Seasons Greetings from The 451 Group and the Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) team. As the year draws to a close and we prepare to start a New Year, we wanted to highlight some of our recent work and the best of 2009. For 451 Group subscribers, we encourage you to check out our [...]

Red Hat’s Q3. Google’s definition of open. Copyright assignment. And more.

As the year draws to a close, we sure are getting some pretty sweeping assessments of open source, open standards and what openness means in today’s enterprise IT market. Google kicked things of with a thoughtful discussion of the meaning of open in today’s enterprise IT, but it included a somewhat misplaced declaration that ‘open [...]

We recently published (451 clients only) our predictions for open source in 2010. As a child of the 1970s it was a little disappointing to be making predictions about the year 2010 that did not involve living on the moon, driving hovercars, and flying around using jetpacks. It’s always more fun to look a bit [...]

Here are CAOS Theory’s top 20 posts of 2009, in terms of page views: The Open Source Initiative’s corporate status is suspended: a CAOS Theory Q&A October – Our take on the potential ramifications of the suspension of OSI’s corporate status. Commercial open source business strategies in 2009 and beyond January – An overview of [...]

Topics for this podcast: *2009 review and 2010 preview *New CAOS survey and report – Climate Change *Ups and downs in new round of GPL lawsuits *Oracle-Sun-MySQL saga continues iTunes or direct download (30:00, 6.9 MB)

Shuttleworth steps down as Canonical CEO. Open source at SAP. And more.

A new round of GPL-based BusyBox suits has been filed, targeting big names in electronics and IT. We’ve long covered these series of GPL-based suits and settlements, but this latest round comes at an interesting time for open source software and its licensing. First, we have the backdrop of the Oracle-Sun-MySQL acquisition, with opponents arguing [...]

There was much rejoicing recently as Google announced a change of heart and decided to release the source code to EtherPad, which it had previously acquired along with AppJet and had planned to shut down. Krishnan Subramanian at Cloud Ave was certainly happy as it supported his theory that SaaS vendors should offer their software [...]

Recent non-Oracle/EC/MySQL news.

I’m taking part in two webinar’s this week that will likely be of interest to CAOS readers. On WednesdayI’m contributing to a webinar with EnterpriseDB on the subject of open source database adoption in the enterprise, while on Thursday I’ll be presenting a 451 Group webinar on data warehousing. During the EnterpriseDB webinar we will [...]

Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems looks set for approval by the European Commission after the competition commission welcomed commitments from Oracle related to the future development and licensing of the open source MySQL database. The EC has until January 27, 2010, to reach a final decision however it appears that significant progress has been [...]

We’ve just published our latest CAOS special report, ‘Climate Change -User perspectives on the impact of economic conditions on open source software adoption.’ The report is based on our recent survey findings among more than 1,700 open source software customers and users, and also offers guidance on calculating cost savings from open source software. Those [...]

Sun updates Java platform. Red Hat open sources SPICE. And more.

There was a time years ago when open source software in the enterprise often had to be just ‘good enough.’ Over time, use and broader adoption, open source software has now reached the point that it must often be ‘as good or better’ than proprietary alternatives, now typically getting equal consideration from customers and users. [...]

Matt Asay is right, in my opinion, to point out the inherent bias in the case Monty Widenius et al have made against Oracle’s potential ownership of MySQL. I would go further, however, in stating that the case being made against Oracle is flawed by the fact that it is so self-serving. For instance: I [...]

Palm sued for GPL violation. Wind River launches Android distro. And more.

Topics for this podcast: *As the Oracle-Sun-MySQL EC world turns *Google gets its Web on with Go and Chrome *Open source and cloud computing complement, compete *How transparent is your open core? iTunes or direct download (26:20, 6.0 MB)

Eben Moglen says EC case against Oracle-Sun is flawed. The value of open source. And more.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether Oracle should be allowed to acquire the MySQL database along with Sun Microsystems including former MySQL/Sun executives, developers, rivals, partners, analysts, journalists, the Department of Justice and even US Senators. What do open source software users think? We asked the members of the “CAOS user community”* to [...]