Four years ago today, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 1.0. and delivered a better Web experience to millions of users.   Top features included pop-up blocking, fraud protection, integrated search and tabbed browsing. What made you decide to give Firefox a try?  And what were your favorite features in Firefox 1.0?  2.0?  3.0?  If you’re interested in what’s coming next for Firefox, you can download and help test Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

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NLnet Foundation will give €150,000 (US$234,000) to Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, for the project, which will run through 2010, said Valer Mischenko, the foundation’s general director.

The research and the code will be published for peer review, an open-source development model that can offer a stronger security model than undocumented, proprietary systems that dominate the smart-card market, Mischenko said. Companies will be able to use the software in future products, as it will be licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The need for more secure systems is clear. Researchers revealed last year security vulnerabilities in the Mifare Classic RFID chip, which is used in up to 2 billion smart cards used for building access and public transportation systems worldwide.

The researchers figured out how the Mifare Classic’s encryption algorithm worked, allowing them to obtain the 48-bit encryption keys the cards used. With that information, it’s possible to create a clone of the card or, in some cases, add money to the card for public transport systems, said Bart Jacobs, information security professor at Radboud University.

The Mifare card chips “are from the 90s,” Jacobs said. “At the time when they were developed, there was little computing power on those chips.”

Using more complex encryption algorithms requires more computing power, which potentially means that a person could have to stand at a turnstile longer during a transaction. One of the aims of the new research is to strengthen that encryption but still have the transaction take a second or less, Jacobs said.

“You don’t want to stand before a gate 10 seconds before it opens,” Jacobs said.

Another aim is increased privacy. London’s transport agency, Transport for London (TFL), uses Mifare chips in its contactless payment system known as the Oyster card. Customers have a couple of options when getting the card: they can register it with TFL, which offers benefits such as free replacement if the card lost, or buy an unregistered one.

If the card is registered, some of the person’s travel record is stored by TFL databases, Jacobs said. That’s a potential privacy risk if the data is misused. Jacobs said the project also aims to create card that can still offer special, personalised benefits for the rider but also not unnecessarily transmit more information than needed to a centralised database.

“Our point is that you can get these benefits without sacrificing privacy,” Jacobs said. “We’d like to try this out.”

A person’s public transport history could also be used for marketing or other commercial purposes which may suit some interests but not necessarily be in the best interest of privacy, Jacobs said.

“In our improved card, the card behaves more like a paper ticket,” Jacobs said. “It is electronic, but hides its identity and only says to a gate ‘I’m allowed to make that trip’.”

The research, headed up by Jacobs and Wouter Teepe, will start in July in the university’s Digital Security Group. Jacobs said within about six months the researchers should have a good idea if a stronger algorithm will be technically feasible and practical in use.

OSGi, SOA, JavaScript improvements top list of enhancements in 23 projects

The Eclipse Foundation next week is set to offer its annual simultaneous release of open-source project updates, this time called the Ganymede Release and featuring improvements in the core OSGI-based component model and SOA tools.

All told, 23 projects are being upgraded in the Ganymede release train, ranging from the main Eclipse Project, featuring the Java IDE, to STP (SOA Tools Platform Project). Ganymede is to take flight on June 25. Release trains in 2007 and 2006 were called Europa and Callisto, respectively. All have been named after moons of Jupiter.

Highlighted in Ganymede are improvements to Equinox, the OSGi component model used in the main Eclipse Project, which includes the base IDE. “This is how different components of Eclipse talk to each other,” said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse director of marketing.

A new provisioning platform in Equinox, called Provisioning Platform (p2), offers an improved mechanism for updates to installed or deployed applications, such as a new component to be distributed to the installed base. P2 is a reengineering of Update Manager tool.

“Basically, it simplifies the whole update process and provisioning process,” said Skerrett. “The original one required a number of manual steps to ensure you have all the required plugins.”

Dependencies between plugins are resolved.

Eclipses’s effort to improve on Update Manager was lauded by an industry analyst.

“Many people in the Eclipse community — including Eclipse project members — have been frustrated with the Update Manager of late, and it’d be great to see that problem taken care of,” analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk, said. “In the meantime, companies like Genuitec have stepped in with [its] Pulse offering for Eclipse package management. But seeing what Eclipse proper has to offer will be fun.”

Security features also have been added to Equinox, including a facility called Secure Storage, providing encryption capabilities. If a developer, for example, were building an application on top of Equinox and needed to store a username and password, these would be kept in Secure Storage.

Support for Java Authentication Service is now in Equinox as well, enabling Web site visitors to be given different capabilities based on their level of authentication.

Tools for SOA development in Ganymede include a BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) editor being added to STP. “Basically, it provides a visual tool for creating and editing BPMN,” the standard scripting process flows in SOA applications, said Skerrett.

Two other tools are debuting in STP: SCA Designer (Service Component Architecture), providing a graphical interface for developers to build composite applications using SCA, and Policy Editor, a collection of editors and validators for constructing and manipulating XML expressions that conform to the WS-Policy standard.

In the modeling space, Eclipse is providing GUI tools. The ECore Tools technology is part of the Eclipse Modeling Framework and enables developers to manage data models.

The SQL Query Builder tool enables visual programming of queries as opposed to manually programming them, Skerrett said. SQL Query Builder is part of the Eclipse Data Tools Platform project.

A JavaScript editor in the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project extends the IDE to enable JavaScript development. Developers can build Web applications based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

Also featured in Ganymede are bug fixes and various enhancements to the different projects. Rich AJAX Platform features the ability to customize look and feel using CSS and the Presentation Factories concept. Eclipse Communication Framework Project offers real-time shared editing and other features for collaboration.

The BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project offers an improved JavaScript editor and debugger.

Eclipse has more than 95 projects underway, but only 23 were involved in Ganymede. “Each individual project [team] decides whether they want to participate,” Skerrett said.

Ganymede’s Web page can be found here. The full list of Ganymede projects and version numbers includes:

* Buckminster Component Assembly 1.0
* BIRT 2.3.0
* C/C++ Development Tool (CDT) 5.0
* DTP 1.6RC5
* Device Software Development Platform Project Device Debugging 1.0
* Device Software Development Platform Project Target Management 3.0
* Dynamic Languages Toolkit
* Eclipse Communication Framework Project 2.0.0
* Eclipse Model Framework Technology
* Eclipse Modeling Framework 2.4.0
* Eclipse Packaging Project 1.0.0
* Eclipse Project 3.4
* Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project 3.0.0
* Graphical Editor Framework 3.4.0
* Graphical Modeling Framework 2.1
* Model Development Tools. 1.1
* Model to Text 0.9.0
* Model-to-Model Transformation
* Mylyn 3.0 (task-focused UI)
* RAP 1.1
* STP 1.0
* Subversive (version control)
* Test and Performance Tools Platform Project 4.5.0

Pentaho BI Platform and Open BI Suite architecture (Click to see full image)

Pentaho bills its Open BI Suite as “the world’s most popular open source BI suite.” The software offers OLAP (on-line analytical processing) reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration features. Last Fall, Pentaho announced version 1.6, adding a BI metadata layer that lets IT develop intelligence road maps that business users can then use to build reports. It also added a thin-client AJAX-based reporting interface for streamlining the creation of ad hoc queries and reports without requiring input from IT.

Pentaho is providing a FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) exception to its GPL licenses, permitting Pentaho and other organizations that distribute the software under other specified Open Source Initiative (OSI) certified licenses to be exempt from some of the GPLv2 requirements. According to Pentaho, the FLOSS exception simplifies distribution.

In explaining its move to GPL, Pentaho cites a freshmeat.org statistic that more than 60 percent of open source projects tracked on the site are GPL-licensed. The company also noted the precedents set by other commercial open source vendors including MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, as well as by Java and the Linux kernel, all of which are GPL-licensed projects.

More information on Pentaho’s new licensing policy may be found here.

Linux leader Linus Torvalds originally developed the Git source-code management software in 2005. He didn’t like available open-source tools for the chore, but encountered resistance in using a proprietary tool, BitMover’s BitKeeper. Torvalds liked the distributed approach enabled by BitKeeper and Git, in which individuals could maintain their own “trees,” variations of a project that branch off a main trunk. Git also can be used to track and manage software patches sent “upstream” by contributors working on code branches to the programmers responsible for maintaining various open-source projects.

Google currently uses a source-code management tool called Perforce to manage Android, but the company is moving to another code repository technology in preparation for moving Android into an open-source project, said Android leader Andy Rubin.

“We need an open-source repository. Currently we’re on Perforce. That has to be moved to Git,” and there’s an effort now to make the transition, Rubin told me in an interview about Android. That sounded to me like Android had settled on Git, but Rubin wasn’t willing to go that far. “We have no announcements at this time,” he said.

Maybe we’ll hear more at the Google I/O conference next week for programmers interested in Google’s work. One theme of the conference is Android. Benjamin Lynn of Google’s developer programs group offered a basic guide to Git on a Google open-source blog posting this week. And Google uses Git elsewhere, for example, to help Linux kernel programmers with support for Qualcomm mobile phone processors.

Junio C. Hamano currently maintains Git.

One choice Google won’t pick for source code management is the centralized Subversion software. “Subversion we don’t think is enough of a repository to handle 11 million lines of code. If this is adopted, and there are 10,000 people checking out, it’ll die,” Rubin said. (Android today consists of about 8 million lines of Linux code plus 11 million lines of higher-level code; of the latter, about 8.6 million will become open-source software.)

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Video: Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created two years ago (Thanks RadonPL on Digg)

Om Malik wrote at GigaOm, “If Yahoo is turning to Jajah for Voice on IM, then AOL wants to offer others an ability to integrate AIM Call Out service via its Open Voice APIs into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with Wi-Fi connectivity. AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM.” He continued, “Jajah, AOL Open Voice, Ribbit and scores of others are taking a platform approach to VoIP, hoping that adding voice to applications will drive up minute volume and turn them into a viable business.”

TMCnet.com reports, “Many users are loathe to run multiple IM clients, so many switched from AIM to Skype because they could get IM, plus voice & video — all in a single client. Why bog down system resources with multiple IM clients? I will say AOL has done a good job of beefing up the feature-set of AIM, but one has to wonder if Skype’s momentum is unstoppable.” The piece continues, “In any event, Steve Murphy, Senior Vice President, AOL said, ‘By opening up our voice communications gateway to developers we’re furthering the mission of AIM which is to facilitate the world’s real-time conversations. We’re building on the popularity of the Open AIM program and opening up the AIM Call Out platform, enabling open standards voice communication services to proliferate in the marketplace.’”

“Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies,” said Jim Johnson, The Standish Group International. Five years of research has gone into this new report titled “Trends in Open Source.” The Open Source report discusses The Standish group’s research study of the top 10 drivers that are influencing decisions on how IT is adopting open source technology. “The Standish Group’s new study clearly shows how pervasive Open Source Software is used in industry today. It is a shocking examination of Open Source usage by commercial and government organizations,” said Timothy Chou, Ph.D., former President of Oracle OnDemand and author of “The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future,” “The Standish Group has successfully quantified both user and market behavior so that we may more fully understand what is driving this IT trend.”

If the $60 billion is anywhere closer to the real figure, then it is time to re-look at open source world, and its impact on traditional vendors. We’ve known there is a big effect, but it is only now that we have some concrete numbers ($60 billion is a mind boggling). And this is now real competition, real money, real business strategies. I am sure biggies at Microsoft and Oracle are reading this report now.

It’s a great time to be an open source company.

[I am trying to get a review copy of the report, and will update this post if I manage to get it]