VMware launches vFabric. Actuate claims $50m OSS-related revenue. And more.

There are a number of cloud computing events and announcements taking place — VMworld, a countering announcement from Citrix, and recent partnership among rPath, newScale and Eucalyptus Systems for private and hybrid clouds — that we believe are indicative of the significant role and impact open source software is having in cloud computing — a [...]

Red Hat takes a PaaS at the cloud. Novell’s Linux revenues slide. And more.

Simon Phipps has published an interesting post today examining the issue of contributor agreements and copyright assignment. This is an issue that has been thrown into focus by the recent debate about the open core licensing strategy, and the disagreement between NASA and Eucalyptus Systems, and is likely to remain significant thanks to Project Harmony. [...]

Software giant Adobe is among those shaking heads at Oracle and its strategy, or at least lack of tact, with the open source software, including its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, killing off OpenSolaris and Java lawsuit against Google over Android. It wasn’t that long ago that Adobe was thought of similar to how it’s portraying [...]

There has been plenty of discussion around our recent post arguing that we have entered a new era of open source commercialisation strategies. “Open source 4.0″, characterized by corporate-dominated development communities, is upon us with increased emphasis on collaborative development for non-differentiating code. In comparison the previous era was dominated by vendors that eschewed the [...]

The future of open source licensing. OpenSolaris governing board quits. And more.

It seems safe to say that Oracle is currently ahead of Microsoft when it comes to the company with the most contentious relationship with open source. To some extent that is due Oracle’s questionable approach to community, but it must also be noted that Microsoft has managed not to put its foot in it for [...]

Google responds to Oracle’s patent claims. So does everyone else. ClosedSolaris. And more.

If there was one thing that could be guaranteed about Google’s response to Oracle’s patent lawsuit, it was that the company would paint the claims as an attack on the open source community. Ever since SCO launched its ham-fisted legal claims about Linux the response of any OSS-related vendor targeted by legal claims has been [...]

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding [...]

Oracle sues Google. Novell bidders down to three. VMware for Alfresco? And more.

The Linux Foundation this week launched the Open Compliance Program, its set of open source software tools and training to further ease open source adoption, including a self-assessment checklist and new data exchange standard for reporting software information, such as license and legal requirements. The program consists of six components: tools such as software dependency [...]

Compliance. Funding. Financial results. Copyright assignment. And more.

Stephen O’Grady and Simon Phipps have both recently published interesting posts on the current state of open source, with Stephen pondering the relative growth of open source and Simon wondering whether the “commercial open source” bubble has burst. What they are describing, I believe, is the culmination of the trends we predicted at the beginning [...]