Six open source vendors announced the creation of the Open Management Consortium (OMC) today, an effort to promote the adoption, development, and integration of systems and network management software based on open source and open standards technologies (press release). The OMC provides an alternative to “monolithic vendor lock-in”, which presumably refers to HP’s OpenView, IBM’s [...]

OpenLogic, an open source “stack provider”, announced its Expert Community Program today (press release). Basically, experts in the open source community (experts defined here as open source project contributors or committers) can sign up to be part of a distributed support network for OpenLogic customers. When members of this support network solve customer issues for [...]

Stephen Shankland at News.com posted a short article about Sun and PostgreSQL (“Next Solaris gets open-source database“). I was unaware that Josh Berkus went to work for Sun in March. Josh is a member of the PostgreSQL team (and coincidentally has done internal development work for The 451 Group). Josh had posted a blog entry [...]

If you take a look at the all-time top downloads list of open source projects hosted at SourceForge, you’ll see that the top nine projects all have to do with sharing music and videos. Surprise, surprise. These top nine account for over 500 million downloads! Wow. Yet, when compared to the 7-day most active or [...]

Open Source & Free Software At The 451 Group When we talk about the model of open source and free software in the enterprise not being a zero-sum or all-or-nothing endeavor, we’re pointing not just to knowledge gained through our regular discussions with vendors, but also to our own experience. The 451 Group is not [...]

Alfreso, an open source document management vendor, made an announcement yesterday that mostly went unnoticed, but is deserving of mention (and reflection) – it has open-sourced the enterprise edition of its software. Why does this matter? The trend for venture-funded open source startups has been to provide two software versions – one open source with [...]

This is just the type of announcement that makes open source tangible to my kids. The LEGO Group announced today that it will open-source the firmware for its Mindstorms NXT programmable Lego kits. While this may have no direct impact on the enterprise software space, it is a sign of the pervasive nature of companies [...]