A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I’d put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly.

Now I’ve rediscovered that draft post…and that I never fixed the bad code it had fingered. Worse, I’m no longer in a position to change the code.

Along similar lines, I’ve been told that a database driven DHCP config file generator that I wrote back in the late 1990s is still in use, and still suffers bugs due to my failure to sanitize MAC addresses that, being entered by humans, sometimes have errors.

I’ve written bad code since then and will write more bad code still, but as my participation in open source projects has increased, I’ve enjoyed the benefit of community examples and criticism. My work now is better for it.

From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.

This article comparing the usability of Joomla vs. WordPress has already been linked by everybody’s uncle, but it’s still worth a look.

I find it amusing, however, that none of the comments so far on that blog post mention the commitment that the core WordPress team appears to have on making blogging fun. If you start with the goal of making something fun, then add sophistication to make it flexible without being complex, you’ll get a very different result than you would if you started with different goals.

MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important.”

Still, people are finding inspiration in OurDelta and Drizzle. Competition from those braches/forks and criticism from the community are sure to help re-align the MySQL core, or provide a reasonable alternative if Sun/MySQL can’t deliver. In the meanwhile, the High Availability MySQL blog is worth following.

I generally liked CommentPress, but when the Institute for the Future of the Book website went down recently, it started throwing errors in the dashboard. So I decided to re-do the Open Source Software For Libraries website using Derek Powazek’s DePo Masthead.

I think it’s a beautifully readable theme, and I only had to make a few modifications. I’ve ostensibly lost CommentPress’ paragraph-level commenting features, but I discovered those may have been broken all along (that was what started me thinking about replacing the theme). I still have lots of work to do on the site, like inserting the footnotes, illustrations, and the final chapter (Ryan Eby’s guide to open source software for the server-side of your library).

WordPress 2.5.1 added a really powerful feature to register_taxonomy(): automatic registration of permalinks and query vars to match the taxonomy. Well, theoretically it added that feature. It wasn’t working in practice. After some searching yesterday and today, I finally found the bug and worked up a fix. I made a diff and set off to open a ticket in Trac.

On the one hand I’m glad I searched first, because it turns out that a ticket on the very same issue was opened on May 16th and it already has a fix. On the other hand, it’s kind of a kicker to have lost my chance at reporting the bug and submitting a fix by only a few days.

The fix is committed for WordPress 2.6, but I’ve done a workaround for 2.5.1 (workarounds are easier to manage than core code changes). I’d say I wish I searched Trac first, but I wouldn’t have known what to search for if I didn’t figure out how to fix the bug first. And I guess I really can’t complain about a community that quickly finds and fixes bugs.

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software best delivered as packaged bits. But the big problem with packaged software–or one big problem–is the risk associated with installation. It just might not work. The Web removes that problem.

It’s way cool to see Lichen’s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).

Part of it is pride in seeing something that I’ve been working on for so long finally get out into the world, but Scriblio really does get better with every comment or criticism. And it takes giant leaps forward every time somebody installs it and reports on how it went. Way cool. Thank you.

Open source software of the free as in free beer and free as in free speech variety has matured to the point that there are now strong contenders in nearly every category, though that doesn’t make them easy choices. It’s often revealing when people criticize OSS as being free as in free kittens, which is true in the sense that F/OSS does require continued care and feeding to make it work, and false in that it suggests commercial solutions don’t. Indeed, as technology reaches deeper into our daily activities, the suggestion that we could make a product decision and then walk away is, perhaps, the most dangerous.

The choice between commercial and OSS is an especially interesting question in a situation I’m familiar with. When we first adopted the software in question, we had free use of it. And even when the developer began requiring annual licensing fees, the costs were initially below $2,000. In time the developer became a formal company, took on venture capital, a large staff and sales force, and eventually was acquired by a competitor. All along, the licensing costs grew, most dramatically over the past few years. The company recently quoted $57,000 in fees for 2009, and looking forward, licensing fees will likely reach $100,000 by 2015 (see graph above).

Because of the growing costs of maintaining the software, a consortium is considering pooling funds and operating a single instance to serve all members. Sometimes, the difficulty of distilling the varied needs and interests of the consortium members is worth the effort, but the vendor’s formula for licensing fees doesn’t yield a significant discount, and the consortial proposal calls for seven FTE of staff to manage and maintain the software (our own use requires .25 FTE).

This is interesting because, while writing my LTR on open source software for libraries, I had an opportunity to speak with Maureen Sheehan, technology integrator for a public school district in southeastern New Hampshire. Open source is relatively common within higher ed, but if there’s anything to stereotypes, universities are rich with staff and other resources while our public schools are in quite the opposite position. Is free software the sole provence of the privileged?

As it turns out, no. Sheehan was speaking to me about her experiences with Moodle, an open source application in the same market as the commercial software that’s becoming so expensive for us now. Moodle is a learning management system, or LMS, that helps teachers deliver instructional content online, as well as offer online class discussions, tests, and quizzes and allow students to submit homework assignments online. Here’s Sheehan’s story from the LTR:

Sheehan says she started looking at the software when a teacher who was familiar with it from another school system requested it. Sanborn didn’t have an LMS, so she mentioned it to the network administrator, who was able to get Moodle up and running in a day. “And he was able to get all the students imported, so they could use it quickly.”

With the project now in its second year, Sheehan says “I love it, it’s wonderful for our district,” adding that it’s “very convenient. It’s improved communication with our students.” She offers the story of a math teacher who posts all his homework assignments for all his classes in Moodle, “so students and parents can always see what’s been assigned, and download the worksheets,” as well as the story of an English teacher who asks students to continue in-class discussions of their reading online in Moodle.

Noting an upcoming requirement from the state that students maintain portfolios of their work, Sheehan says the district is planning to use Moodle as an “e-portfolio system.” The school system’s earlier leap to open source, as it turns out, has positioned it well for the new requirements and will save it from having to buy a commercial product.

And the price was one of the biggest selling points. “The fact that it was free gave me more confidence,” says Sheehan, who notes that so far the only costs have been for time spent training the teachers.

Do the math on what Sheehan’s district is paying for Moodle. The software is free, Sheehan and the network administrator are supporting it along with their other responsibilities, and the training is the same as for a commercial alternative. Even better, Moodle might save the school as much as $25 per student/year for a commercial portfolio system, a lot of money for any district.

Now do the math comparing Moodle to the commercial product we’re now using. Using Sheehan’s experience, it appears that staffing requirements may be lower than for the commercial solution. And using the free kittens metaphor, it seems that the money saved from not licensing the commercial product can be invested in additional staff to develop new features or offer more support to instructors.

The most difficult aspect of this is the cost of switching applications — the cost of re-training a user-base that may range from indifferent to change-opposed. And that’s where F/OSS becomes most interesting. Commercial vendors tell us we can’t afford to develop software that delivers the features they offer, but at the end of the day it’s the people on the ground that make it work. Where better to spend the money, on a far away vendor or on building a strong staff that can act and lead locally?

Anybody who thinks Free Software is anti-copyright or disrespectful of intellectual property should take a look at Mark Jaquith’s post, What a GPL’d Movable Type means. Let’s be clear, Anil Dash takes issue with Jaquith’s interpretation, but the point is Jaquith’s offense at what appears to be Six Apart’s grabbiness for any code somebody might contribute.

Freedom 0 was one thing, the willingness of a person to pour his or her sweat into something, then watch somebody else (or even risk watching somebody else) profit from it is another.

open source, free software, F/OSS, copyleft, copyright, intellectual property

I wish I’d seen this from WordPress maven Matt Mullenweg before I finished My LTR on open source software for libraries. Mullenweg is brushing off some of the mystique and praise the media has been giving him, and giving an honest sense of what makes open source software work:

the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Oh yeah. WordPress 2.3 is out and available for download. It’s a major milestone for the project both architecturally and on softer issues like lifecycle management that are often the Achilles heel of otherwise great open source projects.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress, startup, myth, open source, free software, motivation

Sarah Houghton-Jan’s review of my LTR on open source software for libraries reminded me I wanted to blog this related piece I’d written for American Libraries.

Tim Spalding cocks his head a bit as he says it to emphasize the point: “LibraryThing.com is social software.” However we categorize it, Spalding’s baby has become a darling to librarians, and as we sat chatting over lunch in spring 2006, the web application that had begun life just to months earlier was to catalog its 3-millionth book.

LibraryThing is no library — Spalding’s critics are quick to remind him of that — but it does open some of the activities of librarianship–the cataloging and organization of books–to a world of bibliophiles eager to partake. Librarians and patrons alike cannot help but compare LibraryThing to their own libraries’ catalogs and wonder how this free software, built (well, crafted) in less than a year by a solo developer who didn’t know he was creating a Web 2.0 start-up, could deliver so many features that we’ve wanted in our “real” libraries.

Catalogs, in libraries anyway, are inventories. Their design and features often reflect the interests and needs of those in the library’s back rooms rather than of the patrons entering and exiting through the front gates: but nobody told Spalding that before he began, and the result reflects the things he wanted to do as a reader and consumer of books: He set out to build software that allowed him and any other user the opportunity to organize the world of books to their liking.

But today he can’t quite understand my question: “How did you choose to use PHP and MySQL?” The answer, it seems, was a no-brainer. Spalding was confident and experienced with those technologies–the former a programming language and the latter a database environment–and, even better, they were free. Not just free as in “free beer,” but also free as in “free speech.”

Along with PHP and MySQL. Spalding happily and unquestioningly hopped on board with Apache, an open source web server, and Linux, the open source operating system on which LibraryThing runs. That particular combination, popular worldwide, is known as LAMP (Linux, Apache. MySQL, PHP). Together, this platform of free tools has lowered the cost of development and reduced the risk of exploration.

Librarian Aaron Schmidt agrees. While at Thomas Ford Memorial Library, in Western Springs, Illinois, he started working with open source because it was free and easy. When the library leased a fancy new printer/photocopier/scanner, Schmidt quickly figured out how to automate scanning from the library’s rich collection of historical photos. And when he went looking for a tool to easily post the pictures online. Schmidt immediately thought of using WordPress, a free open source content management application. “[I] figured people had already solved many of the issues I would face,” Schmidt says.

But free open source software isn’t just for brave experimenters looking to push boundaries. Librarian and software developer Dan Chudnov explains that you can no more run a library without software today than you could run a library without a building in 1900. Open source software, says Chudnov is “as massive a donation of time, energy, and products you cannot afford to turn down today as Carnegie-built libraries were back then.”

The economic benefits of open source are undeniable, but Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman says it’s more than that. With an eye toward the growing role technology plays in our world. Stallman holds that the right to “run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software” is essential to any truly free society.

Chudnov is right: Libraries can’t afford to ignore the value of open source, and those in libraries who are using it agree. But among these success stories, another theme emerges that resonates with Stallman’s message: Open source software is forming the foundation of our libraries of the future, where we all get to play bricklayer and architect.

open source, f/oss, free software, libraries, lib20, library 2.0

Context: Below is the text of my virtual presentation to the LITA BIGWIG (it stands for blogs, wikis, interest group, and stuff) Social Software Showcase. The presentation is virtual, but the round table discussion is going on today, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. I won’t be there, though. My bad scheduling got me double-booked and I’m presenting in the Transforming Your Library With Technology track.

— – —

We’re swimming in reports that tell us to reduce expenses while the costs of our systems continue to rise. Compare this to the trend outside libraries where commoditization of bandwidth, storage, and even servers as well as the maturing of our software and management practices has made possible large numbers of competing, free services in almost every category (among the most recognizable we find Gmail, YouTube, and flickr). And those who want more direct control over the network services they use can find open source software to match those offerings and service providers to help them use it.

Libraries are good at sharing data, but we’ve done a poor job of taking advantage of the network and new technologies to reduce the costs of sharing or build network-dependent features. One result is that it’s often cheaper to buy a book than to do an ILL transaction. The success of Linux, Apache, and every other open-source application has been the success of network-enabled efficiencies that allowed aggregation of improvements from a broad range of contributors.

In libraries, this applies equally well to both our systems and data. We recognize now that our data is living and evolving, but synchronizing available record enhancements with individual collections remains costly and laborious. Without efficient mechanisms to share improvements, the value to any one library of trying to share what local improvements or corrections they make is limited, preventing libraries from benefiting from the network in ways that open source software development has.

Extending some of the affordances of open source further, remixing and mashups have shown the power of open systems and common, easy to use protocols. Those mashups are pointing the way to new applications and features that the platform providers themselves often can’t foresee or afford to develop on their own. Libraries, struggling as we are with developing the features our users are demanding, need remixable platforms to support more rapid and sustainable development.

And we need platforms that are affordable to all libraries, including the nearly 30% that serve populations of 2,500 on an average annual budget of less than $50,000 (about 60% of America’s libraries serve communities of fewer than 10,000 people).

That’s some of the philosophy driving this IMLS grant proposal. The key features of what I hope to achieve are simple: We’ll need a lot of applications to do this, and all of them will share these characteristics:

• Open source and free in both the “free beer” and “free speech” senses of the term
• Remixable and open for others to innovate with
• Social

From there it’s really a matter of what we hope to achieve…what we build.

scriblio, internet archive, imls, bigwigshowcase07, open source, community informatics, presentation

Web 2.0 has matured to the point where even those who endorse the moniker are beginning to cringe at its use. Still, it gave me pause the other day when Cliff (a sysop) began a sentence with “Web 2.0 standards require….”

Web 2.0 is now coherent enough to have standards? We used to joke about rounded corners and gradient blends being the rule, but something more has indeed emerged. O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 by example, Time Magazine echoed Kevin Kelly’s assertion in naming You as person of the year: Web 2.0 is about people. And “the rules” are emerging as a matter of market forces and natural selection.

Open Source

No matter your position on the Free Software Foundation’s philosophy, open source development reduces costs while improving quality and helps projects get to market faster with new ideas.

Flickr is among those that’s been rather public about their use of the LAMP stack, though Google and others have quietly built their business on it too. WordPress, a rare example of a downloadable Web 2.0 application, has enjoyed active development (and even a resurrection) due to its GNU license.

Still other Web 2.0 applications extend the open source model further. Open source content, or the user’s ability to declare a Creative Commons license on their content in these Web 2.0 applications is becoming common (and demanded by some). We may argue about the efficacy of Wikipedia, but the fact is that it’s among the most likely sites to appear for a web search and it’s consistently ranked among the top sites for traffic.

Wikipedia’s early contributors, looking at a young site with an unclear value proposition, could trust that their work would be protected by license (specifically, the GNU Free Documentation License).

Built for Remixing

Amazon reports that almost a third of their sales are attributable to remixers and boasts 180,00 registered developers of their API.

Google Maps didn’t include a public API when first released, but the community responded with enthusiasm and quickly reverse engineered the JavaScript to build new applications. Google responded by releasing a public API, making internet mapping and Google almost synonymous.

Dan Cat mashed up flickr and Google Maps on his own before Yahoo!/flickr snatched him up to build those features into flickr’s own site. But the company still enjoys the efforts of developers building applications to the flickr API, independently developing new features and adding value to the service.

Like open source, remixability and APIs engage a larger pool of talent than is available inside any company and serve two very important audiences: those who want features and those who care about their exit strategy. Neither group is remarkably large, but both are influential, passionate users. (More: Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability.)

Well Behaved and Social

Predictable and reliable URLs are essential to allowing users to bookmark and link to your site; well-formed semantic markup makes it easier for screen readers and search engines to make sense of the content. Semantic markup and microformats aid in remixability, contribute greatly to the Semantic Web, make site redesigns easier, and generally display better in a broader variety of formats and clients (think HTML vs. RSS).

People are anxious to leave comments telling us how right or wrong we are, so a site without comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is turning its back on its users. Good sites recognize the value of their users and cultivate the community. Caterina Fake did a lot of that for flickr (see her comments on my first photos there), while MetaFilter exists entirely as a community.

That doesn’t mean users are itching to build somebody else’s site, the lesson is that personal value precedes network value. Good sites make it easier for people to do what they want to do, not what their boss or the site’s creator wants.

If it isn’t obvious already: empower the user to achieve their own goals and control their experience.

rules, web 2.0, web applications, open source, remixability, social software, well behaved

The most selfish thing about submitting a manuscript late is asking “When is it going to be out?” So I’ve been waiting quietly, rather than trouble Judi Lauber, who did an excellent job editing and managing the publication.

Ryan and Jessamyn each contributed a chapter, and I owe additional thank yous to the full chorus of voices that answered so many of my questions, participated in interviews, and generally made the book/journal/thing what it is.

The official announcement features a quote from Richard Stallman, the founding father of the Free and Open Source software movement.

In the 70s, computer users lost the freedoms to redistribute and change software because they didn’t value their freedom. Computer users regained these freedoms in the 80s and 90s because a group of idealists, the GNU Project, believed that freedom is what makes a program better, and were willing to work for what we believed in.

He’s speaking of software, code, but his words harmonize well with the founding purpose of libraries. A hundred years ago we embarked on a period of library construction unmatched in our previous history. We may mistakenly identify the period with the source of funding, Andrew Carnegie funded thousands, but Carnegie’s spoken belief that individuals could elevate themselves and build a stronger republic through libraries was alive in the zeitgeist.

Today, as the World Wide Web becomes ever more interwoven with the fabric of our fleshy lives, libraries have new roles and responsibilities. Just as we architected public libraries of brick and stone in the past, we must to build and support a public information architecture for the future. Open source software not only serves libraries’ immediate economic interests, such software is also aligned with the larger public mission and philosophy of libraries.

Yes, I’m a partisan, for both free — free as in free speech — and open source software and for libraries.

libraries, library, LTR, Library Technology Reports, F/OSS, open source, free software, freedom, lib20, library 2.0

Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless.

The Simple Economics of Open Source:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

economics, free software, open source, oss, peer reviewed

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

F/OSS, GPL, Larry Augustin, OSS, distribution, free software, marketing, open source

Does open source free your budget up for the best talent?

I asked her if the choice to go with open source is helping her to keep costs in check, here’s what [Dabble CEO Mary Hodder] said:

What happens with open source is you actually spend the same amount of money, but you don’t have lock-in and you pay for really good people to run it. And so you still end up paying. But you just pay in a different place. And I think it’s a much more sustainable model for that kind of server/software development.

Found in south by southwest festivals + conferences

talent, sxsw, sustainability, oss, opensource, cost shifting, Mary Hodder, Dabble

A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.

The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up this forum thread that suggested Blastwave.org’s ports of PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

edit: I corrected the model number.

amp, amps, apache, lamp, mysql, open source, oss, php, solaris, sun, t2000

Art Rhyno confused my by calling it ERP, but he just rocked his code4lib presentation and I realized he’s talking about the same thing that’s been itching me: libraries are not unique, but our software and standards are unnecessarily so.

In my introduction of WPopac I made the point that I didn’t want to replace the ILS — certainly not the acquisitions management functions or other business processes. Art today explained that he wouldn’t want to have to develop or support those features either, but that we don’t need to. He reminded us that other people have to buy stuff too, and that buying books really isn’t so different from buying plumbing supplies or toys.

The market segment is called ERP, enterprise resource planning, and Art pointed out a few open source solutions. I’m waiting for his slides to go online, and I’m hoping we hear more about this.

code4lib, code4lib2006, erp, enterprise resource planning, open source, library, libraries, acquisitions, workflow

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

• Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
   
• Collage appears to have good content reuse features
   
• OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
   
• Drupal: open source and turning heads

cms, content management system, joomla, collage, omniupdate, drupal, commercial, open source, oss, web, web management

Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.

tags: geo world, geocode, geocoding, geographic information system, geography, geolocation, gis, gis development, gis guide, gis tools, map room, mapping, mysql, open source, open source gis, open source tools

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, software, zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite

I might be overstating it, but Identity Management is the next big thing for the open source community to tackle. That’s why I like Sxip, even though I know so little about it.

There are a number of other solutions stewing, but most of those that I’m aware of are targeted at academic and enterprise users. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some federated system of identity management among blogs?

Yes, IdM is the next big thing, but as an infrastructural technology, it will be invisible when it works.

Here’s another link: The Identity Initiative : iname, FreeID, LID, SXIP, What’s Your Favorite Emerging Digital Identity?

tags: community idm system, community, digital identity, federated, federated identity management, federated system, identity, identity management, idm, open source, open source community