451 CAOS Theory, along with the myriad of other services provided by The 451 Group, are now on hiatus for the rest of the year. We’re all off for winter break / holidays / Christmas (whatever you wish to call it, these days) until January 2nd, 2008. Check back in early January for continued open [...]

Red Hat hires new CEO. IBM acquires Solid. Microsoft works more closely with Samba. (and more)

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Just when I thought I’d be in for a quiet last day in the office before Christmas… IBM has announced that it is to acquire in-memory database specialist Solid Information Technology in a move that sees it competing directly up against the TimesTen functionality that Oracle acquired in June 2005. The aqcuisition also has implications [...]

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has spoken before about how he is more interested in learning from the successes of Ikea, Ryanair and Virgin Mobile than he is the established proprietary software vendors. Even so, it was surprising to see that Red Hat has looked outside the software industry for its new president and CEO. Jim [...]

It seems the definition of just enough operating system (JeOS) and the amount of OS needed for virtual appliances depends on who you talk to. The term, coined by virtualization leader VMware, refers to an OS stripped down to only the necessary components to run a particular application or stack of software. Ubuntu Linux distributor [...]

A common question you hear from proprietary vendors when dismissing open source alternatives is “how many customers actually want access to the code anyway?” It is a question I put to an open source software vendor myself earlier this week while playing devil’s advocate. The response – that the right to modify the source code [...]

Drupal founder obtains funding for startup. Digium surpasses one million downloads of Asterisk. Alfresco announces partnership with Quark. (and more)

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A long time ago, in a different life, I coined the term total innovation opportunity as a means of encapsulating the potential open source has to lower development costs for business users, while enabling developers to focus on innovative development. I was therefore interested to see this week that Hyperic’s John Mark Walker had picked [...]

SFLC settles GPL lawsuit with Xterasys. Canonical finalizes first Bazaar. SugarCRM releases v5.0 (and more)

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2008 could be a very good year for the likes of Compiere and Openbravo if 451 CAOS Theory’s blog stats for this year are anything to go by. I’ve just been taking a look at the most read stories of the year, and following the usual suspects (Oracle Unbreakable Linux, the Linux desktop, the EC’s [...]

I recently noted that Centeris, which enables the integration of Linux into Microsoft environments, had changed its name to Likewise and launched a new open source authentication project called Likewise Open. This week I was able to catch up with Likewise CEO, Barry Crist, who shared some more details about the company’s products and strategy [...]

Sun’s Allan Packer (author of Configuring and Tuning Databases on the Solaris Platform) has published a lengthy and fascinating blog post on the future of proprietary databases in which he discusses the likelihood of MySQL, PostgreSQL et al challenging Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Packer’s multi-part post covers a number of areas including: Feature Stagnation In [...]

Companies that sell and support open source software have been acting like garage bands lately, changing names in significant numbers as the year draws to a close. One theme of all the new nomenclature: association with open source. The first example is Centeris, which recently changed its name to to LikeWise Software. The new name [...]

The Dutch government’s decision to favor the use of open source software over proprietary alternatives has naturally received a lot of press attention over night, and rightly so. The news has overshadowed a similar decision by New Zealand’s Ministry of Justice. It’s a shame the Ministry of Justice’s decision hasn’t garnered more attention, because it [...]

Novell reports earnings. Adobe open sources remoting and messaging technologies. Yahoo sponsors Apache Software Foundation. (and more)

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Popular Mechanics is reporting that NASA has decided that the avionics software that will power the Ares I rocket to the moon will be based on open source software. NASA announced this week that Boeing will deliver and install the avionics systems for the Ares launch rocket that will send humans back to the moon [...]

Seeing as I mentioned the SEC’s investigation of Novell’s financial results, it is only right that I also mention that the SEC has given Novell the thumbs-up to announce its delayed fourth quarter and full year results later today. “The SEC required no change to Novell’s previously reported financial results,” says Novell. The company had [...]

Novell to release delayed earnings tomorrow. Centric CRM changes name to Concursive. Untangle surpasses 100,000 users. (and more)

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Open source stack and support vendor OpenLogic has announced an effort that, with help from some other vendors, projects and communities, aims to better quantify open source software use in the enterprise. The Open Source Census kicks off with an open source software tool from OpenLogic called OSS Discovery. Intended as a pluggable architecture for [...]

Ulteo, the online desktop firm set up by Mandriva founder and former-CEO, Gael Duval, has announced the ability to run the OpenOffice.org productivity suite within a web browser. In fact, this blog post was written using OO.org within Firefox via Ulteo. How well does it work? The best thing you can say about it is [...]