My how time flies when it comes to standards battles. This week brought a flurry of news, issues and opinions involving Open Document Format (ODF), starting with Microsoft’s support for ODF in the latest Office 2007 SP2. This comes a year after Microsoft was criticized for its Office Open XML (OOXML) standardization campaign and subsequent [...]

I was thinking about the myths surrounding open source software and thought it would be interesting to take a straw poll of @caostheory and @maslett followers to see which were considered the biggest myths. In no way are the results to be considered scientific (the final two options provide evidence of the informality of the [...]

OIN aims to cut the FAT. What is the point of the GPL? Black Duck takes flight. Ingres delivers Salesforce.com appliance. The ongoing fallout from Oracle-Sun. Feedback on the Bee Keeper model. And more.

Last June I reported on James Dixon’s Bee Keeper model for understanding the relationships between commercial open source vendors and their communities. Recently James has updated the model, incorporating a number of changes, including some suggested by me as a means by which the Bee Keeper analogy could be applied beyond captive open source projects. [...]

Oracle buys Sun. Sun previews MySQL update, makes GlassFish Portfolio, OpenSSO and OpenDS available on EC2. Numerous partner announcements from the MySQL conference. Red Hat maps open source adoption. And more.

One thing that seems clear in cloud computing right now — the combination of operating system, hypervisor, clustering, applications and other cloud infrastructure components in the mix is creating some interesting competition. We’ve written before about the fight over the OS role and its relevancy as hypervisor vendors race to cover the OS parts, OS [...]

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.” The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that [...]

The big news to kick off this week was Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There is already a lot of discussion of the integration challenges, how Oracle is getting into hardware (or as Matt Asay describes it, having an ‘iPod moment’) and of course, the implications for open source software. What stands out to [...]

Topics for this podcast: *CAOS 11 – Open to Investment *CollabNet out with new TeamForge 5.2 *Memcached and MySQL appliances abound iTunes or direct download (25:05, 5.8 MB)

Open source in government. Sourcefire announces relationships with Symantec and Microsoft. EPL supercedes CPL. The cost and potential savings of open source. The origins of open source. IBM and Sun – back on? And more.

Are vendors that ask their paying customers to also contribute code changes trying to have their cake and eat it too? The issue of increasing corporate contributions to open source has been bubbling under ever since Jim Whitehurst highlighted the lack of enterprise participation during a speech at the 2008 OSBC conference. Whitehurst also mentioned [...]

A new effort was announced by prominent open source software vendors — Red Hat and charter members Alfresco, EnterpriseDB, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Likewise, Pentaho, Zmanda, Zenoss and Zimbra — and channel player SYNNEX to extend open source software into the all-important sales and distribution channels of mid-market value-aded resellers (VARs) and system integrators (SIs). As covered [...]

Maybe it was a coincidence but two recent blog posts have highlighted questions over the value of source code in terms of enterprise adoption of open source software and the wisdom of open source vendors in focusing on low cost. Savio Rodrigues noted that his experience backs up recent data from Forrester that suggests that [...]

Refining the Beekeeper model. Investment opportunities. Schooner, Gear6 and Virident line up memcached appliances. The launch of the Open Source Channel Alliance. Is source code necessary? And more.

I’m not sure whether folks are really hungering for more discussion or input on the Microsoft share of the netbook market, Linux share and potential, yada yada yada. However, I need to get this off of my chest. Back when I looked for and found, despite difficulty, the perfect Linux netbook for my wife, we [...]

Red Hat launches data integration project. What if Oracle bought Sun? The origins of Hadoop. Trademarking ‘Open Cloud’. The pluses and minuses of copyright assignment. And more.

Yesterday The 451 Group published Open to Investment, the latest CAOS research report, which examines the past, present and future of venture capital investment in open source-related vendors. The report contains analysis of the history of venture funding in open-source-related firms between 1997 and 2008, based on The 451 Group’s database of more than 370 [...]

Speculation over IBM and Sun enlivens an otherwise quiet week. The importance of the Affero GPL. The size and shape of the open source database market. The reliability of open source code. And more.

There was some netbook news to start off the week, including Microsoft’s claims of gains in this emerging market, continued buzz about Linux in the space and a bit of a Twitter discussion I kicked off on what is or is not a netbook. First to address the market share claims from Microsoft and others. [...]

Some weeks ago Luke Kaines stated his observation that “requiring copyright attribution is a greater sin than providing commercial add-ons”. His perspective was based on the theory that requiring copyright assignment restricts the developer community, a theory that was apparently repeated by Dave Neary during the recent OSBC event (I missed that session due to [...]