Vietnam seeks opportunities

VietNamNet Bridge administrations and enterprises are seeking cheap alternatives and open source software has become the top choice, reports Vietnam Net.

In 2004, the Vietnamese government kick-started a national open source software development programme for 2004-2008. This programme, however, has not had any impact on the development of open source software in Vietnam, as it remains on paper.

However, the situation has changed. Recently the government has asked state agencies to use authentic software products. As those products are expensive, state agencies are seeking open source software.

Matt Mullenweg, the 23-year-old founding developer of the open source blogging software WordPress, woke up in March to find that disaster had struck, says The Guardian.

"A cracker gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers WordPress.org," he later explained. "They modified two files to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution."

What was alarming was that thousands of people were downloading the code, believing it to be the latest - and so the most secure - when in fact it was making their sites vulnerable to attack.

The business intelligence (BI) software market is all about enabling business users to make sense of their data, says Internet News. However, sometimes the data`s complexity can make it a daunting task.

Open source BI vendor Pentaho claims it has a solution in the new Pentaho Business Intelligence 1.6, which provides a semantic metadata layer.

"Pentaho has been marching down the path of making open source BI easier to use," Lance Walter, VP of marketing at Pentaho told InternetNews.com. "The latest release is a critical next step in that it adds an open source BI metadata layer that lets users build reports with terms like `customers`, `products` and `sales` and insulates them from the underlying database structure and schema."