Dr. Dobb's Journal, January 2006
To help developers adopt and share best practices for software development, IBM will contribute intellectual property to the open-source community. Specifically, IBM will contribute a subset of the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP), a collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects. According to industry analysts, about half of internally developed software projects run over budget, 90 percent are late, and 30 percent canceled. Fifteen to 20 percent of all software defects reach customers, costing the U.S. economy $60 billion a year, according to the Standish Group. IBM is being joined in this open-source project by the likes of Capgemini, BearingPoint, Covansys, Number Six Software, Ivar Jacobson International, Armstrong Process Group, Ambysoft, Object Mentor, and Bedarra Research Labs, as well as Unisys, NTT Comware, Sogeti, Wind River, Jaczone, and Object Management Group. IBM will likely make the contribution via the Eclipse Foundation.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Karlsruhe's joint International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT; http://www.is.cs.cmu.edu/) have demonstrated breakthroughs in cross-lingual communication. A lecture by InterACT director and computer-science professor Alex Waibel provided speech-to-speech translation simultaneously translated from English to Spanish to German. According to Waibel, current speech-to-speech translation systems allow translation of spontaneous speech in very limited situations, such as making hotel reservations or tourist shopping, but they cannot enable translation of large, open domains such as lectures, television broadcasts, meetings, or telephone conversations. The new technology developed by InterACT researchers fills that gap and makes it possible to extend such systems to other languages and lecture types. Waibel also illustrated new ways of delivering speech translation services beyond traditional headsets and audio systems. One involves an array of small ultrasound speakers that can deliver a narrow beam of audio in a foreign language to a particular individual, while others nearby hear the same speech in the original language as it's spoken without disturbance.
Microsoft has made major modifications to its "shared source" license program, moving from 10 specific licenses to three more general ones (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/). The three new licenses are: Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL), and Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).
The Ms-PL is the least restrictive of the Microsoft source-code licenses, letting you view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or noncommercial purposes. Under the Ms-PL, you may change the source code and share it with others. You may also charge a licensing fee for your modified work if you wish. This license is most commonly used for developer tools, applications, and components.
The Ms-CL is a license that is best used for collaborative development projects. This type of license is commonly referred to as a "reciprocal source-code license" and carries specific requirements if you choose to combine Ms-CL code with your own code. The Ms-CL allows for both noncommercial and commercial modification and redistribution of licensed software and carries a per-file reciprocal term.
The Ms-RL is a reference-only license that lets licensees view source code to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a Microsoft technology. It does not allow for modification or redistribution. This license is used primarily for technologies such as development libraries.
IBM announced plans to open source its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that supports software that can process text within documents and other content sources to understand the latent meaning, relationship, and relevant facts buried within. UIMA (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima/) provides an open framework with standard interfaces for adding unstructured information analytics to any application. This framework makes it easy to integrate the analytic software tools and end-to-end enterprise applications across several different vendors. UIMA also provides tools to speed the creation of new, reusable analytic software components to handle unstructured information. The UIMA framework currently has been embedded in IBM products, including IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, the WebSphere Portal Server, and Lotus Work Place.
Transportation engineers in Missouri plan on using people as data points in a project that involves real-time monitoring of cell phones belonging to car and truck drivers traveling on state highways. The information collected, which includes traffic flow, congestion, traffic volume, speed, and the like, will then be sent back to drivers in the form of automatically updated electronic road signs, web site alerts, and text messages sent to mobile phones and in-car information systems.
The project, which will be the largest and most aggressive of its kind in the country, will be implemented by Delcan (http://www.delcan.com/), a company that includes traffic safety, management, and planning amongst its portfolio. Similar projects are being planned in parts of Virginia and Georgia. The system follows mobile phone signals from tower to tower, overlays that data onto highway maps, and determines speed.
The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has announced formation of the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI), which will push for Linux-based operating systems for mobile phones. Research firm Ovum reports that worldwide mobile phone sales grew 31 percent in 2004, and that more than 2.8 billion phones are expected to be in use by 2009. The MLI working group (http://www.osdl.org/lab_ activities/mobile_linux/) will work on operating system technical challenges, foster development of applications for Linux-based mobile devices, deliver requirements definition documents and use cases, and host complementary open-source projects that support the initiative. MontaVista Software, Motorola, PalmSource, Trolltech, and Wind River are among the first MLI participants.