Free charter communications software for linux

Ice, the Internet Communications Engine, is middleware for the practical programmer. A high-performance Internet communications platform, Ice includes a wealth of layered services and plug-ins. Ice means simplicity, speed, and power.
Ice is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Commercial licenses are available for customers who wish to use Ice with proprietary products. Please contact sales@zeroc.com for more information.
Ice is currently available for C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, Python, and PHP, and is supported on various operating systems. Additional operating systems and languages will be supported in future releases.
Ice consists of the following packages:
Slice The Specification Language for Ice. Slice establishes a contract between clients and servers, and is also used to describe persistent data.
The Slice Compilers Tools to compile from Slice into target languages, such as C++ and Java, or to automatically generate documentation from Slice files.
Ice The Ice core library. Among many other features, the Ice core library manages all the communication tasks using a highly efficient protocol (including protocol compression and support for both TCP and UDP), provides a flexible thread pool for multi-threaded servers, and additional functionality that supports extreme scalability with potentially millions of Ice objects.
IceUtil A collection of utility functions, such as Unicode handling and thread programming. (C++ only.)
IceBox An application server specifically for Ice applications. IceBox can easily run and administer Ice services that are dynamically loaded as a DLL, shared library, or Java class.
IcePack A sophisticated server activation and deployment tool. With IcePack, the complex task of deploying applications in a heterogeneous computer network is dramatically simplified. Simply write a deployment descriptor in industry-standard XML, and IcePack handles the rest.
Freeze Freeze provides automatic persistence for Ice servants. With just a few lines of code, an application can incorporate a highly-scalable evictor that efficiently manages persistent objects.
FreezeScript It is common for persistent data types to change, especially in large software projects. In order to minimize the impact of these changes, FreezeScript provides inspection and migration tools for Freeze databases. The tools support an XML-based scripting capability that is both powerful and easy to use.
IceSSL A dynamic SSL transport plug-in for the Ice core. It provides authentication, encryption, and message integrity, using the industry-standard SSL protocol.
Glacier One of the most difficult challenges for object middleware systems is security and firewalls. Glacier, the firewall solution for Ice, greatly simplifies the deployment of secure applications. Glacier authenticates and filters client requests and allows callbacks to the client in a secure fashion. In combination with IceSSL, Glacier provides a powerful security solution that is both non-intrusive and easy to configure.
IceStorm A messaging service with support for federation. In contrast to most other messaging or event services, IceStorm supports typed events, meaning that broadcasting a message over a federation is as easy as invoking a method on an interface.
IcePatch A patching service for software distributions. Keeping software up-to-date is often a tedious task. IcePatch automates updating of individual files as well as complete directory hierarchies. Only files that have changed are downloaded to the client machine, using efficient compression algorithms.
Enhancements:
- Various additions, including redundant IceGrid registries.

Inter-Thread Communication (ITC) aims to make it exceedingly easy to call functions in other threads.
The lexer does all the work, so just run the lexer on your headers, then call the stub functions.
In addition, it also provides a complete threading API, with the four threading primitives and a high speed threadsafe FIFO class.
Enhancements:
- It add support for GCC 4.x, and the build system is fixed.

Libtubo Interprocess Communication is a small and simple library that can run processes in the background and communicate via the stdout, stderr, and stdin file descriptors.
The functionality of libtubo is similar to the glib function g_spawn_async_with_pipes(), except that all pipe setup and monitoring is taken care of.
The calling function only has to provide the functions with which to process the input/output of the remote process.
The library first appeared in the year 2000 in the xfce3 desktop as part of the xfsamba application, and is now available for use for other developers.
Enhancements:
- Some control bugfixes.
- The version has been updated to the xffm scheme, as this package is now distributed with xffm.

Buni Meldware Communication Suite (MCS) is a platform-independent groupware package consisting of:
- Meldware Mail
- Meldware Calendar
- Meldware Webmail
- Meldware Secure Administration System
Together the package provides support for thousands of users concurrently to send and receive email and to schedule meetings. MCS uniquely allows you to store all messages and scheduling events in nearly any database and runs on nearly all popular software and hardware platforms.
MCS commitment to platform and database agnosticism aims to meet increasing business requirements to maximize ease and flexibility of managing and accessing data as well as putting a premium on interoperability.
Additionally, while the scheduling and calendaring services can be installed separately, the integrated feature set provides both a distinctive and powerful experience to both users and server-side Mail Based Applications and Collaboration Based Application Services.
The MCS platform provides security integration using LDAP sources including Microsoft Active Directory as well as flat-file and database sources.
Additionally, extensible security allows custom authentication/authorization sources.
Enhancements:
- This is the first milestone release with WCAP, freebusy for webmail, and mature IMAP all together.
- It has undergone extensive hardening, dogfooding, and QA testing.
- The WCAP protocol for calendaring now works well for Thunderbird and Lightning 0.3.
- Webmail calendaring was greatly improved.
- The abillity to download attachments has been added to the webmail interface.
- Numerous performance improvements have been made in SMTP, IMAP, and MIME parsing since 1.0-M7.

The CentralNic Toolkit is CentralNics system for instantaneous Registry-Registrar Communications. Registrars can use this system to register and modify domain names in real time, with no delays for human intervention or e-mail processing.
CentralNic Toolkit also provides advanced and efficient methods for searching for and querying domain names and whois records, and retrieving account information.
All the software developed for the Toolkit system is Open Source, and is developed in a participatory manner, relying on cooperation with our user base. Users of the software are encouraged to submit bugs, suggestions, feature requests and patches.
Enhancements:
- This release adds support for the new account management functions that allow automation of payment batches.

Automated Revision Control System is used to automatically monitor remote and local git, subversion, CVS, and even rsync repositories.
It notices changes and updates the local and remote repositories almost automatically. It requires either git, subversion, rsync, or CVS, and can be used for Web site maintainance, backup, communications, and many other purposes.
Enhancements:
- This release generally works a lot better to the extent that the authors are starting to using it for everyday file syncing and backup.

Cream is designed to meet the unique demands publishers have, including features that allow subscription management, support for multiple products (print subscriptions, advertising, online subscriptions, books, etc.), customer communications (both incoming and outgoing), and easy-to-use reporting and analytical functions.
The project also enables publishers to track special offers, such as seasonal discounts and trade shows. With Cream, media organizations can put their business data to work, increasing sales and customer satisfaction. It allows employees to have up-to-date information throughout the sales cycle, and lets managers have greater insight into sales patterns.
Main features:
- receiving e-mails functionality (text and HTML)
- sending HTML emails
- editing HTML emails with a WYSIWYG HTML editor
- newletter subscriptions for anonymous users
- external HTML forms for newsletter subcribe and unsubscribe
- sending HTML newsletters
- editing HTML newsletters with WYSIWYG HTML editor
- powerful filter for sending newsletters to either newsletter subscribers or all customers based on type, category, product, campaign...
- Import of products and customers
- Communication and Sales tabs in user interface
- completely localizable user interface
- localizations to Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian languages
- Home page with shortcut and summary links
- Help page with FAQ, Support and Forum links
- Cream now works on Windows too
Enhancements:
- This version works with MySQL database and features new functionality for contacts, opportunity and task management, external HTML forms for support and information requests, CMS integration, and many new fields and options.

stic bundles a few Linux tools which are intended to support the task of collecting an unreasonable amount of pictures (preferrably in JPEG format).
similar
a program for detecting duplicate or very similar images. It maintains a
database of characteristic color samples which it compares with submitted
pictures. similar depends on libjpeg and ImageMagick s convert (on a
modern Linux desktop system these components should already be present).
Storage medium may be a usual filesystem or a MySQL database. There
also is a MySQL UDF extension to compare image samples within SQL queries.
similar contains the communications module described at sagent.
simv
a core program to perform file management tasks on an image collection.
Its main purpose is to coordinate file movements with the content of
similars database. This applies to importing new files which get tested
against the existent collection, as well as to inform similar about moving
and deleting files within the collection.
simv depends on an external image viewer like ImageMagick s display
(should already be present on a modern Linux desktop system) or John
Bradleys xv (quite a fast one).
simv contains the communications module described at sagent.
sagent
a standalone version of the communications module used in simv and
similar. This software receives input from its start terminal and multiple
clients, distributes several types of output back to them, and is also
able to act itself as such a client.
Since communications mainly use TCP/IP there is an encryption layer
(Blowfish with 128 bit keys) which provides user authentication. Any
single activity of such a user may be particularly permitted or denied.
Secure connections should be possible that way as long as one can defend
the keyfiles and programs on client and server host against foreign
access.
Front-end connection software is available in C, Tcl/Tk and PHP3 to build
custom clients. In the most primitive case even telnet can act as a
client.
The standalone program sagent may be used as communications node in a tree
of clients. Another purpose is to be a shell frontend which sends commands
to a server and receives its replies.
snntpbatch
a command line based NNTP (newsgroups) client. It is mainly intended for
automatic download of images by use of a filter language. Nevertheless it
also downloads the message texts and converts them to HTML code which
includes the downloaded images. Also, it is capable of automatically
posting sets of images to the newsgroups.
The tools are designed to be very independent of the system flavor. On an
average Linux desktop there should be no need to update existing system
components. Actually one could use stic without having display equipment for
graphics.
Any program activity which is possible in dialog may also be performed in
batch runs. Therefore the tools are quite suitable for users who like to get
boring tasks automated and manual tasks simplified.
All tools code is open source and distributed under BSD license.
Example images Credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (see images/CREDITS)
Enhancements:
- The new encrypted protocol version 0.2 is standard now : SHA-1 seal, 256 bit keys, variable chaining initialization vector.
- The protocol of a connection is chosen by the client and may or may not be accepted by the server.
- See sagent command -security options clientprotocol , serverprotocol.