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Software Freedom Day 2012!

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credativ UK once again celebrated Software Freedom Day this month. Although it was one of just 4 registered events taking place in the UK, Software Freedom Day is a global event. A lot of time and preparation went in to making sure it was as successful as last year, and it paid off. Around a hundred visitors passed through the doors, drawn by various press releases, letters to local councillors and schools, and online marketing efforts from the sponsors, who included the local Rugby LUG (Linux User Group), social enterprise Cultivating Communities, and OpusVL, among other open source service providers in the area..

This year, organizers wanted to particularly attract teachers and representatives from local schools, as well as volunteers who might be interested in signing up to host or help with a CodeClub. The event itself proved popular with people of all ages and walks of life.

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In the entrance hall visitors were met by experts volunteering advice and information; they could sample free software and enjoy refreshments cooked by the Indian cuisine group held weekly in the Benn Partnership Centre.

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Craig Barnes, a regular at the Rugby LUG, had designed and built a drum kit with home-made pads and electronics, which was operated by an Arduino using open source software. This was great fun and popular with all ages.

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Visitors enthused about the "hands-on" tech experience in the Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Scratch workshops, which were full for most of the day.
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Working hard in the Arduino room: SFD07 arduino work.JPG

Using Scratch to operate Raspberry Pi computers:
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Scratch was quickly mastered by the kids passing through this room, who then received a certificate: SFD11 kidsteaching scratch.JPG

Rugby's local MP, Mark Pawsey, welcomed the opportunity to raise awareness about free software and open source technologies in the town. He appeared in press coverage beforehand and has been supportive of efforts by credativ and the Open Source Consortium in campaigning for government adoption of open source software during the past year.

Mark Pawsey with Stuart Mackintosh of OpusVL at Software Freedom Day:

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Avon Valley School donated 20 PCs for use on the day, which were used to demo Linux based operating systems and open source applications.

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Visitors thought the event was "well-presented", "inspiring" and an "excellent learning day", run by "very enthusiastic and informative experts". We would like to say thank you to all our wonderful volunteers who did such a fantastic job. Here are a few of them:

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Based on the success of the event we are planning further events throughout the year.

credativ is one of the partners carrying out the 2012 Future of Open Source Survey The goal is to reach 1,000 respondents, so if you're passionate about Open Source, please fill it in. Your help is extremely important to the success of this year's survey.

The following blog post was originally published by SandHill.com and details the findings of last year's survey.

It's exciting to see the evolution of Open Source evident in findings in our Future of Open Source survey over the past five years. Open Source has now moved beyond the tipping point it reached last year in the private sector and now is mainstream in businesses of all sizes and even in mission-critical applications. In fact Open Source is clearly playing a central role in the cloud and mobile segments and has become a driver of innovative solutions in new spaces like Big Data.

The Pace of Open Source Adoption and What's Driving It

Fifty-six percent of the survey participants predicted that that Open Source will comprise 50 percent or more of software purchases in five years. This has more than tripled over the last few years. Respondents continue to identify a turbulent economy as a primary reason why Open Source software is attractive. But perhaps more interestingly, they also indicated that avoiding vendor lock-in is a top driver for adopting Open Source solutions.
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What this Means for Open Source Vendors

According to the survey (455 respondents, 40 percent of whom were vendors), people think the number-one impact on vendors will be Software as a Service (SaaS), which has a profound impact on revenue sources and business models.

How OSS Vendors will Make Money in the Future

skok-072011-2-RevenueSources-300x226.jpgA lot of Open Source vendors used to make their money through custom development; in fact, it was the single biggest source of revenue (26 percent). But when asked how that will change over the next five years, they predicted that it will shrink dramatically to being fourth on the list, dropping to only 17 percent. They believe that SaaS will be the way in which Open Source vendors will make their money. As the figure below shows, they believe that digital services - that is, value-add subscriptions and SaaS - will grow by about 25 percent over the next two years.

This makes perfect sense if you think about the way customers want to consume Software as a Service, and the stronger potential business model of SaaS for Open Source vendors in responding to that need. (For example, Gartner predicts that SaaS will grow from a $10 billion industry today representing just 10 percent of enterprise application spending to double that value by 2015.) Further, SaaS offers a much more flexible and agile approach to productize offerings rather than trying to rebuild a specific solution each time for every customer through professional services.

Accordingly, I think in the Open Source industry as a whole we will see companies getting better at putting digital or web services and SaaS capabilities in place over the next two years and moving away from so much dependence on services.

Also in looking at SaaS from another angle, I see Open Source continuing to be a driver in the build-up of the software stacks that enable SaaS and Cloud-based solutions. SaaS and Cloud together and Open Source will thus become synonymous with each other.

Open Source is Driving New Sectors like Mobile

skok-072011-3-Sectors-Disrupted-300x227.jpgWe have been tracking it as a fund and survey participants identified Mobile as the sector that will be most disrupted by Open Source over the next five years. For example, it is notable that the 3,800 new mobile projects in 2010 were for newer platforms.

Clearly developers aren't targeting legacy platforms like Windows mobile. Ninety-four percent of those new projects were for Apple iOS or Android. Android, you can understand as it is fundamentally open; but it's good to know it's penetrating the iOS stack. We're investing at the intersection of OSS, Cloud and Mobile in companies like Apperian.

Macro Shifts in Open Source - Innovation in Areas like Big Data

To me, what's most exciting at a macro level is to see that Open Source is shifting from commoditization to innovation. For example, take the Big Data space. Open Source is the only way to address such a big problem space because you need a body as large as a community, rather than a single vendor, to tackle the problems of Big Data. Hence you see the innovation around Hadoop and the many companies it has spawned like Cloudera, MapR and the plethora of others.

Also, there is a new class of developers who are building on Open Source who are not willing to take the de facto legacy standard of relational databases and SQL as the solution. Through their innovation on frameworks like Spring, Hibernate and Ruby, they've learned that, in many instances, the best object relational mappings would benefit more from new innovative non-SQL, or so-called "NoSQL" approaches. In many instances these will be far superior to the traditional legacy approaches that came from closed-source giants like Oracle and others.

At the same time, I think it's also very interesting that Open Source is taking the lead in so-called NewSQL. For many transactional and mission-critical applications, where consistency is so important to data for the reliability of the transactions, SQL is still an incredibly powerful and natural way to program. But as applications scale to enormous levels with cloud and mobile applications accessing services in the cloud, there needs to be some new means to reinvigorate SQL. Hence NewSQL. Here we're investing in companies like Akiban to complement our NoSQL investment in Couchbase

Either way, I believe Open Source is going to be the driver of new approaches to solving the Big Data problem because the breadth of solutions needed will require the depth of the Open Source community to address the challenge of data expanding at a rate of 50x over the next decade.

The Potential Traps for Open Source

Despite all the positives we're seeing in the Open Source market, there is a potential negative side. Open Source is not a panacea in and of itself; just because software is written in Open Source, it doesn't mean it will be better.

Open Source is not immune to the bloatware trap. It killed many legacy software companies and Open Source does not necessarily mean best practice. So we have to be careful as an industry not to fall into the trap of just adding more and more features in the name of progress. This is a trap that stifles innovation as more dollars go to maintenance of bloated codebases.

Fortunately communities tend to self-correct and recognize this and trend toward what I call "leanware". For example, I always celebrate projects with tight core kernels that are modular and extensible like Drupal.

However more broadly, feature functionality in many instances was not well thought through by vendors in the legacy approach of the closed-source world. We need to look at how Open Source can stay closer to the customer, and in the best of scenarios, the community will be the customer.

What Barriers Remain to Open Source Adoption?

At a macro level, the barriers to Open Source adoption have certainly changed over the years.

Initially, they were things like policy constraints or legal issues; now we're seeing much more traditional kinds of barriers that we see with any selection of software. According to the survey respondents, the top three barriers to Open Source selection are:

  • Lack of internal technical skills
  • Unfamiliarity with the Open Source solutions
  • Lack of commercial vendor support
Clearly, these could be barriers for any enterprise software selection. We used to see issues about security and licensing as the top barriers.

Next Set of Value Propositions around Open Source

In responding to a survey question on how Open Source impacts the manageability of applications, 53 percent said manageability is better or at least the same with Open source. But as we drilled down further and talked with companies about the survey, they explained that in the past they considered Open Source a complexity - something they worried might infect their own software or something that would be difficult to manage as a component of their overall stack. They explained that's no longer the case. Open Source software is maturing and is properly packaged and properly delivered.

However, as Open Source gets more widely used, new considerations come into focus such as:

  • Once we've built the software, how do we deploy it?
  • When we've deployed it, how do we patch it and update it?
  • How can we make it more effective in the rest of the life cycle, moving it from development to operations? (The so-called dev-ops challenge)

Therein lies the path for the next set of value propositions around Open Source. I think cloud will play a role here because of the emergence of Platforms as a Service (PaaS) in the cloud.

The cycle of managing configuration, deployment and updating of traditional software is still an issue. That challenge may never go away unless there is a fundamental shift. The cloud and PaaS represent that shift. Instead of dealing with all the underlying components of the delivery application, companies will deal with everything being packaged as a service, either as infrastructure, as a platform or at the top of the stack as an application.

Cloud computing will embody, or contain or be built on Open Source. We're very much on that path today. The more cloud accelerates, the more it pulls Open Source. Examples of it are everywhere. Google is built almost entirely on Open Source, as is Amazon Web Services. And there are many examples of pure-play Open Source companies that are addressing the need for interoperability in the cloud by using Open Source. An example of this is how Eucalyptus is building an Amazon-compatible platform on Open Source.

So overall there's a significant shift occurring, and while I think we'll continue to see Open Source delivering more value disrupting and commoditizing existing software categories, I expect to see it both enabling new categories like Cloud and, perhaps most excitingly, driving new areas of innovation in areas like Big Data. It's an exciting time and I look forward to what the year ahead holds for us all.

Results of North Bridge Venture Partners' fifth annual open source survey, conducted in partnership with The 451 Group, were unveiled at the 2011 Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Click here to see a slide presentation of the survey findings including up-and-coming open source companies and some cool open source projects mentioned by survey participants.

Careers update - credativ UK

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This month, credativ is pleased to welcome two new members of staff to the team in Rugby; as a leading specialist in Linux and Free Software, we are expanding in order to accommodate the growing demand for our services.

At credativ we invest in our employees - their growth and development is important to us and, by working for a dynamic company which is constantly evolving, our employees gain exposure to a diverse range of opportunities which may not be available so readily in larger, more traditional organizations.

Current Opportunities
credativ UK is looking for competent open source developers and assistant free software engineers to join our development team permanently. We have a small development team in the UK, so you need to learn quickly and be the kind of person who gets things done and cares about your coding and craftmanship. Current customer projects using Python and Ruby include:

  • back and front end web development for customers to use for training and recording of information security processes

  • creating and advancing modules for business enterprise systems

  • Work will involve supporting existing systems, improving free software packages and deploying new technologies for customers.

    What do we do?
    We develop and support business software solutions using free software; our key business areas are consulting, development, support and training. credativ supports a diverse range of clients and has a long history of contributing to free software projects.

    Our technical team is actively involved with software projects such as Debian, PostgreSQL and OpenERP, among others. Over the last decade, credativ has expanded from Germany to the UK, US, Canada and India, and worked to maintain excellent relationships with other free software organisations, companies and upstream projects. This means we have extensive links with the wider free software community and a vast pool of resources we can tap in to for the benefit of our customers.

    What do we use?
    Our platforms run on Linux and are all built using open source technologies. We use Python, Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, Django, Apache, C++, Git, and whatever is the best tool for the job. We use lightweight agile development processes, with a strong emphasis on test driven development; we like to get involved in user groups and open source community initiatives.

    Skills and Requirements
    Solid development skills, a hunger for learning new things and enthusiasm are the most important things. We are using some interesting technologies to solve some interesting problems, so a good approach to problem-solving is a must.
    Our platforms use a few core technologies, the more you are familiar with the better. Here is a sublist; for detailed job descriptions please see the careers pages on our website.

  • Linux

  • PostgreSQL, MySQL

  • Python, other object oriented programming languages

  • Ruby

  • Ruby on Rails

  • Open Object, OpenERP

  • GNU/Linux system administration
  • How to get in touch
    Please send your CV, a covering letter, and links to your blog, github or any open source project contributions to careers@credativ.co.uk


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    Saturday 17th September - credativ employees were among the volunteers of Rugby Linux Users Group (LUG) who held an open day at The Benn Partnership Centre in Rugby to promote Free Software to the local community.

    Software Freedom Day is celebrated in over 100 countries worldwide; Linux User Groups in cities all over the UK organise their own initiatives, but this is the first year that the Rugby LUG has held the event.

    "The idea of Software Freedom Day is to educate the public about the many benefits of using high-quality, free open source software that is available. Many people may be using Free Software already, without even realising it." says Nick Morrott, from the group. "By increasing awareness of Free Software, our vision is to empower everybody to be able to freely connect, create and share in a digital world that is participatory, transparent, and sustainable."

    At the free event, there were representatives from the Free and Open Source software community, as well as from local ICT companies who specialise in FOSS for the home, education and business.

    A specialised session for members of the education sector took place prior to the main event, where they could discuss their needs on a one-to-one basis with the specialists.

    Volunteers had set up a range of PCs, laptops and projectors so that visitors could experience first-hand the huge range of free software available. A wide range of software suitable for the home, education and business were on-hand, suitable for common tasks such as photo and video editing, multimedia, office and productivity, and games. Visitors could try out these free and open applications on both Microsoft and Linux platforms and benefit from informal and free advice, with the opportunity to arrange further follow-up sessions if required. Many took away information on the solutions as well as "Software Freedom Day" T-shirts, free CD's and memory sticks loaded with software.

    The event was a great success, bringing in over 100 visitors, from individuals wanting to know how FOSS can be applied to their home computers, to representatives from larger organisations, charities and local government.

    Rugby LUG hopes to organise a similar event next year. For more details, please see the group's website: http://www.rugby.lug.org.uk. or contact us at info@credativ.co.uk

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    Rugby, UK - 6 June 2011

    credativ Ltd, the UK branch of the largest independent provider of Open Source consultancy in Europe, today announced that it is partnering with OpenERP in a move aimed at increasing OpenERP’s share of the UK enterprise resource planning market (ERP).

    Chris Halls, MD, credativ UK, comments on the partnership: “OpenERP provides a flexible, robust and cost-effective alternative to proprietary systems such as SAP, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Sage, and is especially attractive to SMEs that may have previously found the cost of ERP systems prohibitive.”

    “credativ has already introduced OpenERP to UK SMEs and enterprises in the manufacturing, ecommerce and logistics industries. credativ’s customers using OpenERP have already realised business benefits including cost savings, streamlined processes, improved visibility and simplified reporting.”

    OpenERP's comprehensive suite of modular applications caters for all major business processes including: CRM, project management, warehouse management, manufacturing, financial management and human resources.

    credativ has been providing open source training and consultancy to public and private sector clients since 1999. The credativ team has extensive experience of working with OpenERP; recent implementation work includes delivering customisations for warehousing, accounting, VAT, reporting and Magento e-commerce integration.

    Halls continues: “Our partnership with OpenERP underlines our commitment to improving the system’s functionality. We want to highlight open source ERP as an alternative to less flexible proprietary platforms, and believe that this new partnership will bring our experience, size and range of services to organisations who are considering OpenERP.

    OpenERP’s modular design allows organisations to introduce or replace existing ERP systems at their own pace without the burden of ongoing licensing costs. We see our partnership with OpenERP as an opportunity to encourage more organisations to make the move to open source.

    credativ's unique support offering is available from operating systems to business applications - at scale. Our international OSSC (Open Source Support Centre) provides support and consultancy not only for OpenERP but for all major open source applications and distributions.”

    Committed to actively participating in the Open Source community, members of credativ’s 40+ developer team regularly contribute to projects with recent input into OpenERP bug fixes, banking functionality and VAT reporting modules.

    About credativ:

    Founded in 1999, credativ is an independent consulting and services company which operates from Germany, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. With a large team of experts in open source software, credativ offers a vast knowledge base that can be tapped into at any time by its clients. The company focuses on the service and support of open source software with a comprehensive range of services, including open source consulting, architectural and technical advice, open source software development, open source training, and personalised support. credativ is “Your One-Stop Shop for Open Source SupportTM”.

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    Rugby, 6 December 2010 - credativ Ltd and Black Duck Software Inc. have announced an international partnership to help further the deployment and integration of Open Source Software.

    The OSSC (Open Source Support Centre) run by credativ in the UK, US, Germany and Canada will now also be providing support for customers of Black Duck Software Inc.

    Black Duck Software is a worldwide provider of “managed software component reuse” solutions; they support businesses and organisations who use Open Source and third party source code in adhering to relevant licensing obligations, thereby reducing the associated business risks.

    Through this partnership with credativ, Black Duck can now also offer comprehensive technical support for the many free software projects which are developed through extensive developer communities rather than through an organisation. This service guarantees Black Duck customers additional security for complex Open Source services and provides an alternative which is comparable to the manufacturer's support available with proprietary software.

    Mr. Chris Halls, Managing Director of credativ Ltd in the UK, explains:

    “We are delighted about the partnership with Black Duck. We hope that combining our competencies will enable us to cover all the requirements for safe operation of Open Source software. Our partnership is a good basis for further international expansion - our Open Source Support Centres will be enhancing Black Duck's service offering, not only for the US but also the European market.”

    If you would like to know more about our Open Source involvement simply leave us a comment here... alternatively please contact us directly.

    About credativ

    Founded in 1999, credativ is an independent consulting and services company which operates from Germany, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. With a large team of experts in open source software, credativ offers a vast knowledge base that can be tapped into by its clients. The company focuses on the service and support of open source software with a comprehensive range of services, including open source consulting, architectural and technical advice, open source software development, open source training, and personalized support. credativ is “Your One-Stop Shop for Open Source Support” TM.

    The Open Source Support Centre (OSSC) offers support for the following:

    Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xandros, SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Linspire, Mandriva, Slackware, Open BSD, Gnome, KDE, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Slony, Zarafa, eGroupware, Kolab Groupware, Scalix, SugarCRM, vtiger, CITADEL, Mozilla-Firefox, Mozilla-Suite, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Wine, Apache, Asterisk, OpenSER, FreePBX, OpenPBX, CallWeaver, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, OpenLDAP, OTRS, RT, Samba, Cyrus, Dovecot, Exim, Postfix, sendmail, Amanda, Bacula, DRBD, Heartbeat, Keepalived, Nagios, Open Security Filter, Ferm, FAI, Squid, XEN, VirtualBox.

    For further information please contact:

    credativ Ltd,
    36 Regent Street,
    Rugby,
    Warwickshire,
    CV21 2PS

    Press contact

    Simon Bowring

    Tel: +44 (0) 1788 298150
    Fax: +44 (0) 1788 298159
    Email: simon.bowring@credativ.co.uk

    About Black Duck Software Inc

    Black Duck Software is the leading provider of products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-solution and reduce development costs while mitigating the management, compliance and security challenges associated with open source software.  Black Duck Software powers Koders.com, the industry’s leading code search engine for open source, and is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, California, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing.

    For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com

    Black Duck, Know Your Code and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Koders is a trademark of Black Duck Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

    Press contacts

    Peter Vescuso
    Black Duck Software
    press@blackducksoftware.com
    +1 781-891-5100

    Ann Dalrymple
    TopazPartners

    CIOZone Interview

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    mme-ciozone.pngCIOZone, a social network for CIOs, recently interviewed our Founder and CEO Dr. Michael Meskes.

    CIOZone is a central place where CIOs can network. In this video, Roger Green takes the time to drop in to our office in Moenchengladbach, Germany to interview Michael Meskes, the founder of credativ about the history of the company, how Open Source has developed and how the business is different today from what it was 10 years ago.

    This discussion is followed by analysis of current development and future challenges; the difference between Open Source vendors and proprietary global players; virtualisation and cloud computing in relation to Open Source and what to keep in mind when migrating to Open Source software.

    Read on or watch the video at ciozone.com.

    If you're looking for support, services and training for Open Source software, you've come to the right place at credativ!

    PostgreSQL 9.0 is now in Betaphase

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    The PostgreSQL developers' community recently published the first Beta version of the new 9.0 release. Over 200 new functions and improvements feature in this new version.

    With this new release, PostgreSQL now amongst other features claims an inbuilt replication solution as well as the ability to access and read standby nodes, continuously being updated by Log Shipping (Hot Standby). Streaming replication allows the sending of transaction logs directly to one or more standby nodes, which considerably reduces the amount of time lost compared with the more common, file-based log shipping. Combining these two features makes for an extremely efficient solution for high availability or loadbalanced systems.

    The all new PostgreSQL version also offers the following innovations:

    • Memory based LISTEN/NOTIFY: this replaces the previous table based implementation and is much faster.
    • Exclusion Constraints: broadens constraints to be able to deal with the complex datatypes of overlapping constraints.

    • Procedural code such as PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl and PL/Python can now be done inline per DO command.
    • This means there is no longer need to define a function with CREATE FUNCTION.

    • Triggers on columns

    • Triggers can now be tied to conditions

    • Named argument lists for procedures

    • Parameters can now be flexibly linked to rolls/databases

    As always, anyone interested is invited to share their test results with the developers. Information on the procedure for testing and filing of error messages can be found in the Wiki.

    All blog articles which fall into the PostgreSQL category are grouped in their own feed, and if you find you need support and services for PostgreSQL, you've come to the right place at credativ.

    credativ Training at Munich Open Source School

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    In May, Consultants from credativ GmbH will be holding a 3 day advanced system and network administration workshop at the Open Source School in Munich.


    Training specifics (subject to modifications!):

    • Kerberos: This training covers the Kerberos authentification protocol, which can handle a range of services and operating systems transparently. The use of tickets makes single-sign-in possible; so a user can access all services with a unique log in. The training will be aimed at network and system administrators who wish to roll out Kerberos in their business or administrative network; it will also cover the installation and management of Kerberos, as well as the integration of services and client programs.


      When: 03-05/05/2010 and 13-15/09/2010

    • Spam and Virus Defense: This training will clarify the integration and fine tuning of open source based services Postfix, Amavis and SpamAssassin, which protect a network from unnecessary strain due to spam mail or malware. This training will be geared at administrators who wish to secure their company's email systems against spam and viruses.


      When: 26-28/05/2010 and 18-20/10/2010

    • Samba in heterogenous networks: This training concerns Samba as a replacement for Windows servers for smooth integration for both Windows clients in unix-based networks, and Linux servers in Windows-based networks. The training is directed at administrators wanting to migrate a Windows network completely or partly to Linux with the help of Samba. The goal of the training is the management and administration of LDAP-based primary/backup domain controller setups.


      When: 30/06-02/07/2010

    The training will take place at the Open Source School in Munich city centre, Amalienstrasse 77. Applications can be made via the Open Source School website or by faxing this form. For further information contact Michael Banck.

    Further dates for your diary: 21-23 April - PostgreSQL training will be carried out by credativ experts at the Linuxhotel Linuxhotel in Essen.

    This week, credativ launches its Open Source Support Card. With this card Open Source Support can be bought at a fixed price - without a binding contract.

    After a long preparation phase we are now offering our trusted services in a new, simple format; with the Open Source Support Card you get a fixed contingent of project-specific, pre-paid services.

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    Customers using the Open Source Support Card have the unique advantage of full cost control; the card can be purchased as a product, without any obligation to sign an agreement for a specific length of time. This may be of particular benefit to larger companies, where new contracts have to be reviewed and cross-reviewed before they can be authorised. A summary of the advantages of the new pre-paid support format include:

    • Open Source Support for a specific project
    • Support not restricted to a specific number of desktops and servers within a company
    • A tempting price model, starting at just £480
    • Full control of costs
    • Support available via telephone, e-mail and remote access
    • Bilingual support - help given in English or even German, if required! ;-)
    • Cost of support NOT determined by the number of CPUs or users
    • NO binding contract - easy way to purchase
    • NO call centre - direct access to the experts
    • Support units can be used for the following services:
      • administration
      • installation (remote)
      • consultancy

    All support is provided to the usual credativ standard. Just as you would expect from our usual contracts, the cost of the service is not determined by the number of CPUs, users, or DB entries. Support units purchased through the Support Card can be used for all related problems within a company - no matter which workstation or server they come up on. The support itself is provided by our Open Source Support Centre: you won't have to deal with non-technical staff or battle through FAQ scripts - our Linux experts and Open Source specialists are on hand to take calls directly. Many of us are actively involved in contributing to a number of Open Source projects - as regular readers will already be aware. ;-)

    The new Open Source Support Card is also an exciting development for the wider Open Source community. By offering yet another attractive support option for free distributions, we hope to prove that there is now no reason not to consider Debian and CentOS as viable alternatives to commercial distributions.

    The Open Source Support Card is designed and marketed in such a way that resellers can also get on board, making access to support that bit easier for consumers: imagine purchasing your server online and while you're at it being able to drop a Support Card into the shopping basket as well - Open Source Support with just one click!

    Currently the Support Card is just available for Debian and CentOS in the UK and in Germany, although we will soon be offering it in the US and Canada too. If you have any questions or comments we'd be pleased to hear from you - we've put a lot of effort into this new product, and are looking forward to the response from our customers and the wider community.