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 [...]

A number of people have recently raised the issue of the threat that cloud computing poses to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors, including Savio Rodrigues, Matt Asay, and Mike Hogan. I believe that cloud computing provides an opportunity for open source specialists, but agree that cloud services based on open source code [...]

Savio Rodrigues has published a post arguing that cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure pose a threat to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors. Savio makes a good case based on the recent launch of AWS’s Relational Database Service, based on MySQL, and Microsoft’s support for MySQL and Tomcat [...]

Earlier this year Jason van Zyl from Sonatype raised the question as to why so many open core software vendors hide the pricing details of their proprietary enterprise editions, pointing out that it was in their best interests to be transparent: “Potential customers who start out as your Open Core users need to see exactly [...]

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 [...]

I’ve written a few times recently about the fact that I think the open source engagement model practiced by companies such as Day Software will become more popular as we see an increasing number of proprietary companies engaging with open source and the pendulum appears to have swung back in favour of community-developed open source [...]

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 [...]

Simon Phipps has begun a conversation designed ultimately “to devise some sort of a Software Freedom Definition which articulates a holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked.” To put it another way, this is an attempt to create a definition of “open source vendor”. We have discussed this issue before, and [...]

UPDATE – The OSI’s status was in early 2010 restored to “Active”, per the California State website – UPDATE The ability of the Open Source Initiative to steward the Open Source Definition and police the use of the term open source as it relates to software is in doubt following the confirmation that the corporate [...]

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, [...]

Matt Asay set the cat amongst the pigeons late last week with his post declaring that “Free software has lost. Open source has won. We’re all the better for it.” There have been a number of responses picking apart Matt’s claim, of which I would recommend Glyn Moody’s. To my mind, there is actually a [...]

Before I even start this post I am going to repeat our view that Oracle is well aware that it has little to gain from killing off MySQL and that we expect MySQL to become the scale-out database for non-transactional web applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental deployments. That said there has [...]

An interesting story in today’s Wall Street Journal states that the Open Invention Network is “nearing an agreement to acquire 22 patents that Microsoft sold to another organization earlier this year” that could be used to protect Linux from patent attacks. If true it won’t be the first time the OIN has acquired patents in [...]

By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL. The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This [...]

Jay has already provided a good overview of the debate related to the apparent decline in the usage of the GPLv2. I don’t intend to cover the same ground, but I did want to quickly respond to a statement made by Matt Asay in his assessment of the reasons for and implications of reduced GPLv2 [...]

Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo, has published an interesting take on commercial open source business strategies, highlighting that vendors that treat community edition products like a free demo are failing to make the most of open source. The key themes of Eric’s post have been discussed before (although his analysis is no less valuable or [...]

Microsoft has announced that it is to contribute code to the Linux kernel development effort under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. What on earth does it all mean? Here’s our take on the situation. With thanks to Jay Lyman for his contribution to the following: Q. This is a joke, right? A. Not [...]

In our recent long-form report, CAOS 12 – The Myth of Open Source License Proliferation Jay Lyman made the case that the abundance and variety of open source licenses, rather than being a hindrance for open source adoption, had actually helped open source software and the vendors that choose it by providing “flexibility, effective development [...]

When Buying Solutions, the national procurement partner for UK public services, announced in May that it had signed a new software licencing deal with Microsoft, there was some consternation that the deal was held up as a reinforcement of the Government’s Open Source Action Plan. The answer was that the agreement allowed “licences already purchased [...]

An excerpt from “After The Software Wars,” a new book written by former Microsoft employee Keith Curtis highlights one of the reasons why the rank and file within proprietary software developers fail to appreciate the potential of open source. “At Microsoft, I got all the software I wanted for free.” I’ve been thinking about this [...]