SugarCRM loses its CEO. Reaction to the Nagios fork. Oracle’s hardware plans. And more.

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Life is not so sweet
SugarCRM announced the resignation of John Roberts as CEO and appointment of Larry Augustin as interim CEO. Larry offered a perspective on his role. The news was widely reported but there were two surprising aspects - that the founder of an apparently successful company should choose to leave despite it being apparently poised for a run at an IPO when the markets recover, and that almost no one publicly questioned why the founder of an apparently successful company should choose to leave despite it being apparently poised for a run at an IPO when the markets recover. The Register was the notable exception but didn’t uncover any answers.

Forking hell?
We previously reported the Icinga fork of the Nagios open source monitoring software. This week Nagios creator Ethan Galstad responded by welcoming the fork and writing a series of posts that dealt with the issues, including trademarks, commercialization and the future of Nagios. Meanwhile GroundWork Open Source, which makes use of Nagios within its products, provided its point of view on the Icinga fork. In a timely post, James Dixon offered a perspective on why, when, and how to fork an open source project.

You say fauxpen, I say potato
Tarus Balog’s post on what he calls “fauxpen source” business models caused something of a stir, most of its played out in the comments to our response. There was more to come, however, with Carlo Daffara, Tarus and Benjamin Reed continuing thje debate about what constitutes an open source business model, and whether vendors with proprietary extensions should be allowed to call themselves “open source”. The debate has simmered for the last 10 years and the latest skirmish settled nothing. Tarus himself was left with a feeling of disappointment about the level of debate.

The potential impact of software liability
The European Commission proposed that software developers should be held responsible for the security of their products, prompting Glyn Moody to speculate on the impact on open source developers. Savio Rodrigues argued that it would specifically damage open source vendors, while Matt Asay argued that the proposal did not match the reality of the vendor-customer relationship.

The best of the rest
# Reuters interview with Larry Ellison on plans for Sun hardware.

# The New York Times reported the behind-the-scenes details on the Sun acquisition saga, including the involvement of a mystery third bidder, thought to be HP.

# Intel and Nokia jointly announced the oFono project, an open source telephony project.

# MontaVista launched MontaVista Linux 6 embedded Linux operating system.

# JasperSoft updated its JasperForge forge with full production capabilities and collaboration features.

# SGI lives on. Rackable Systems to become Silicon Graphics International (SGI).

# New InformationWeek open source survey focuses on desktop adoption.

# Free software makes the Huffington Post. Jamie Love raised timely & important questions for president Obama on free software usage.

# Dave Neary explained why football clubs are like free software communities.

# ComputerWeekly explained how a government-wide Microsoft software deal fits into the UK Government’s Open Source Action Plan.

# xTuple partnered with BitRock to simplify installation of open source ERP.

# Likewise announced that its Open identity management software is now integrated in Citrix XenServer.

# WSJ: Novell plans to create and market a Moblin-based OS for netbooks.

# Zenoss Core 2.4 open source network monitoring now GA.

# Introducing PostgreSQL Experts Inc, Josh Berkus’ new PostgreSQL consulting, services and support company.

# The Linux Foundation: GNU/Linux: The Operating System of the Cloud.