We industry analysts sometimes get a chuckle or two out of vendor names. Sometimes it’s a new vendor and we are left wondering, what were they thinking? Sometimes people take a vendor’s name and make fun or pun out of it. More seriously, though, we do continue to see vendors that focus and center their [...]

Record results for Alfresco. New funding for MuleSoft and Pentaho. And more.

Revenue growth for Red Hat and Oracle. Funding for Abiquo. And more

Last week at OSBC I attended an interesting discussion between Matt Asay and Gartner’s Brian Prentice, much of which was spent discussing the relative merits of open core and pure open source business strategies. Brian has written up his thoughts on the discussion, and I thought I would also add mine since there were a [...]

UPDATE An updated version of the business strategy framework can be found here. UPDATE Last week I presented “From support services to software services – the evolution of open source business strategies” at the OSBC event in San Francisco. The presentation was effectively a work in progress update on our research into the various strategies [...]

We’ve just published our latest CAOS special report, ‘Closing the deal with community,’ which covers how software sales and marketing can be very different, but can also be very advantageous when the product is open source software. Among our findings: Sales and marketing for open source can be less expensive, but is nearly as often [...]

Marten Mickos joins Eucalyptus. Novell rejects Elliot. Perspectives on OSBC. And more.

As I attend OSBC 2010 and search for a common theme among the sessions, business executives, developers and discussions on enterprise open source software, it becomes apparent that we are entering an age of open source enablement. I first heard the theme in a morning conversation with an individual in a mid-size organization that uses [...]

Pre-OSBC special: VMware goes NoSQL. Magento raises $22.5m. Nuxeo triples customer count. And more.

In preparation for my presentation at OSBC tomorrow I’ve been looking back at some of the key trends that influenced the commercial open source landscape in 2009. One of those is the decline in the use of the GNU GPL as a proportion of all open source projects. The decline was highlighted by figures from [...]

Recent developments regarding Apple and the exposure of its iPhone OS non-disclosure agreements by the Electronic Frontier Foundation highlight a new reality for technology companies today: you may be able to keep you code private (though that is ill-advised), but your practices will be open – one way or another. This is about more than [...]

Updating the MPL. Funding for Lucid and eXo. StatusNet. And more.

Interesting news today from the Eclipse Mylyn project, which it has been proposed should deliberately fragment into six sub-projects for which Mylyn would become an umbrella. I had the chance to chat last week with Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies, who originally invented the task-focused interface and created Mylyn as part of his PhD. [...]

Topics for this podcast: *Novell gets unsolicited bid *More deals and drive for devops *Dual licensing debated *Patent and IP deals, fights involve open source iTunes or direct download (32:56, 9 MB)

Elliot offers $2bn for Novell. OSI refutes IIPA’s view on open source. And more.

We continue to see and hear signs of a new movement in enterprise IT: devops. The term has for some time been a reference to the blending roles and benefits of an integrated approach when it comes to the ‘development’ of an application through testing and QA to production and ‘operations.’ We cited this as [...]

The 451 Group has been participating at OSBC for many years and this year will have a larger presence than usual as both Jay and I will be presenting and attending both days and we are sponsoring the event itself. My presentation – “From Support Services to Software Services – The Evolution of Open Source [...]

Novell’s Q1. The future of OpenSolaris. And more.

There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.” It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially [...]