Free Software Policy

Virtual Browser is built on top of Free Open Source Softwares. Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions.

Sometime, because we found a bug, or because we want to add a new feature, we have to "patch" one of these software. In order to respect the original license of this software (most of the time, the GPL), we have to send back this patch to the original authors of the software. But this is also in our interest, because they will be able to review, ack and merge our modifications into the original software (upstream).

We do our best to send patchs upstream:

>  Quality: the comunity will review and ack our changes 
>  Fiability: These changes are used (and tested) by all the other uses of this software 
> Time: We don't have to rebase our changes each time there is a new version of the software.

Internal Projects

Some of our internal projects are also available under the GPL.

krb5 test

This small utility can be used to test your kerberos configuration. It will try to fetch a service ticker for a given service, and show you verbose diagnistic messages in case of failure. You can grab the source on floss.commonit.com. You'll need kerberos devel files (libkrb5-dev on Ubuntu) and CMake to build it. To use it, just launch it and fill the request informations.

libsoup-libproxy

libsoup-libproxy is a libsoup url proxy resolver module using libproxy.

To use it in your project, just copy proxy-resolver-libproxy.c and soup-proxy-resolver-libproxy.h in your source tree and build them. You'll need libproxy headers and library for that.

Here is how to enable the module in a libsoup session

#include "soup-proxy-resolver-libproxy.h"


SoupSession *session = webkit_get_default_session();
SoupSessionFeature *feature;
soup_session_remove_feature_by_type(session, SOUP_TYPE_PROXY_RESOLVER);
feature = SOUP_SESSION_FEATURE (soup_proxy_resolver_libproxy_new ());
soup_session_add_feature (session, feature);
g_object_unref (feature);

pkcs11-proxy

This project is based on a stripped down Gnome Keyring without all gnome dependencies and other features . It provides a simple and cross platform pkcs11 proxy to relay smart cards authentification commands on the network (use an encrypted tunnel for that !).

It contains two components: a daemon running on the host where the smartcard is plugged and using the real pkcs11 driver (pkcs11-daemon), and a pkcs11 driver used on the remote host (pkcs11-proxy). Sources are available at floss.commonit.com.

External Patched Projects

nx

Virtual Browser use a slightly modified version of NX. These patchs can be found on floss.commonit.com. The "embedded" branch is the iPhone version of NX with some optimization for this platform.

glusterfs

Glusterfs is a distribued filesystem, used in Virtual Browser clusters. Some of our patchs are not yet merged upstream. The most important features we added is NaCl encryption for secure file sharing. You'll find our glusterfs git tree at floss.commonit.com and we're working with glusterfs developpers to help them merging these modifications.

Misc Patchs

Some other software used in Virtual Browser have been patched. You'll find these patchs here. We will do our best to send these patch to upstream projects, but some of them are simply out of the scope of these original projects and won't be merged.