Open Source Blog

CBR’s take on the latest news and developments in Open Source.

How Web 2.0 helped Obama win
November 05, 2008

Whatever your view of Obama’s likely impact on science and technology, it’s inarguable that he used Web 2.0 technologies to help him win the election.

Obama outlined his technology manifesto before McCain, and when McCain did finally say what he would do with regards technology, it seemed he had copied many of Obama’s ideas: he too talked about getting high-speed Internet access to more Americans, for example.

But there were stark differences when it came to their use of technology in their own campaigns. While Obama was using social networking site twitter, blogging, and raising millions of dollars from small donors through a brilliantly-executed website, McCain was struggling to find his technological feet...[click continue reading to find out how Web 2.0 helped Obama win the election]...

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Posted by Jason Stamper at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)

 

War of words as Zoho sticks it to salesforce.com

So you thought the Software as a Service (SaaS) market was all peace and love? Think again. The CEO of open source, online applications provider Zoho -- Sridhar Vembu – has fired a salvo across salesforce.com’s bows. He is not happy, that’s for sure.

According to Vembu, his firm worked on integrating its online office suite with salesforce.com’s Force.com hosted applications platform. Just before the work was completed, Vembu alleges, salesforce.com pulled the plug and refused to let Zoho play on the platform, because it has online CRM applications of its own. Then, according to Vembu, the real strong-arm tactics began...[click continue reading for what Benioff did next and more of Vembu's accusations]...

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Posted by Jason Stamper at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

 

OSS firm wins massive JBoss contract
October 28, 2008

Champagne corks were popping at Swiss open source content management firm Magnolia, after it won a deal with JBoss.org to underpin its 40 project sites, which attract 20 million views per month.

With over 40 different open source middleware projects to host, Magnolia said it will play a key part in building the project websites for use by the community.

JBoss.org currently uses its own in-house CMS to run the site. However, with the increasingly complex functionality required, maintenance and development of the system was detracting from its core business, JBoss.org said...[click continue reading for comments from JBoss.org's site leader on the motivation for the deal]...

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Posted by Jason Stamper at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

 

BPM enabled on Google Android?
October 24, 2008

A little birdie tells me their business process management (BPM) company is gearing up to enable on-demand business processes to run on Google’s new Android mobile phone platform. I’m under strict embargo so I can’t reveal who the firm in question is, but I’ll let you know just as soon as I can.

Google of course has a free software developers kit (SDK) available so there’s nothing to stop companies writing new apps for Android or indeed adding hooks to their own components.

The BPM firm in question believes that by breaking business processes down into discrete building blocks, and allowing them to run on the Android platform, business people will be given more power over their processes and indeed the potential to see just how efficiently they are running -- while they are on the move. So I guess we need to coin two new acronyms: MBAM (mobile business activity monitoring) and MBPM (mobile business process management).

Learn more about Android here.
Download Google's Android SDK (currently in beta) here.

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Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)