Venture capital funding for open source vendors was down 50% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year. No great surprise there, but there was some good news as that figures was an increase on $45.4m raised in Q1.
According to our preliminary figures, there were 13 announced funding deals in the second [...]

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license and concern over the openness (or closedness, depending on your perspedtive) of the [...]

Red Hat announced a new cloud certification and partner program. I’ve been expecting to see and hear more from Red Hat on cloud computing given its prominence in Linux and open source and the prominence of Linux and open source in the cloud. However, I’m left asking a few questions.
First of all, where are all [...]

Dennis Byron is right to point out some “seeds of rain in the forecast” in Red Hat’s first-quarter financial results.
On the face of it, Red Hat is performing very well despite current conditions, and in the first quarter recorded net income of $18.5m on revenue up 11% to $174m. As Dennis notes, however, deferred [...]

Is it a phone, is it a PC? A netbook or MID? It’s Moblin and if Intel has its way, it will be ‘inside’ the mobile devices we’re using in a year or two, whatever they look like or whatever they’re called.
The latest page of this Intel Moblin story is the announced partnership with mobile [...]

Reductive Labs raises funding. Virtual Iron bites the dust. And more.

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 to [...]

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 issue recently [...]

As we prepare to publish a new, special CAOS report on open source software licensing, I thought it might be fitting to revisit one of our previous reports, CAOS Report 10 - Mobility Matters, given all that’s going on and all the open source going in smartphones, e-readers, netbooks, and other devices where open source [...]

I had an interesting chat with Nobby Akiha , senior VP marketing and Rich Guth, VP open source strategy, at Actuate, about the company’s ongoing conversion to open source. Having got involved with open source via the Eclipse BIRT project, the company is going through the process of re-archtecting its strategy to address the open [...]

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.
Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the [...]

Yahoo opens up Hadoop distribution. Microsoft and Novell claim customer wins. And more.

My Acer A1 netbook that I purchased three months ago has already had four operating systems installed and run on it — it shipped with Windows XP, then it had Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.04, then I upgraded to UNR 9.10, then I went back to UNR 8.04. Oh and I burned an image of

I just published a post about opportunities for cloud-based databases and data warehousing over on our Too Much Information blog, which I thought might be of interest to CAOS Theory readers given the involvement of Greenplum.

We continue to see signs that open source software is growing beyond its enterprise footprint as more resellers, service providers, system integrators and other channel players are starting and expanding their open source use, reliance and offerings.
It wasn’t that long ago that we talked about open source tuning into the enterprise and midmarket channels when [...]

Earlire this week Infoworld published an article entitled “the fight over open source leeches”, which I described as “a good summary from InfoWorld of the issues related to (lack of) corporate contributions.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with the underlying theme of the article: that non-contributing open source users are damaging the commercial interests [...]

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.
Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.
Open [...]

Last week I asked the question, if open source has won, then where do we go from here?
A number of different answers were forthcoming to the two parts of the question from various blogs and Twitterers so I thought it was worth bringing them together in a follow-up post:
Has open source won?
I mentioned in my [...]

SourceForge, the venerable open source repository and vendor, just got a shot in the arm by agreeing to acquire the newer, more social networking-minded Ohloh for an undisclosed amount.
We’ll be reporting more on the deal as we learn more about it, but it clearly makes sense. Actually, we saw SourceForge and Ohloh coming together already, [...]

My three-year-old son is currently obsessed with winning. Whether it is walking up the stairs or cleaning his teeth he has to be declared the winner. The interesting thing is, he doesn’t mind not actually being the first up the stairs just as long as he is acknowledged to have “won”.
I mention this because there [...]