Sun Microsystems and Canonical issued a joint press release yesterday regarding Ubuntu support for the UltraSPARC T1 processor and the related Sun server line. We touched upon this topic in part one of our interview with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, late last week.
While this news was expected, based on Mark Shuttleworth’s appearance during […]

Recently, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth spoke with The 451 Group at length about Dapper, Ubuntu, and the trends and development of the open source and free software movements as they relate to enterprise information technology. In this multi-part series, The 451 Group will present Shuttleworth’s comments along with insight and commentary from […]

I posted a blog entry a few weeks ago about Larry Augustin’s open source board portfolio. Well, it got bigger yesterday. XenSource, the open source virtualization software company, has announced that Larry Augustin has joined its Board of Directors.
Plus one. Eleven. Maybe. The press release doesn’t mention his role with Linux International or the Linux […]

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), has an editorial on Newsforge today entitled “The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time” (curiously titled).
In summary, Stallman thinks that the Java licensing announcement that Sun made at JavaOne isn’t big news. The announcement he refers to is “Sun Recasts Java Licensing for GNU/Linux and […]

Successful open source project teams without core vendors make for great hiring wars.
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog etry about Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL project, taking a job with Sun. Josh used to work over at Greenplum, an open source vendor focused on data warehousing and business intelligence implementations of […]

So, following on the heels of LaVonne Reimer leaving as CEO of Compiere, the company just announced at its partner event that Andre M. Boisvert has been named Chairman of the Board and Chief Business Development Officer. Boisvert will be responsible for growing and developing the global Compiere partner network. Does this mean that Compiere […]

Wow…there were a lot of press releases today from open source vendors (and open source oriented vendors) named as finalists for the “Red Herring 100 North America” list (vendors are only eligible if they are privately held). I checked out Red Herring to see exactly which vendors were included.
BitTorrent, Black Duck Software, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Funambol, […]

WinHEC, of all events, isn’t the most obvious place for open source enthusiasts to flock to. For years the legacy style Windows hardware engineering conference has been the forum where Microsoft leaning software developers learn specifically how to write their system code and device drivers for the Windows platform. But things are different this year.

Ingrid Marson at ZDNet UK has an article at News.com about an upcoming BBC documentary on the topic of open source called “The Code Breakers“.
A senior Microsoft executive* told a BBC documentary that people should use commercial software if they’re looking for stability.
Aren’t we past this rhetoric?! It simply doesn’t hold up. There are plenty […]

BMC’s CTO, Tom Bishop, has posted message on the Open Management Consortium’s (OMC) web site, showing what seems to be support for the organization. I posted a blog entry about the launch of the OMC last week. BMC is a public company (NYSE:BMC) with a $4.4 billion U.S. market capitalization and annual revenues close to […]

We’ve seen a few examples of vendor-backed open source efforts that were shut down, abandoned, or curtailed. Add to this list Apple Computer with its Darwin BSD core for Mac OS X. Tom Yager at InfoWorld published a piece today entitled “Apple closes down OS X“. This issue has been discussed for several months now. […]

Not quite open source, but open-source-adjacent: I am taking over The 451 Group’s Rich Internet Application (RIA) coverage from my colleague Tony Rizzo. I caught up with Nexaweb and ICEsoft today at JavaOne, and I’m looking to touch base with Backbase, JackBe, and Laszlo Systems. Who am I missing? Have any readers compared these frameworks, […]

I was just talking to Shai Agassi at SAP and he gave me a pretty interesting factoid: The SAP Developer Network (SDN) Web site attracts about 500,000 anonymous visitors per month. And the site has become a wellspring of information, feedback and ideas for SAP’s development plans. After two years in operation, SAP is contributing […]

CollabNet VP of marketing Martin Doettling dropped by our office on Monday afternoon to correct my erroneous impression that CollabNet’s growth has been sluggish or static. The company has used the same few reference accounts since I started tracking it years ago, and it recently introduced a lower-cost on demand option; understandably, I think, I […]

JavaOne kicked off today with a keynote by newly-appointed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. So, what did Sun gift to the open source community today?
In terms of software contributions to open source, add the following to the growing list of Sun’s open source software assets: Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT), Java Studio Creator, Java System Portlal […]

The Kororaa project, a binary installation of Gentoo Linux, has received a note that it may be in violation of the GPL, as the project includes proprietary binary video drivers from ATI and NVIDIA along with the Linux kernel, released under the GPL. The post on the Kororaa site does not indicate whether the note […]

Ok…so I love Larry Augustin’s job. At least I think I do.
I saw another press release this week that listed Larry Augustin as a board member. I touched on this a few days ago in my blog entry regarding Hyperic. Larry and open source board seats seems to be a recurring theme, so let’s do […]

A new wave of companies, known collectively as open source stack providers (or “stack certifiers”), has emerged to address the problem of integrating and supporting multiple open source software components in a single organization. Stack providers assemble sets, or stacks, of commonly used open source software components and offer services around them, including support and […]

Hyperic has announced a Series A investment from venture firm Accel Partners (press release). Although the funding amount was not listed in the press release, VentureWire is reporting the number to be $2.5 million U.S. (with a projected $3.25 million U.S. first round goal). It also announced that Larry Augustin (formerly of VA Linux) […]

Chordiant has just released its collaboration product called Mesh (press release), which it says utilizes an open source development style to develop the types of business process automations that enable the collaborative framework.
This seems a fine example of what kinds of products should be developed out in the open. The processes surrounding collaboration are very specific to […]