Two years ago I published a post entitled “things I wrote down during OSBC”. It tuned out to be surprisingly popular, so I decided to try the same formula again. Just as was the case two years ago these are presented chronologically. I wrote down a lot more than this, to be clear, but these [...]

Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond. The presentation covers our recently published report of the same name, and provides some additional context on the role of open source in driving innovation in distributed data management. Specifically, the [...]

The presentation of North Bridge Ventures’ Future of Open Source survey has long been one of the highlights of the Open Source Business Conference, keeping attendees up to date with the views of open source users and vendors alike, and providing details about the trends that will shape open source in the future. The 451 [...]

Open World Forum is only a few weeks away and once again The 451 Group will be represented at the event in Paris. On the morning of September 30 I’ll be taking part in the Open Analysts summit: The 2010 barometer of Open Source, along with Roberto Galoppini, James Governor from Red Monk, Jeffrey Hammond [...]

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 [...]

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

At the Open World Forum event in Paris this morning I presented a quick overview of the state of free and open source software in 2009 and a look at the trends shaping FOSS into the next decade. The presentation was just 10 minutes rather than the 20 I had originally understood it to be, [...]

Next Wednesday The 451 Group will be taking part in Red Hat’s Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, the line-up for which has been finalized this week. Starting at 9.30am ET the event is designed to is to foster discussion across a broad range of technical topics related to cloud computing, including: virtualization, security, management, open [...]

Two of the biggest open source events in Europe both announced their calls for papers today. Open World Forum 2009 will take place in Paris in October (preceded by the Open Source Think Tank) while Open Source Meets Business 2010 will take place in Nuremberg in January next year. The theme for Open World Forum [...]

Last week during my presentation of Open Source is Not a Business Model at the ISV Forum I was running through some observations about community engagement best practices for traditional vendors when Stephen Walli asked me whether we thought a community manager should report to engineering or business executives. As Stephen notes I side-stepped the [...]

There were plenty of clever and interesting things said during this week’s Open Source Business Conference. These are the things I felt compelled to write in my notebook, in chronological order. Some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source, others were new ideas to me, or interesting ways of expressing old [...]

I’ll be heading over to the West coast at the end of the month for a short trip that will take in EclipseCon – including the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit – OSBC, and the Open Source ISV Forum. It promises to be a busy and interesting trip and I’m looking forward to an intensive [...]

Ian Skerrett has announced the details of the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit, a one-day event scheduled to take place alongside this year’s EclipseCon next month. The summit is a one day event for business executives responsible for their organizations open source strategy and is designed to answer two questions: 1) ‘What Open Source Strategies [...]

On the open source panel at the recent 451 client event I was asked by Raven what impact I expected the current financial situation to have on M&A for open source vendors. I responded that I expected to see an increase in M&A activity related to open source in the first half of next year. [...]

Next week I’ll be jetting over to Lyon to attend ICT 2008, the European Commission Information Society’s research event for information and communication technologies. It promises to be a fascinating and lively event and will examine topics such as European Union priorities in ICT research for over €2 billion of funding available in 2009-2010, the [...]

Matt Asay has an interesting post today on how its getting harder to distinguish between open source and SaaS which reminded me of the presentation I was scheduled to give at a recent SugarCRM event in London. Due to illness I was forced to cancel my appearance (and it’s a good job I did as [...]

What happens between a company announcing its intention to license its code using an open source license and the resulting project being launched? Mostly the answer involves a whole lot of legal discussions as the intellectual property and licensing issues are ironed out and the processes and structures are put in place to support the [...]

Another year has passed by in a flash and OSCON, O’Reilly’s annual open source convention, is upon us. Fellow 451 open source analyst and Portlander, Jay Lyman, will be with me all week at the Oregon Convention Center to check the pulse of the open source development community, meet with vendors and clients, reconnect with [...]

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source [...]

This year was my first chance to visit the Open Source Business Conference, so while I can’t compare to previous years I must say I was impressed with the consistent quality of both the keynotes and the breakout sessions. One of each particularly stood out for me, however: the keynote from Jon Williams, CTO, Kaplan [...]