Are vendors that ask their paying customers to also contribute code changes trying to have their cake and eat it too? The issue of increasing corporate contributions to open source has been bubbling under ever since Jim Whitehurst highlighted the lack of enterprise participation during a speech at the 2008 OSBC conference. Whitehurst also mentioned [...]

When Network Appliance announced its patent infringement charges against Sun in September the company went out of its way to try and ensure that it was not seen as the next SCO Group. Founder and EVP Dave Hitz took to his blog to explain the background and attempt to reassure the the open source ZFS [...]

NetApp is suing Sun Microsystems over the ZFS file system technology (press release). It’s a software patent case, headed for East Texas. The problem? Sun released ZFS as open source, complicating the situation. 451 Storage Analyst Henry Baltazar and I spoke with Dave Hitz, founder and EVP of Network Appliance, briefly by phone today about [...]

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 [...]