Apache News & Articles

In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang.

Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and eleven other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes fourteen defendants.

Just recently, we reported on Nuxeo’s (news, site) steady progress with Apache Chemistry, a Java implementation of the CMIS spec.

The newest development on this front is OpenCMIS (a project led by Alfresco, SAP and Open Text) that is adding their collection of libraries, frameworks and tools around CMIS to Apache Chemistry.

No, it is *not* an attack against Chemistry, but more of a friendly merger.

The Apache Lucene Connector Framework (LCF) has reached the next stage toward becoming an official Apache (news, site) project.

Many people are perfectly happy working directly with open source as it comes from the project that wrote it. Others prefer a bit more spit and polish. If you're in the second category, you might be interested to know that Lucid Imagination (news, site) has released a new version of its LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Lucene.

What LucidWorks Contains

LucidWorks for Lucene version 2.9.1 is free and includes:

• Apache Lucene 2.9.1
• An upgrade to all of the related utilities
• Version 0.9.9 of Luke, a development and diagnostic tool for working with Lucene indexes
• Additional testing performed by Lucid Imagination
• Additional bug fixes from the current trunk of the Lucene project
• The benefit of Lucid Imagination customer feedback
• Tools from Lucid Imagination to ease both Lucene installation and deployment
• Geographic-based search provided by the new Lucene Spatial contrib module

Why Lucene 2.9.1 Matters

If you haven't looked at Lucene 2.9, you're missing out on advanced numeric search and real-time search performance improvements. Tied together with Lucene Spatial, these additions can allow mobile users to do searches for, say, an Italian restaurant within five miles of where they currently are, and can get useful results thanks to the GPS in their mobile device and Lucene's quick handling of the information.

You can download LucidWorks now.

For those of you who run a Microsoft web environment built on IIS (Internet Information Server), but still would like to run some open source applications and/or websites, there's good news for you.

Helicon Tech, a provider of web server enhancement tools, has released an Apache emulator for IIS 7. Called Helicon APE, it implements .htaccess configurations within the IIS web server. This includes almost all of the major Apache modules (35+ to be exact).

The Helicon APE offers modification-free transition of Apache websites to IIS, simple configuration of PHP and Apache compatible URL rewriting syntax.

Helicon APE
 

The Helicon APE is installed on IIS 7 as a managed module, but can also work for other versions of IIS that support ASP.NET when installed as an ASP.NET module.

APE costs start at US$ 25 for a website and US$ 95 for a server license. There's also a free version for up to 3 websites on a single server.

Now this one isn't from Microsoft, but is another step towards interoperability between Microsoft and open source. There are likely many who would love to have this product.

Apache Lucene (news, site), the popular open source search engine, is now available in version 2.9.0. This version is the last minor release before the big step to Lucene 3.0, but the developers didn't hold back all of their improvements for later.

This year, ApacheCon US returns to the San Francisco Bay Area -- the home of the Apache Software Foundation, which celebrates its 10th birthday in 2009. The conference will span over several days (November 2-6) and promises to be an “exciting celebration” of a decade of great coding, while offering a peek into the future of Open Source.

This conference should be like no other ApacheCon before with a feast of BarCamps, Get Togethers, featured tracks, evening events and a birthday bash to celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of the ASF committers and members. Another perk is that this year’s conference is cheaper and offers many free sessions to get you out of that bad economy blues.

The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps.

Well, there's been a change in the script and we've got a small civil war on our hands. Tempers and tensions have risen between US-based Bluenog and Netherlands-based Hippo -- both companies deal in the content management space, both are tinkering with open source.

Now it's not the fight we're interested in -- though it's been a fun interlude of Days of Our [Software] Lives. Rather, it's the principles behind the issue that are worth paying attention to.

In short, Bluenog has been accused of violating Hippo's and Apache's software licenses by using Hippo's code and not properly giving attribution. We had a chat with both parties. Here's what they had to say.

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

Some technology partnership announcements make complete sense. Others leave you scratching your head as you try to decide what these people were thinking.

The announcement that Lucid Imagination (news, site) and ISYS Search Software (news, site) have partnered to combine their search technologies is fortunately not the latter.

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases -- Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) -- which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency is among 18 U.S. Intelligence organizations to benefit from the Apache Lucene/Solr enterprise search technology.

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s VC arm, has announced its investment into Lucid Imagination, a commercial provider of open source search technologies.

This may mean a lot of things (just scratching the surface here): great exposure for Apache (not bad of a present for the ASF’s 10th birthday), promotion of open source adoption, better data mining opportunities for the U.S. intelligence -- you name it.

Facebook and Google, interestingly, are also (indirectly) in the mix.

Well, good news! Since we discussed Chemistry with David Nuescheler  -- Day Software's CTO and one of Chemistry committers -- the CMIS implementation project has been officially incubated at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Now, let's do some Chemistry with another major contributor to the project -- open source enterprise CMS vendor, Nuxeo, and its head of R&D Florent Guillaume.

Welcome to the first installment of our new end-of-the-month look at what you can expect from open source CMS projects in the next 30 days. We're just getting started and are counting on you, our community members to help us gather the key facts.

Here's what you can expect in May 2009. To avoid playing favorites, the projects are presented in alphabetical order.

The CMIS specification is still in early stages, but the buzz around it is consistently loud. Most recently, the spec has piqued interest of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), as some saw a "reference implementation" ingredient missing from the CMIS recipe for success.

Meet Chemistry -- a recently-proposed Apache Incubator Project with a goal of creating a generic, open-source, Java-language implementation of CMIS.

CMSWire had an opportunity to talk to one of Chemistry committers -- Day Software's David Nuescheler -- to get more insight into the project.