There is no one – or nothing – on British TV like Jim Cramer. To me he is a quintessentially American TV personality. No matter what some might think of his track record there’s no denying the man has influence.
His interview with Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat is an entertaining (if superficial) four and [...]

Kickfire and 10gen obtain new rounds of funding. BusyBox developers drop lawsuit against Supermicro. OpenLogic and EnterpriseDB release open source survey findings. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

Timed perfectly (and somewhat coincidentally) between OSCON and LinuxWorld, we’ve just published our latest CAOS report, ‘The Rise of Community Linux.’ Sounds like the community distros are ready to take over the world. Well, not exactly. However, we found significant and increasing use of community Linux distributions such as CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu (which although [...]

I wrote recently about the potential of open source software as a platform for cloud computing. Since then I’ve been involved in a couple of conversations with prospective cloud users that have further highlighted the opportunity for an open source cloud.
The conversations involved big companies with substantial budgets/IT costs, truly mission-critical applications and a tendency [...]

Only two months ago, I offered some criticism of hardware manufacturer VIA’s approach to Linux support, open source software and working with developers and communities. I also offered some of its missteps — encumbering developers with complicated contracts and limiting transparency at the cost of community growth — as lessons to vendors pondering how to [...]

Two interesting posts on the subject of vendor and community open source development have been published today by Stephen O’Grady and Matt Asay. First Stephen called for the rhetoric to be toned down and for participants in the ongoing debate to avoid claiming that one governance model is “better” than the other.
“Organic projects might generate [...]

Dana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.
Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of [...]

Almost every IT end user organisation in the world makes use of open source software somewhere within their company, but that doesn’t necessarily make them an open source advocate. UK telecommunications incumbent BT is apparently ready to make the leap from the former to the latter.
The company has announced its membership of the FOSSBazaar open [...]

Going to my first OSCON five years ago, it was held at the downtown Portland Marriott, and the halls were more crowded, which was nice. However, OSCON has grown beyond the split-level Marriott, where you would sometimes be swept away from conversation by the cavernous escalators. Now OSCON is at the Portland Convention Center, and [...]

We knew Marc Fleury couldn’t stay out of the business world for long. The founder of JBoss has leaked details of his new venture, an open source home automation community named OpenRemote.
The OpenRemote team also includes the creator of Asterisk Mark Spencer, JBoss veterans Juha Lindfors, Christian Bauer, Java X10 project creator Wade Wassenberg, and [...]

When Sun acquired MySQL and announced that it would invest the resources necessary to position the open source database for mission-critical deployments, I think everyone assumed that the database would eventually become bigger and heavier.
Few would have predicted that we would also see a project that would make the database smaller and lighter, but that [...]

EnterpriseDB has announced the results (PDF) of its recent survey of open source database usage.
While the company understandably highlights the adoption of PostgreSQL for transaction-intensive applications and its high reliability and performance and scalability EnterpriseDB has done a pretty good job of presenting the results in an unbiased manner.
I couldn’t help feeling that some [...]

Last week I wrote about whether Google’s potential acquisitions might be stifled by its focus on its own infrastructure software projects but noted that by releasing App Engine the company was encouraging a wider ecosystem of applications based on its platform.
What I didn’t discuss at the time was the potential risk of application vendors finding [...]

Attending the Open Mobile Exchange at OSCON today, I heard some differing perspectives on the role and impact of open source in the mobile software market. We heard from Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin how significant Linux is in the mobile and embedded spaces, some of the non-desktop Linux uses we predicted would be [...]

Ever since Sun acquired MySQL the rumours have been rife that Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member and Sun’s PostgreSQL lead, would soon be heading out the door.
Josh has now confirmed that he is indeed leaving Sun, but before the doomsayers start writing of Sun’s PostgreSQL support business completely, Josh also notes that Peter [...]

Another year has passed by in a flash and OSCON, O’Reilly’s annual open source convention, is upon us. Fellow 451 open source analyst and Portlander, Jay Lyman, will be with me all week at the Oregon Convention Center to check the pulse of the open source development community, meet with vendors and clients, reconnect with [...]

Dana Blankenhorn states that “Open source should support Apple over Psystar”. I have to disagree. My perspective is not based on his views on contracts and licenses (although you can read plenty about that in the talkback section) but on a couple of other issues:
1/ “Open source” is not a single homogenised being or movement.
2/ [...]

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks.
On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an opportunity [...]

Sun continues to take a performance pounding, and the rumors of replacements, layoffs and revamps are beyond swirling and now perpetuating skepticism of the company. It strikes me as odd that Sun, which has embraced open source and is also the defacto leading corporate open source software contributor, is continually dogged by doubts about its [...]

The Federation Against Software Theft has apparently published a survey indicating that 79% of British company directors “would be happy to avoid buying software licences in order to support their company’s balance sheet during the current tough economic climate.”
The anti-piracy organization pointed out that “the penalty for committing this type of fraud is up to [...]