The 451 Group was pleased to work with North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM and additional companies and players in the industry for the Future of Cloud Computing Survey 2011, which confirmed the early nature of the market, but also indicated customers and users have learned from previous trends, particularly open source software and virtualization. The [...]

Back in September last year, as the LibreOffice announced its separation from OpenOffice.org and Oracle, I published a quick post comparing the relative success of a variety of forks. Inspired by Alan Bell, I used Google Trends charts to illustrate the relative level of interest in a number of projects and their forks. Hardly a [...]

There have been many changes in the market and technology since Citrix acquired XenSource and a major stewardship stake in the Xen open source hypervisor four years ago. Red Hat’s 2008 Qumranet acquisition and subsequent push behind the Linux-integrated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor has added to the disruption. One thing, though, remains the same: [...]

Ian Skerrett last week suggested that there is a growing trend in favour of permissive non-copyleft licenses at the expense of reciprocal copyleft licenses. Ian asked “name one popular community open source project created in the last 5 years that uses the AGPL or GPL?” The responses didn’t exactly come thick and fast. I certainly [...]

While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor. OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office [...]

It’s coming up on a couple of years since I wrote about the reasonable approach toward open source software adoption put forth by the U.S. Department of Defense, which was ready and willing to use open source, but was not requiring a less-realistic all-open source or only-open source approach. Today, we see that measured consideration [...]

One of the ‘things I wrote down during OSBC’ was this statement from Benchmark EIR, Rob Bearden: “Misalignment between a business model and the community’s tolerance point will never be accepted. This will manifest itself in multiple distributions.” At first glance the statement may seem obvious to anyone who has studied open source-related business strategies [...]

One of the ironies of open source over the years has been that the organisation formed to “educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source”, the Open Source Initiative, was itself *perceived to be* something of a closed shop [see the comments for clarification on this point]. That is set to change as [...]

As previously mentioned, The 451 Group was very pleased to be able to participate in this year’s Future of Open Source Survey. We believe that the results provide critical insight into the wants and needs of end users that will help shape the evolution of vendor business strategies designed to meet the long-term needs of [...]

One of big stories out of the Open Source Business Conference this week was Microsoft’s announced support for the CentOS community Linux distribution, a free clone of RHEL that nonetheless enjoys significant enterprise and cloud computing use, as we’ve covered extensively, including a special report that is currently being updated, in part, with a new [...]

The Future of Open Source. de Icaza launches Xamarin. Funding for Datameer. And more.

Google orders an Ice Cream Sandwich, hold the Honeycomb. Funding for WSO2 and Typesafe. And more.

Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond. The presentation covers our recently published report of the same name, and provides some additional context on the role of open source in driving innovation in distributed data management. Specifically, the [...]

I recently wrote about big changes afoot in the Linux market, the topic of a current special report I’m writing. We’ve seen significant changes in the Linux landscape and market in the past 10-15 years — including its enterprise fight and victory over SCO, its rise to dominance in HPC and, more recently, the faster, [...]

I’m currently researching and writing about the changing Linux and operating system landscape, which is being impacted by cloud computing, additional competitors and devops, as well as the ongoing impact of unpaid, community Linux distributions such as CentOS and Ubuntu. Another one of the changes underway is what’s happening with SUSE Linux, largely considered the [...]

It may be hard for Amazon, any of its users, critics or competitors to find a silver-lining in the recent cloud outage that took major sites offline for significant periods over the last week (ok, the critics and competitors are getting plenty), but I see a real upside for all: this has been our latest [...]

DoJ/FCO says aye CPTN. Canonical readies Ubuntu 11.04. And more.

As we noted last week, necessity is one of the six key factors that are driving the adoption of alternative data management technologies identified in our latest long format report, NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond. Necessity is particularly relevant when looking at the history of the NoSQL databases. While it is easy for the incumbent database [...]

Oracle announced on Friday that it is to discontinue its commercial interest in the OpenOffice.org project, prompting a barrage of criticism from the open source faithful with regards to its approach to the open source applications project, and community in general. The company was accused of being community-hostile, for example, and comparisons were also made [...]

The 451 Group’s new long format report on emerging database alternatives, NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond, is now available. The report examines the changing database landscape, investigating how the failure of existing suppliers to meet the performance, scalability and flexibility needs of large-scale data processing has led to the development and adoption of alternative data management [...]