Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

Microsoft and TomTom announced a settlement to their patent dispute, and while part of me was gearing up for a SCO-like saga, it just didn’t materialize. Actually, this settlement is the real-world scenario that was probably most likely from the start. It may be the end of the matter from a legal perspective, but in [...]

Red Hat’s financial results. Further Sun acquisition rumours. OSBC round-ups. Cloud. Microsoft. Vendor lock-in. Linux on the desktop (or not). Transparency. Open source in the travel industry. And more.

Red Hat had an impressive quarter, particularly considering current economic conditions, and the company’s CEO spent much of the week talking about the good times for Red Hat and open source, largely as a result of bad times in the economy, although Whitehurst also sees improvement. It does seem that open source in general stands [...]

There were plenty of clever and interesting things said during this week’s Open Source Business Conference. These are the things I felt compelled to write in my notebook, in chronological order. Some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source, others were new ideas to me, or interesting ways of expressing old [...]

Earlier this week NASA Ames Research Center announced that it had entered into a “Space Act Agreement” with Microsoft to “jointly… develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make the most interesting NASA content – including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon – explorable on WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft’s online virtual telescope [...]

I mentioned in yesterday’s CAOS Links that Microsoft had published a white paper (PDF) on open source. Called “Participation in a World of Choice” it outlines Microsoft’s perspective on various issues related to open source development, distribution and licensing. There is plenty for open source advocates to discuss and argue with (and Carlo Daffara has [...]

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory Given a large number of events, meetings, presentations and conference sessions to attend this week I am dispensing with the commentary/smart alec remarks. Here are the major headlines from the first two days of EclipseCon, OSBC, # Rumors that Red Hat is about to get gobbled by Oracle were [...]

Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst had the following three statements on his final slide at OSBC today: Transparency builds trust Participation solves problems Open source provides an answer Transparency has become one of the main buzzwords this year and I believe is critically important for traditional proprietary vendors as they attempt to participate with open [...]

Topics for this podcast: *IBM-Sun rumors swirl with implications for open source *Linux and open source rising up in the clouds *Acquia adds to Drupal-based commercial offerings *West Coast CAOS Tour iTunes or direct download (28:21, 6.8 MB)

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

UPDATED – I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below. There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into [...]

IBM is in talks to acquire Sun, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cites “people familiar with the matter”. According to the report the deal on the table is $6.5bn in cash, although it sounds as if negotiations could be faltering: “People familiar with the matter cautioned that, while talks are [...]

Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

George Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, has written an interesting post on the topic of defining what it means to be a Free Software vendor, furthering the conversation on business strategies related to free and open source software. I have recently posted about defining what constitutes an “open source vendor” for our [...]

The calm before the storm: forthcoming events. Putting a value on open source. Microsoft’s open source CRM Accelerators. OSI approves EUPL. SpringSource updates Groovy and Grails. Open source ERP in the cloud. And more.

I’ve been talking to device manufacturers and the Linux-centered software providers that feed them code for mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, industrial control, automotive technology, medical devices, military uses and a slew of other categories commonly classified as embedded devices, and I can definitively report that I am not hearing or sensing any fear, uncertainty [...]

UPDATE An updated version of the business strategy classification can be found here. UPDATE How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core [...]

Last week Carlo Daffara published a preliminary new classification of open source business models to be used by Conecta, updating the original taxonomy used as part of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT efforts. Although I examined that taxonomy as part of my research for Open Source is Not a Business Model (OSINABM) I also tried not [...]

Are open source vendors more efficient? The Eclipse Foundation’s mobile application development tools project. Black Duck launches open source software management suite. Is open source capitalist or communist? And more.