OStatic

Few recent trends in storage have had as much momentum as Network Attached Storage (NAS). A NAS device can make a network more efficient and secure by supplying file-based data storage services to networked devices, or it can be used for applications such as streaming media. FreeNAS is free, lightweight, open source network-attached storage server software, based on FreeBSD. You can find a good tutorial on how to set up a free NAS server with it here. We recently caught up with Olivier Cochard-Labbe, FreeNAS founder, and Volker Theile, project administrator.

Last week, as part of a dual-promotion between OStatic and Sun Microsystems, OStatic introduced a program through which Java developers can get a year of free hosting for applications powered by the open source GlassFish Application Server and MySQL--both from Sun.? GlassFish is an app server project for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, and is based on source code donated by Sun and Oracle. Its servlet container employs a derivative of Apache Tomcat. We checked in with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun and a co-founder of GlassFish, about GlassFish and open source issues.

Voice chats have emerged as integral parts of many online games in recent years--part of the social gaming trend--and VoIP solutions such as Teamspeak have been created in response. Mumble is an open source project that has gained an audience in this arena for the low-latency game chatting it facilitates. It offers noise suppression, gain control, and support for multiple audio standards. It's client-server focused, and does need its own dedicated server. We checked in with Thorvald Natvig, lead developer of Mumble, on open source and where Mumble is going.

If you're a systems manager, it's a good idea to have OpenQRM on your radar. It's an open source systems management platform that integrates with existing components in enterprise data centers. We checked in with Matt Rechenburg, Project Manager for openQRM, on how people are using it and where it's headed.

Are you familiar with OpenXava? Not everyone is, but it has big fans in the Java development community. It's a popular web application framework for developing business applications. It generates Java (JavaEE/J2EE) web applications that can be deployed on any Java Portal Server as portlet applications. OpenXava is noted for saving developers programming time by delivering business components that they can adjust, rather than making them build applications from the ground up. Javier Paniza, Creator and Lead Developer, checked in with us on where OpenXava is going and other open source goings on.

Does your business need to improve its people skills? OrangeHRM is one of the most robust human resources management applications around, and it's free and open source. Released under the GNU General Public License, it is based on PHP, MySQL and Apache HTTP Server. Himath Dissanayake, CTO of OrangeHRM, checked in with us on how the application can make a difference for businesses.

Among writerly tools in the open source world, TinyMCE is one of those under-the-hood gems that deserves notice from many users. Also known as the Tiny Moxiecode Content Editor, TinyMCE is a cross-platform, web-based JavaScript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released under the LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB. It integrates with many content management systems, such as Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress. Joakim Lindkvist, CEO Moxiecode Systems AB, recently gave us some thoughts on how it's used, and what open source needs.

Are you familiar with Pentaho? The Florida-based company was founded by a team of Business Intelligence (BI) industry veterans from commercial BI companies including Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, Oracle, and more. Pentaho offers a suite of open source BI applications, and, akin to how Red Hat works, gets its revenues from support and management services for its enterprise customers. (It also offers a commercial Enterprise Edition.) We recently checked in with Bill Seyler, a Senior Software Engineer at Pentaho. Among other thoughts, he points out that open source is in need of better monetization models.