There was some incredulity expressed yesterday when I suggested that SAP is a great case study on the way in which proprietary companies have engaged with open source.
To be clear, I was not suggesting that SAP is, or should be considered, an open source company, but based on our understanding of SAP’s changing strategy with [...]

Regular visitors to the 451 CAOS Theory blog will be well aware of The 451 Group’s CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) research service and our CAOS long-form reports.

They are probably less aware of the open source coverage that The 451 Group provides on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, however, and I thought it would be worthwhile to provide some examples of The 451 Group’s ongoing open source coverage by highlighting a few recent reports.

A couple of posts have been published recently worrying about the impact of more open source specialist vendors being acquired by proprietary vendors.
This is an issue that crops up occasionally. Usually when a major acquisition has been announced, and the current questioning seems to be driven by the ongoing saga of Oracle-Sun-MySQL, as well [...]

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 tell [...]

I’ve been trying to dig a bit deeper into the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems, to look beyond the received wisdom about the EC’s concerns about the deal.
We know they revolve around the open source MySQL database, the European Commission has said that much. But the Statement of Objections [...]

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 [...]

Below is a rough draft of the cornerstone slide for a new presentation deck I am putting together to explain the various business strategies for monetizing open source software. The aim is to explain every single existing strategy using the elements on this one slide (although I am yet to test it out).

In our previous [...]

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 [...]

A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party – the far-right, whites-only political party – to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme.
Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on [...]

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 been [...]

Matt Asay has written an interesting post speculating that Oracle might use the delay caused by the European Commission investigation into its acquisition of Sun to drive the price down. Sounds reasonable enough to me.
In it, Matt makes a couple of statements, one I agree with: “Oracle… likely will prove to be a better manager [...]

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 argument [...]

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors – Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital – no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to [...]

There’s quite a bit of discussion about SpringSource’s annnounced acquisition of Hyperic, with all kinds of speculation on SpringSource’s competitive positioning, its desire to add a management component and, as we report, the importance of Hyperic’s focus on monitoring and managing applications in virtualized and cloud environments. What does not seem to be quite as [...]

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.”

The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that [...]

Yesterday The 451 Group published Open to Investment, the latest CAOS research report, which examines the past, present and future of venture capital investment in open source-related vendors.
The report contains analysis of the history of venture funding in open-source-related firms between 1997 and 2008, based on The 451 Group’s database of more than 370 funding [...]