I’ve just spent about an hour running around the publisher booths at LW, and there are some great new books out there or on the way. O’Reilly is launching or has recently launched books including Ruby Cookbook, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running; Steal This Computer Book 4.0; Ajax Design Patterns and, the title I’ve [...]

I spoke with the good people at OpenOffice.org about penetration by their alternative, open source office productivity suite into enterprises. I was most happy to hear that enterprises taking the leap, either in small tests or widescale rollouts, still cite OOo’s methods of handling Microsoft Office macros as a major security advantage. A couple of [...]

Nick Selby, Dennis Callaghan, and I will be posting updates over the next two days from the floor of LinuxWorld Boston. Wireless service seems to be good here, unlike some other conferences that will not be named. I was unable to attend the conference yesterday, but I was told from those onsite that attendance was [...]

The supposed “bombshell” that Microsoft is to provide technical support for Linux running on Virtual Server 2005 isn’t a complete surprise – Microsoft’s Jim Herbert told our TechDealmaker service much the same thing back in February 2003 when Redmond announced the acquisition of Connectix – though I admit it seemed a longshot at the time. [...]

Dutch software house TIOBE (named for The Importance of Being Earnest, endearingly enough) calculates the relative popularity of various programming languages using Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! stats. Obviously it’s a rough-and-ready calculation, but I was interested to see that PHP is now ranked fourth (behind Java, C and C++), and that Ruby has cracked [...]

I had a lot of fun at EclipseCon 2006 talking to small, profitable companies with no VC. The Eclipse ecosystem is rapidly becoming awesome, but it’s not the only place where startups like these appear: Cygnus and Sleepycat were similarly bootstrapped. You always hear that there’s no money in tools, but I finally realized why [...]

After an interesting talk with RightNow’s Greg Gianforte, I realized just how good hosted app vendors can have it. Greg has been a big evangelist for open source, and his company uses a lot of open source components in their operations, The cost savings are obvious and the ability to cost-effectively scale (a key need [...]

I admit to being impressed by the boldness of Sun’s ‘Niagara’ UltraSparc T1 processor strategy when the chip was launched at the end of last year – eight cores, 32 threads and its emphasis on lower power consumption seemed to put it ahead of the pack. But I was surprised and a bit uncertain about Sun’s decision to turn the design specs of the chip over to the open source community as OpenSparc. What would they want with it, and what would they do with it?

A nice little interview CNET interview with JBOSS CEO Marc Fleury casts some light on how disjunctions between business models can make it difficult for an open source-based company to be acquired. Despite acquisition discussion requests coming in “almost every quarter” he gives the impression that talks usually founder on his requirement that JBOSS stays fairly autonomous and sticks with its open source approach.

It was tempting to make my first post here about the alleged inability of enterprise CIOs to distinguish between code quality and the developer’s footwear when evaluating software. But I’ve managed to resist… nearly.

Instead, here’s an issue which has been tickling my cranium every now and then and on which I would like to collect some opinions. Can you really keep in-house software, base on GPLed code private in a modern company where outsourcers and contractors abound?

On behalf of The 451 Group, I’d like to welcome you to our public open source blog – 451 CAOS Theory. On this blog you’ll find a diverse group of 451 analysts covering diverse open source topics on a regular basis.

451 CAOS Theory is where the 451 analysts share information, point to interesting news stories and opinions, and generally think things through. This is our jumping-off point for tracking open source-based business issues. However we are also writing it to be a useful starting-point for the rest of the industry.