Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so. My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week Glyn Moody advised open source specialist start-ups to give up on the idea of ever hitting the $1bn revenue barrier. Basing his argument on an observation made by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, Glyn argued that: “all other open source companies really need to stop chasing that $1 billion dream – the idea [...]

Google’s open source programs manager, Chris DiBona has asked the Open Source Initiative to delay consideration of Google’s WebM license, and in doing so has called on the OSI to be more open. Specifically, DiBona said Google “will want a couple of changes to how OSI does licenses” and that he thinks “that OSI needs [...]

Is Google’s WebM open source or not? And why (or more to the point, how) did it take the OSI nearly five months to approve the PostgreSQL license? Open Source Initiative board member, Simon Phipps, declared on Monday that Google’s WebM project “is not currently open source”. It was a statement based on the fact [...]

If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one. It ought to be simple: either the software meets the Open Source Definition or it does not. But it is not always easy to tell [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the issues I have with the Free Software approach is that advocates have habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when discussing issues that they see as in any way negative to free software. I was reminded of this while reading Bradley M. Kuhn’s criticism of Mark Shuttleworth’s reported views on [...]

We’ve provided a few examples recently of vendors choosing permissive licenses for open source software projects with the express purpose of rapidly driving adoption of a particular technology (Day Software, JetBrains, SpringSource). The last of those was interesting as compared to SpringSource’s previous decision to use the GPL for the same project with the intention [...]

When SpringSource introduced its dm Server product, then known as the Application Platform, I argued that it was fascinating (if you’re in to that sort of thing) to see that SpringSource had chosen the GPL for the OSGi application server. It is equally fascinating (if you’re in to that sort of thing) to see that [...]

Development tools vendor JetBrains caused something of a stir in October last year with the news that it was releasing an open source Community Edition of its popular IntelliJ Idea Java IDE using the Apache License. IntelliJ Idea 9 was duly released in both Ultimate Edition and Community Edition forms at the beginning of December, [...]

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Looking back through our 451 CAOS Links posts there are a number of examples of companies “going open” in 2009 – either embarking on an open source project for the first time or expanding their engagement with open source through new initiatives. Here’s some examples: January: Prism Tech released its OpenSplice DDS low-latency data distribution [...]