Sun’s chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has published more details about Sun’s $1m Open Source Innovation Award, which is especially worth mentioning as it addresses some of the questions I raised last week about whether prizes are the right model for community development. “If the idea is truly innovative, would it not find its [...]

Cleversafe obtains new round of funding. Sun releases OpenSPARC T2 processor design. IT Mill open sources RIA development tools. (and more)

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During my daily crawl for all things open source and Linux related today, I came across a press release from ZenTrend claiming to be the world’s first ‘open source fashion design platform.’ See: The World Just Got Flatter — Silicon Valley E-Tailer Launches First Open Source Fashion Design Platform: iStyler Intriguing. I called the press [...]

A few weeks ago, we released our fifth 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Report entitled ‘The SMB Market Opportunity – How big are SMBs for open source?.’ In this report, we explore the challenges and conditions that must be met in order for open source software and its vendors to succeed in [...]

SFLC sues Verizon over GPL violations. Novell postpones quarterly earnings release. Sun announces open source awards program. (and more)

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This is old news for those in the Drupal and content management communities, but for some reason has not got a lot of attention from the wider open source industry: a few days ago Dries Buytaert announced that he is forming his own Drupal start-up, called Acquia. Buytaert has teamed up with Jay Batson, who [...]

The subject of IBM releasing the OS/2 operating system under an open source license has raised its head again with the OS/2 World Foundation demanding that IBM respond to a two-year-old petition requesting that it should do so. “More than two years ago on September 25, 2005, we sent IBM a letter with a petition [...]

It’s been a busy few months for the Software Freedom Law Center and the BusyBox open source software developers it represents. The SFLC just filed another GPL-based lawsuit, making it the fourth such U.S. court action in as many months. There’s a significant difference this time: the alleged GPL violator is major U.S. wireless and [...]

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more attention in the press today on the comments made by Martin Bryan, outgoing convenor of the ISO JTC1/SC34 WG1 (the working group overseeing the progress of ECMA 376 – Microsoft Office Open XML – through the ISO standardization process). It’s a really quite remarkable comment on the mess that [...]

Sun’s plan to award open source developers with prizes is an interesting one and reaction has on the whole been good, but I can’t help wondering if it is the right way to reward community developers for their efforts. In May this year Sun’s executive vice president for software, Rich Green, had cast doubts on [...]

Controversy is swirling around coincidental real-time Linux releases from Novell and Red Hat, but despite the back and forth, there appear to be some significant differences in what the companies are offering. Novell released its SUSE Linux Enterprise Real-Time 10 (SLERT10) last week, aiming primarily at financial services organizations with a low-latency, predictable version of [...]

Just hours before it was due to announce its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007, Novell has postponed the announcement pending a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC’s concerns, it appears, relate to the company’s previous financial results. “Novell received a comment letter from the Securities and Exchange [...]

Red Hat launches MRG. Centeris rebrands as Likewise, updates software. Sun open sources system management code. (and more)

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UPDATE – For more details on Likewise’s strategy, including insight from the company’s CEO, Barry Crist, see this follow-up. – UPDATE Linux systems management vendor Centeris has announced that is has changed its name to Likewise in a move that also sees the company re-branding its products for the second time in less than a [...]

SUP acquires LiveJournal from Six Apart. Digi-Data parners with OS Storage. Red Hat ranked as top vendor in study. (and more)

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