Early last year, Greg Kroah-Hartman led a Linux kernel development effort to address lacking support for hardware devices and drivers in Linux. Kroah-Hartman even devoted more of his work to the driver project and then put out another call for companies to come forward with their Linux driver issues. This work is highly commendable and [...]

Or at least it will be if Open Health Tools, a new project to create standards and interoperable systems for accessing electronic health records, is a success. The project (PDF), which involves “national health agencies, government-funded organizations and agencies, major healthcare providers, international standards organizations and companies from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the [...]

EnterpriseDB and SpikeSource obtain new rounds of funding. Microsoft’s Open XML document format wins approval. Linux Foundation releases report on Linux participation. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor. In short, Ringside’s Social Application Server is designed to add social networking capabilities to existing applications and content. It [...]

SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese was hinting at a new direction for the former open source stack and services provider at OSBC, and the latest announcement indicates that it involves more of a focus on proprietary and “hybrid software solutions”. The new Solutions Factory offering is targeted at ISVs and is said to provide them with [...]

I kept waiting to weigh in on the ISO approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format, searching for some kind of silver lining for open source. Sure, there are those that say technical and interoperability issues will limit uptake of the standard. But this is Microsoft and Office we’re talking about, so it seems [...]

Given my previous lamentations about the state of open source adoption in the UK, it is good to see David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservative party talking up the potential for open source adoption in the UK. (You can also watch and listen to the speech here). The Conservatives have some form here. In [...]

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing: “”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code [...]

The figures originally reported here were preliminary and have been revised for a formal CAOS report to be published in the first half of 2009. In the interests of accuracy this data has now been removed. For a full assessment of VC funding in 2008 see this post.

The Linux Foundation has put out a fascinating study on Linux kernel development, who’s doing it and how fast things are moving. In reading through the report, I’ve picked out some of the statistics and points that stood out to me: There have been almost 10,000 patches in each recent ~quarterly Linux kernel release. Releases [...]