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 [...]

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks. On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an [...]

Yet another open source acquisition. This time it is mobile device vendor Nokia stepping up to the plate with its purchase of open source development tools vendor Trolltech. Nokia will offer NOK 16 is cash for Trolltech, which values the firm at roughly $153m (taking into account currency conversion and rounding). Trolltech hadn’t yet announced [...]

Jaron Lanier’s Long Live Closed-Source Software! is well worth a read if for no other reason than it challenges a number of assumptions about the value of open source software. For the same reason, it should be read in conjunction with the numerous critiques that have followed. Lanier’s argument is that the open source movement [...]

So after all the hype, it’s not a Gphone but a Linux-based platform for mobile devices and an industry alliance. There are more questions than answers raised by the Android announcement, and from an open source perspective there are two big ones: How does this compare to the existing mobile Linux initiatives? It’s not as [...]

Perhaps a better title for my post from Friday (“The irrelevance of desktop Linux”) would have been “The irrelevance of the desktop PC”. The AP has published an interesting article about PC trends in Japan that provides some context and outlines the opportunity that does exist for Linux as a client operating system. “Japan’s PC [...]

The coolest thing I saw at LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco last month was the Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone. The Greenphone is a Linux-based mobile phone, based on the company’s Qtopia Phone Edition platform. It is targeted at software developers who are looking to bring their applications to the emerging Linux phone market. Today at the CTIA [...]

I am pleased the announce today the we have officially launched the 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service and the first CAOS Report – “Stack and Deliver,” covering the open source stack provider space. For more details on these announcements, I invite you to take a look at the two press releases [...]