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Catalyst is a fully New Zealand owned company, directed and staffed by bright and intelligent Information Technology experts who deliver critical open source business systems to some of NZ's largest organisations.
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New Zealand Open Source Project
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Weka is another New Zealand open source project to come out of a research environment. In this case Waikato University’s Machine Learning Group. It is a world-class tool for exploring and extracting information from data. And a hugely popular one at that, with some 20-30,000 downloads per month from SourceForge over recent years. According to one nomination from Israel, Weka is the de facto standard in the machine learning community, used not because it is free, but because it is the best.
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The Berkley System Distributions
The Berkley System Distributions or BSD's may be regarded as the forerunners of Linux and other Open Source projects. They were the original 'free' unix systems however there were some legal challenges made in the 1980's that caused some problems. These challenges were resolved in the BSD's favour and now there is a stable community built around them. They don't have as many applications available out of the box as Linux however because they support many of the same open standards it is usually a realatively simple task to port an application if required.
Because the BSD's have been around for longer than Linux they are regarded as being more mature however the development community isn't as large and support for some hardware isn't as well catered for as with Linux. They are ideally suited as an open replacement for proprietary UNIX systems. They also use the BSD license, rather than the GPL as used by Linux.
The BSD license allows developers to not only modify and distribute software, but to relicense it under closed-source terms as well. So BSD technology forms part of other platforms as well, including MacOSX, Windows and Linux.
The major flavours of BSD today are:
- FreeBSD
- FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for a variety of hardware architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development. FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones. FreeBSD makes an ideal Internet or Intranet server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes. The quality of FreeBSD combined with today's low-cost, high-speed PC hardware makes FreeBSD a very economical alternative to commercial UNIX® workstations. It is well-suited for a great number of both desktop and server applications.