This year was my first chance to visit the Open Source Business Conference, so while I can’t compare to previous years I must say I was impressed with the consistent quality of both the keynotes and the breakout sessions. One of each particularly stood out for me, however: the keynote from Jon Williams, CTO, [...]

IBM has got back to me with a terse response to some questions I posed following its investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week (sample Q&A: Q. Is the investment a response to Sun’s acquisition of MySQL? A. No). What IBM does not say is in fact as revealing as what it does say, however.
Here’s [...]

Today sees the release of our latest CAOS report, Turning the Tables? – The impact of open source on the enterprise database market, which examines – as the subtitle suggests, how much of an impact the open source database projects and vendors have made on the traditional relational database market.
One of the key findings [...]

While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).
IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given [...]

Matthew Aslett and I are in San Francisco for the next few days at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). We will be moderating a total of three panels this year. Matthew’s panel on the the state of the open source database market is especially interesting, given that we are days away from publishing a [...]

The GNU Affero GPL, released in November 2007 and approved by the OSI this month, is being viewed as both closure of a GPL loophole and as a tool to truly transfer the collaborative and community benefits of GPL to the software-as-a-service model. AGPLv3 closes a loophole that many would have preferred to see addressed [...]

SFLC settles GPL lawsuit with Verizon. Novell anounces plans for SUSE 11. Sun launches open source initiative for SMB market. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

Bruce Perens has announced his intention to stand for election to the executive board of the Open Source Initiative with a stated policy of reducing vendor representation and license proliferation. He is asking for individual open source developers and supporters to back his campaign and show community support for his candidacy.
I mentioned recently that “As [...]

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has settled its GPL lawsuit with telecommunications and wireless giant Verizon, bringing to a compliant close all four recent U.S. lawsuits filed on the basis of the free and open source software license. In its suit, the SFLC alleged Verizon, which distributes GPL-licensed BusyBox software to customers via wireless [...]

Sun’s chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has written and interesting post today that relates to a couple of posts I’ve written about recently, particularly The impact of licensing choice and Is FOSS heading for an identity crisis?
In Software Freedom: More than Copyright Simon argues that “certain recent events between the open and proprietary software [...]

Red Hat acquires Amentra. OSI approves AGPL. SFLC releases analysis of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

As Glyn Moody notes, the European Commission has very quietly announced a change in its position on open source software, confirming earlier reports that it is to favor the use of open source software.
The new strategy document (which was actually adopted in February 2007 but has only just been published) states: “For all new development, [...]

I’ve been making preparations this week for the panel I’m moderating at this year’s OSBC conference in San Francisco. The title is The State of the Open Source Database Market, and we’re lucky enough to have a great panel, featuring: Andy Astor, CEO, EnterpriseDB; Roger Burkhardt, President & CEO, Ingres; Ken Jacobs, VP Product Strategy, [...]

I had to chuckle at the recent headlines: ‘Wal-Mart yanks Linux,’ ‘Wal-Mart Linux experiment failed,’ ‘Wal-Mart puts lid on Linux.’ Why don’t they just come right out and say what they seem to insinuate: ‘Wal-Mart murdered Linux.’ Now, that’s not really what happened. Can you murder an operating system? Some folks may have tried, but [...]

In his recent Forbes article Cash Me Out (by way of The Register’s Open Season) Dan Lyons likens the assimilation of open source into the mainstream IT industry to the incorporation of gay culture into mainstream culture.
In his article, Lyons references The End of Gay Culture, an essay written by Andrew Sullivan and published in [...]

The SFLC has settled yet another GPL lawsuit, this time agreeing to dismiss its case against High-Gain Antennas. Similar to prior agreements to comply, the latest GPL settlement comes with some key requirements for the defendant, which was sued for distributing GPL’d BusyBox code in its wireless connectivity devices without properly sharing source code. To [...]

Microsoft makes additional interoperability announcements. Laszlo obtains new funding. SFLC settles another GPL lawsuit. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.
If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based [...]

OpenOffice.org has announced that the project will be moving from its current LGPLv2 licensing to the LGPLv3 with a coming version 3.0 of the open source office software suite. Sun’s Simon Phipps says the move will give OpenOffice developers greater protection from software patent enforcement and threats because the LGPLv3 allows creation of mutual patent [...]

I just noticed an article from last month’s Red Hat Magazine that states: “It is never correct to abbreviate ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux’ as ‘RHEL’.” As one of the commenters states, it is about fours years too late for that, and Red Hat’s branding police will have their work cut out editing the 47,400 uses [...]