Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.1
• RubyGems 1.3.4
• Rails 2.3.2
• ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
• Subversion 1.6.2
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.1.30
• Apache 2.2.11
• PHP 5.2.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
• Git 1.6.3.1
• Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.

JumpBox

Tempe, Ariz.  (Press Release) ~ December 17, 2008 — JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances which provide the easiest way to trial, develop, and deploy applications, today announced the release of 38 Open Source applications to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The release enables server application deployment, configuration, and management almost completely independent of any user hardware.

Organizations have long sought to empower themselves with software that enhances productivity,” says Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox. “JumpBox now offers the ability to do so without procuring hardware, or downloading any software at all.”

JumpBox offers small to mid-sized organizations a library of Open Source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service.  Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for twelve JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.

“The combination of JumpBox and EC2 signals a new era of agility and flexibility for virtualized organizations,” says Staken. “Imagine enabling better customer service almost instantly with SugarCRM or deploying a Ruby on Rails application for testing in minutes. EC2 provides cost effective, scalable computing power; JumpBox provides the application packaged for instant deployment.”

A JumpBox packages an application’s software, dependencies, and application data into a single virtual application that deploys in minutes locally, or hosted to major computing, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. Among other enhanced features, a JumpBox provides an intuitive user interface to quickly guide users through deployment, a web-based control panel for simplified management of system functions, and a backup system that enables data security and portability.

For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

All brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

JumpBox Media Contact:
Steven Shaffer
JumpBox, Inc.
http://www.jumpbox.com
480.967.5897

The news about Microsoft’s Open Source Web Platform Installer probably took a few people by surprise this week. Game plans and strategies are changing quickly, and enterprise open source governance policies (PDF) may need to be reviewed or revised to keep up with the rapid pace of change. Projects like FOSSology and FossBazaar are designed to grapple with governance issues.

Open Source in the Enterprise – 2008, an O’Reilly Radar Report starts with the question/premise: “It’s no longer IF, but HOW?”  O’Reilly’s new report is for CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and business owners who want to make smart decisions about deploying open source. (Disclaimer: O’Reilly makes money selling books about open source software.)

So how do you use open source software in your business? How do you define policies for using open source? How do you govern IT? What are the best practices in the industry today?

The O’Reilly Radar Report, Open Source in the Enterprise – 2008, is authored by Bernard Golden (CEO of Navica).

Mr. Golden starts out by telling us that open source is “growing at a compound rate of 55%”. The number of projects hosted at SourceForge has grown from around 12,500 in 2000 to nearly 200,000 by year-end 2007. However, Mr. Golden also reminds us that Open Source adoption statistics are not very reliable at this point:

It is extremely challenging to assess how much open source is being used within enterprises today. One of the traditional methods of use identification (vendor reports) is missing, as most open source software is downloaded anonymously and copied/redistributed extensively. Self-reporting by enterprises cannot be relied upon, either, as many companies are unwilling to self-report in the interest of avoiding conflict with existing vendors or keeping competitive information confidential.

He goes on to explain his method of research, which involved examining job posting data — looking for tell tale markers of Open Source adoption in various enterprises.

The report lists 6 drivers for Enterprise Open Source Adoption, and follows each with case studies, and analysis of best practices:

1. Agility and Scale ( case study – PayPal)
2. Quality and Security (case study – Coverity)
3. Breaking Vendor Lockin (case study – Kaplan test services)
4. Cost (case study – Big Lots)
5. Sovereignty (case study – open source in Brazil)
6. Innovation (case study – AMQP at JP Morgan/Chase)

The O’Reilly report concludes with details on how to create an Open Source Action Plan.

The critical task at this stage of open source use is to bring it into the open and recognize that it will be an important part of IT initiatives going forward. Don’t underestimate this issue: a recent CIO magazine survey found that about 50% of enterprises claim that they are currently using open source, while 45% cited support concerns as a reason restricting its use—whereas the reality is that nearly every IT organization has open source running today. The first step to solving a problem is confronting it, and the challenge for early open source users is to be honest about their actual circumstances.

I found the report to be well researched and written in a non-technical, jargon-free manner. The case studies are helpful. You might find the report helpful also.

Disclaimer: The values, viewpoints and opinions expressed are totally my own, and do not necessarily reflect the values, viewpoints, or opinions of my employer, clients, suppliers, or any other affiliation.

Tim Bray took a break from his other stuff to run more RSpec tests. Is he RESTing or testing, or both at the same time? He’s misusing RSpec (like Andy McKee abuses the guitar) — and that kind of innovation could lead to a cool new invention — but only if he plays with it long enough to discover something new and interesting.

Obie Fernandez is pushing paired programming the HashRocket way. Looks like they are having fun with it, and getting some good results. True believers in agile programming methods are already doing this, and everyone else is watching it closely, or closing their eyes, and trying to ignore it with one pragmatic eye still open.

David H. Hansson was not really “thinking out loud”, but he recently twittered:

getdropbox.com is exactly what I need to complete the two computer conundrum. Great execution. Can’t wait to be able to pay for it.

DHH also released Rails 2.1.1 — with lots of little bug fixes.

Dave Thomas is having fun with procs in Ruby 1.9

Michael Galpin talked about rapid prototyping with Apache Derby and JRuby on Rails over on IBM developerworks.

Did I mention that JRuby 1.1.4 was released? –  with a 2-20x increase in speed for most features

John Lam (the Microsoft IronRuby guy) helps you connect the dots and solve the really big problems in this video captured at the last RubyFringe.

Nick Sieger talks about jazzing things up with JRuby in this InfoQ video interview.

… and from the awesome fresh news department … enjoy the awesome fresh rails documentation.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner at CIO Magazine, interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

… and discussion of the article continues at Slashdot.