Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

Motorola (Quote, Chart) announced Thursday that it has released version 1 of an open source project aimed at providing a standard for high-availability middleware for telecommunications hardware manufacturers and ISVs. The company also disclosed it has taken the first steps toward turning the code over to a consortium of interested parties.

Dubbed OpenSAF for the Service Availability Forum (SAF), which developed the initial specification, the software supports the SAF’s Application Interface Specification, or AIS.

While the OpenSAF software was originally designed to provide high-availability technology for use in telecommunications products, Motorola sees other applications including in networks of clustered computers inside enterprise computing environments.

Additionally, the software is operating system “agnostic,” although initial implementations are likely to be built on Linux.

“The big telecommunications vendors all have multiple versions of [their own] high-availability middleware,” John Fryer, director of technology marketing for embedded communications computing at Motorola, told internetnews.com. “The objective is to get people to move away from building proprietary platforms,” he added.

Read more: InternetNews

India’s Kerala state government is counting on open-source software to boost its IT literacy rate.

According to a statement, the Kerala government has identified free and open-source software as a major strategic component in its efforts to build an inclusive information society.

“Kerala has always been a leader in literacy, and now we want to make Kerala a leader in e-literacy,” said Kerala Chief Minister V. S. Achutanandan. “We believe that free and open-source software is an essential component in our drive to democratize information technology and bring its benefits to all sections of society.”

The Indian state, located on the country’s southwest coast, is partnering with Red Hat to train the technical staff of various government organizations and school teachers on desktop Linux and other open-source applications. The Linux vendor will also work with the state government to promote Kerala as a global destination for developing open-source software.

Commenting on Kerala’s move toward open source, Nandkumar Pradhan, president and managing director of Red Hat India, said: “The freedom, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of open source helps governments maximize their IT budgets.”

Read more: ZDNet

One of the early adopters of GPL 3 will be the Samba Server project, which supplies file translation code between Linux and Windows.

Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation launched GPL Version 3 on Friday from its Boston headquarters, with an eye toward restricting patent actions against free software. GPL 3’s impact will only slowly be felt as it is adopted as the license of choice on various open source projects. But its adoption is practically assured as developers close ranks in the face of Microsoft charges that Linux and other open source code projects violate 235 of its patents. The GPL 2 and its predecessors have been the license of choice on the majority of open source code projects. The GPL revolutionized the way software is written and distributed. Instead of setting fees and license limitations, the GPL granted developers a broad writ to use code freely and modify it, but it required those modifications to be given back to the developer community.

One of the early adopters of GPL 3 will be the Samba Server project, which supplies file translation code between Linux and Windows. Jeremy Allison, leader of the project, said Version 3 “a necessary update to deal with the new threats to free software that have emerged since version 2 of the GPL.”

Allison left Novell in protest and moved to a job at Google shortly after the Microsoft-Novell deal was announced last November. That agreement supplied protection to Novell SuSE Linux customers but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in follow up statements said no such protections were offered to other Linux users.

In an e-mail exchange with InformationWeek, he said the Samba team “will be discussing a move to GPLv3 now that the license is available” but he couldn’t predict how soon it will be adopted. Allison said the provisions of GPLv3 “will provide greater protection for the freedoms of individual contributors. In the long term, it will provide greater incentive for them to contribute code.”

Read more: InformationWeek