Osiris (software)

Osiris Serverless Portal System

Osiris
Developer(s) kodeware, srl
Initial release March 17, 2010 (2010-03-17)
Stable release
0.15 / February 8, 2012 (2012-02-08)
Preview release
1.0 alpha / December 10, 2014 (2014-12-10)[1]
Development status Current/Active
Written in C++
Operating system Windows, GNU/Linux
Available in Multilingual
Type Peer-to-peer file sharing, Forum
License Freeware
Website www.osiris-sps.org

Osiris Serverless Portal System (usually abbreviated as Osiris sps or Osiris) is a freeware program used to create web portals distributed via peer-to-peer networking (P2P) and autonomous from centralized servers. It is available for Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

Unlike common tools used to publish information on the Internet, such as content management systems, Internet forums or blogs based on a centralized system, the data of an Osiris portal are shared (via P2P) between all its participants. Because all the contents necessary for navigation are replicated on every computer, the portal can be used without a central server. Thus, the portal is always accessible because it is immune to denial of service attacks, Internet service provider limitations (such as traffic shaping and censorship) and hardware failure. In this way, a web portal can be operated at very low costs and free from external control.

History

Osiris was started by a developer named "Berserker" as an outgrowth of KeyForum. Osiris was written in C++ and designed to be decentralized, indestructible and expand beyond a simple a web forum. "Clodo" joined the project several months later.

Osiris was officially announced on October 2, 2006 after 2 years of development. The team is composed of 2 developers (Clodo & Berserker), two employees (DanielZ and Rei.Andrea) and a group of supporters/beta-testers (many of whom were already on the team KeyForum).

Starting from version 0.12, Osiris has become multi-platform, this was possible by migrating from the Visual Studio to the wxWidgets library.

Key features

Osiris is the result of a union between peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and web portals.

Basic concepts

Osiris differs from classic P2P programs in that it is focused on security and distributed data management.

Security

Reputations system

The Reputations system and the subsequent generation of multiple points of view of a portal is one of the most innovative aspects of the program. Unlike "traditional" systems where the computational work (calculation of statistics, indexing of content, etc.) is always made by a central server, Osiris use a distributed approach, where the majority of the works is made by users of a portal, due to this there may be more distinct points of view of a portal, depending on used account.

Each user is free to give reputation (positive or negative) to another user according to its contribution to the portal, based on these reputations, the system processes the pages by removing the contents of users evaluated negatively (such as spammers) and importing the reputations of users considered positively. This allow the creation of a network of assessments that allows management of a portal. Note that each client processes the data independently on its machine in a process that is called stabilization of the portal.

Monarchist and anarchists portals

When a user creates an Osiris portal, the user must choose between two systems of moderation, namely "anarchist" and "monarchy" and the choice cannot be changed after the portal is created. In an anarchic portal, every user can rate another user and thus influence that user's reputation among all users of the portal. In this way, a portal can be moderated without the use of a central server. The first reputation is always positive and is set to the administrator, the user who publishes the invitation link (digitally signed) to the portal. In a monarchy portal, the only users who can generate reputations are the portal administrator and moderators whom he considered positively. Thus, only they can delete or promote content on the portal.

Isis Gateway

Isis is a web gateway to Osiris portals, written in PHP 5, through which it is possible to browse a portal without installing Osiris.

The particularity of Isis is the management of the workload and the data, which don't lie on the public server that is running Isis, but is managed by the various nodes running Osiris. Isis only forwards web requests from visitors to the nodes that have become available to it, minimizing the use of resources from the server through the load-balancing of requests.

Since it is not technically possible to guarantee anonymity in this type of architecture, all accesses by Isis are read-only. This has the dual objective of ensuring the privacy of users and encourage the use of Osiris to actively participate to a portal.

Future plans

See also

References

  1. "Arrivare ad Osiris 1.0 alpha". Retrieved 20 December 2014.
  2. "Download versions". osiris. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  3. Italian / English announcement of GPLing source code of Osiris OSS GPL forum announcement post
  4. "The project is in a 'hibernation' stage, we are working on the new 1.x series but we cannot estimate when can be released.".Clodo. "Forum questions". Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  5. "Arrivare ad Osiris 1.0 alpha". Retrieved 20 December 2014.
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