This week’s post on the decreased use of the term ‘open source’ as an identifying differentiator in some companies’ marketing material generated a lot of attention and comment, with numerous industry watchers pitching in their perspectives on the reasons for the decline. If you haven’t read the original post it might be worth doing so [...]

Horton clears Yahoo. Actuate supports Hadoop. And more.

I’ve been examining the trend of open source-related vendors disengaging from open source development and licensing as part of my research for the next CAOS research report. One of the things that I have observed in relation to open source-related business strategies in recent months is the decreased use of the term ‘open source’ as [...]

We highlighted recently that along with the prominence of open source software, cloud computing is characterized by its early days. Yet users, customers and most importantly, leadership seem to be aware of the need for change, the need to support it and the fact that every day vendors and users put off starting that change [...]

Red Hat posts Q1 results. USPTO disrupts Oracle’s patent claims.

The 451 Group was pleased to work with North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM and additional companies and players in the industry for the Future of Cloud Computing Survey 2011, which confirmed the early nature of the market, but also indicated customers and users have learned from previous trends, particularly open source software and virtualization. The [...]

Oracle wants billions from Goole. Nokia’s first (and last?) MeeGo phone. And more.

Back in September last year, as the LibreOffice announced its separation from OpenOffice.org and Oracle, I published a quick post comparing the relative success of a variety of forks. Inspired by Alan Bell, I used Google Trends charts to illustrate the relative level of interest in a number of projects and their forks. Hardly a [...]

TDF reveals its advisory board. ActiveState acquires Phenona. And more.

Apache OpenOffice.org proposal approved. SkySQL Tekes new funding. And more.

Last week we published a post looking at some statistics suggesting a decline in the usage of the GNU GPL. The post sparked some interesting debate, not least about the validity of Black Duck Software’s numbers, which we had used to compare usage of the various FLOSS licenses over recent years. While we have no [...]

Topics for this podcast: *eBay wins bid for open source e-commerce player Magento *Citrix releases its own version of OpenStack *MapR brings its own Hadoop distribution to market *IBM builds out its analytics and data stream stories with Hadoop *The trend toward more permissive licensing *Why Oracle’s donation of OO.o disappoints iTunes or direct download [...]

There have been many changes in the market and technology since Citrix acquired XenSource and a major stewardship stake in the Xen open source hypervisor four years ago. Red Hat’s 2008 Qumranet acquisition and subsequent push behind the Linux-integrated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor has added to the disruption. One thing, though, remains the same: [...]

Yet more Apache OpenOffice fall-out. Bacula Systems raises $5m. And more.

Apache OpenOffice proposal fall-out. eBay acquires Magento. And more.

Ian Skerrett last week suggested that there is a growing trend in favour of permissive non-copyleft licenses at the expense of reciprocal copyleft licenses. Ian asked “name one popular community open source project created in the last 5 years that uses the AGPL or GPL?” The responses didn’t exactly come thick and fast. I certainly [...]

Reaction to Apache OpenOffice proposal. The rise of Github. And more.

While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor. OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office [...]