Free communications technology 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.

SAP R/3 Communications Suite allows SAP R/3 servers to communicate with external devices such as fax and GSM modems by sending and receiving a fax or SMS.

SAP R/3 Communications Suite provides an easy configuration through a Web interface and a JMX console.

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.

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.

radlib is a C language library developed to abstract details of interprocess communications and common linux/unix system facilities so that application developers can concentrate on application solutions. It encourages developers (whether expert or novice) to use a proven paradigm of event-driven, asynchronous design. By abstracting interprocess messaging, events, timers, and any I/O device that can be represented as a file descriptor, radlib simplifies the implementation of multi-purpose processes, as well as multi-process applications.
radlib greatly improves typical process performance through the use of shared memory buffers to avoid costly "malloc" and "free" library calls. These buffers are also used for interprocess messages. radlib also utilizes shared memory constructs to provide global message queue management and global "Queue Groups" for increased interprocess communications flexibility.
All shared resources are semaphore protected to avoid issues with concurrent access. In short, radlib is a sincere attempt to provide real-time OS capability on a non-real-time OS. It has been successfully deployed on linux, MacOSX and FreeBSD but there is no reason it would not build and run on any flavor of unix supporting System V IPC.
Specifically, radlib provides fast system buffers, a simple config file utility, events, doubly-linked lists, process logging through syslog, message queues, semaphores, shared memory utilities, timers, stacks, state machine utilities, a process framework, a process management utility to start/stop groups of processes, optional MySQL or PostgreSQL database API, straightforward TCP/streams socket API, and other assorted system utilities.
Proprietary forms of radlib have been used in several mission-critical commercial applications with excellent results. It is light yet very powerful and efficient in real time. radlib is BSD-licensed (free to use in binary or source forms) and distributed as source to be built on the target platform. Build instructions are included in the distribution. See the file "COPYING" in the distribution for details concerning open source software and the BSD license.
radlib is currently used as the foundation of my unix/linux-based weather application, wview, which interfaces with the Davis Vantage Pro console to archive weather data in real-time and periodically (every 60 seconds) generate weather images and html files suitable for use on web sites (see my weather page). It uses multiple radlib processes which illustrate radlibs interprocess communications flexibility. Feel free to download the wview source as another example of radlib implementation.
Enhancements:
- Updated to work properly on both 32- and 64-bit architectures.
- No special configuration is required.
- A few API calls have been changed ("int" arguments became "long"), but only a few.
- This release increases the default system buffer numbers and adds an additional size of 8192 to better support 64-bit platforms.

MultiChat is a chat client with the major focus on one-to-many communications (chat rooms and others).
MultiChat application does not aim to be a multi-protocol client. Instead, it seeks to provide multiple chat and collaboration resources based on integrated development with a single protocol and server software.
Installation:
# Run the configure script
./configure
# Compile
make
# Install
make install
# Run
multichat
Enhancements:
- This version fixes some bugs, sets the application icon on the alt-tab screen and changes the topic text justification.

Dream Print Tracking System is a powerful and user-friendly system for tracking print distribution and circulation.
It uses many principles from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, but in a way specific to print publishers.
The Media Development Loan Fund commissioned Dream based on its experience in working with print publishers in more than 30 countries worldwide, where it provides support to independent media in the form of financing, training and technology.
In many of these countries, print distribution is one of the biggest difficulties independent publishers face because it is tightly controlled. Many countries have print distribution monopolies or cartels, which are either politically tied to the government, corrupt or incompetent.
Dream is a tool for tracking print circulation. In a similar way to customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as Campwares Cream software, Dream allows you to maintain a clear picture of your distribution business based on regularly entered contracts, orders, and shipment information. This is handled primarily through Dreams Report functions. Dream is designed to look and feel like an email application. Its inbox is used for tracking inbound communications such as new customer e-mails and customer phone calls.
Because Dream works with any standard SMTP mail server, it also manages outbound customer communications and keeps records of your responses.
Dream does two things: It is a database that stores all the relevant information you supply about the publications you produce, who distributes, who sells it, and how you connect with these people.
It is also a tool for retrieving and presenting this information in several different ways. It contains utilities for tracking products, promotions, and communications.
Dream handles four types of information:
1. Information about what you produce and the people to whom you provide it. This information is entered on the Options tab of the screen and appears primarily in the menus on the Main tabs screens. One example is a product category in which you describe a periodical you produce.
2. Information about specific products such as books or individual issues of what you produce, specific distributors and specific sellers, and tracking of these items from contract to order to shipment to return.
3. Communications, including records of incoming messages from various sources, outgoing emails to individuals, and newsletters.
4. User information including usernames, passwords, preferences and permissions.
Enhancements:
- Minor bugfixes were made.
- A Russian localization was added.