javax.swing.text package. Available for NetBeans and JBuilder. jVi is designed to quickly and easily integrate into many disparate java based desktop apps, from IDE’s to mail-news readers.

• 0 A.D.

  0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It’s a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of ancient civilizations, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess.

• OGRE (O-O Graphics Rendering Engine)

  An efficient, object-oriented hardware accelerated 3D engine. It abstracts the differences between APIs and platforms and allows scene-oriented coding through an easy to use object model. Adaptable to multiple scene types (indoor, outdoor, whatever)

• AkelPad

  A simple notepad-like text editor with many features. It is designed to be a small and fast.

• VASSAL Engine

  The VASSAL Engine is a game engine for creating electronic versions of traditional board and card games. It provides support for game piece rendering and interaction, and supports play by email or over a live connection.

• JabRef

  JabRef is a graphical application for managing bibliographical databases. JabRef is designed specifically for BibTeX bases, but can import and export many other bibliographic formats. JabRef runs on all platforms and requires Java 1.6 or newer.

• SparkyLinux

  SparkyLinux is a Live Linux distribution created on Debian testing. Featuring customized Enlightenment/LXDE desktops, multimedia plugins and selected set of apps.

• Vtiger CRM

  Vtiger CRM enables sales, support, and marketing teams to organize and collaborate to measurably improve customer experiences and business outcomes. Vtiger CRM also includes email, inventory, project management, and other tools, providing a complete the business management suite. Download Vtiger CRM here or sign up for a free 15-day free trial of the cloud-based application with free updates and support at http://www.vtiger.com/crm/

• SciPy: Scientific Library for Python

  SciPy is package of tools for science and engineering for Python. It includes modules for statistics, optimization, integration, linear algebra, Fourier transforms, signal and image processing, ODE solvers, and more.

The PostgreSQL project has again been selected to take part in Summer of Code for 2013. Google will be funding several students to work with mentors from our project in order to hack PostgreSQL code for the summer.

Applications for students open April 22nd. Our Summer Of Code page has all the information you need about applying this year.

If you are connected with a university, please make sure that students know about this opportunity. If you are a student, please apply!

Python 3.2.4 and Python 3.3.1 final have been released.

Python 3.2.4 and Python 3.3.1 final have been released.

Python 2.7.4 has been released.

This feature adds a Quick Look command that will activate OS X Quick Look on selected files and folders when Command+Y is pressed.

Issues are reported in GitHub and comments go to @torkildr.

Subclipse 1.8.19 release is now available. This is the release to use for Subversion 1.7.x working copy compatibility with other tools. A complete changelog is available at http://subclipse.tigris.org/subclipse_1.8.x/changes.html

As you’re no doubt already aware, we’re in the process of upgrading projects to our new developer platform. The new platform is named Allura, and is in incubation at the Apache Software Foundation.

In recent weeks, we’ve been upgrading projects that have been inactive for a while. Now, it’s time to start upgrading everyone else. As you can no doubt understand, we’re anxious to complete this process so we can spend less time maintaining the old platform, and more time improving the new one. However, we also want to be sure that you have plenty of time to check out the new platform and have your concerns, if any, addressed.

We’re going to start upgrading active projects starting on Monday, April 22, starting with the longest-inactive and moving forward. Since each upgrade takes a different amount of time, depending on the size of the repositories, mailing list archives, and so on, we can’t tell for sure when we’ll get to your project.

If you’re ready to go ahead and upgrade your project now, or to read more what’s involved in the upgrade, you can do that at http://sf.net/p/upgrade/

If you have a specific concern about the upgrade, or need to delay the upgrade of your project, due to a release or other project activity, please get in touch NOW, at communityteam@sourceforge.net so that we can work something out.

If you have different components of your project located at different places, you might want to provide simple navigation to those components. That’s why we provide an “External Link” tool to let you easily add a link to your main project navigation menu.

Go to Admin → Tools, and you’ll see the ‘External Link’ tool there.

Click that, and you’ll get a dialog for configuring the link.

This dialog uses the standard terminology we use for all of our tools. The ‘Label’ is what will appear in the navigation menu, and the ‘Mount Point’ is an identifier for your personal reference. After clicking save, click ‘Options’ in the tool badge, and add the URL of the site to which you wish to link.

In this way, you can provide a convenient link to your main website, an off-site Mercurial repository, a discussion forum, or whatever else you like.

Greetings,

The mailing list archive view for SourceForge projects are currently in read-only mode for maintenance. Message sent to the mailing list continue to work, but until the maintenance is complete, the archives will not update. We expect this to complete sometime tomorrow.

Best Regards,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support

Peergreen Eclipse Plugin ease OSGi application development on Peergreen Server.
Server binaries can be installed, removed and updated from within the Eclipse preference pages.

As of this morning, you’ll notice a new feature in the SourceForge code browser. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

Clicking on the ‘Download Snapshot’ link will generate a tarball (tar.gz file) of the revision that you’re looking at. This snapshot is generated on the fly, so you’re certain to get the latest cut, but we cache that snapshot so that someone else requesting the same tarball won’t have to wait for it to generate.

If you’re interested, you can see the ticket and some of the implementation details in the ticket tracker, and you can see what else is coming down the road by perusing the upcoming milestones, also in the ticket tracker, and vote for stuff you’d like to see happen a little sooner.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17. This update fixes a high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later. All users of the affected versions are strongly urged to apply the update immediately.

A major security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-1899, makes it possible for a connection request containing a database name that begins with "-" to be crafted that can damage or destroy files within a server's data directory. Anyone with access to the port the PostgreSQL server listens on can initiate this request. This issue was discovered by Mitsumasa Kondo and Kyotaro Horiguchi of NTT Open Source Software Center.

Two lesser security fixes are also included in this release: CVE-2013-1900, wherein random numbers generated by contrib/pgcrypto functions may be easy for another database user to guess, and CVE-2013-1901, which mistakenly allows an unprivileged user to run commands that could interfere with in-progress backups. Finally, this release fixes two security issues with the graphical installers for Linux and Mac OS X: insecure passing of superuser passwords to a script, CVE-2013-1903 and the use of predictable filenames in /tmp CVE-2013-1902. Marko Kreen, Noah Misch and Stefan Kaltenbrunner reported these issues, respectively.

We are grateful for each developer's efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.

This release also corrects several errors in management of GiST indexes. After installing this update, it is advisable to REINDEX any GiST indexes that meet one or more of the conditions described below.

This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:

• Fix GiST indexes to not use "fuzzy" geometric comparisons for box, polygon, circle, and point columns
• Fix bugs in contrib/btree_gist for GiST indexes on text, bytea, bit, and numeric columns
• Fix bugs in page splitting code for multi-column GiST indexes
• Fix buffer leak in WAL replay causing "incorrect local pin count" errors
• Ensure crash recovery before entering archive recovery during unclean shutdown when recovery.conf is present
• Avoid deleting not-yet-archived WAL files during crash recovery
• Fix race condition in DELETE RETURNING
• Fix possible planner crash after adding columns to a view depending on another view
• Eliminate memory leaks in PL/Perl's spi_prepare() function
• Fix pg_dumpall to handle database names containing "=" correctly
• Avoid crash in pg_dump when an incorrect connection string is given
• Ignore invalid indexes in pg_dump and pg_upgrade
• Include only the current server version's subdirectory when backing up a tablespace with pg_basebackup
• Add a server version check in pg_basebackup and pg_receivexlog
• Fix contrib/dblink to handle inconsistent settings of DateStyle or IntervalStyle safely
• Fix contrib/pg_trgm's similarity() function to return zero for trigram-less strings
• Enable building PostgreSQL with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
• Update time zone data files for DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, Morocco, Paraguay, and some Russian areas

As always, update releases only require installation of packages and a database system restart. You do not need to dump/restore or use pg_upgrade for this update release. Users who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional, post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

Links:

• Download
• Release Notes
• Release FAQ