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Open Source Weblog: April 2007 Archives
OpenLogic preparing open source software discovery tool
April 30, 2007
While there are a number of tools on the market that enable users to identify whether they are using their open source software in a manner appropriate to corporate licensing and usage policies, that doesn’t really help if the business is unaware that open source is being used in the first place.
You can’t monitor what you can’t identify, and in an attempt to solve that problem for enterprises OpenLogic is launching a new tool that helps inventory open source software usage within a business.
Oracle gains some partner support for Unbreakable Linux
April 26, 2007
After Oracle announced its Unbreakable Linux plans I wrote to the world’s 15 largest software vendors (apart from Oracle and Microsoft – I guessed what their responses would be) to ask them whether they planned to support their applications on Oracle Enterprise Linux.
I received only three definitive responses (from Novell, BMC and BEA), all of which could be summed up with “we will if our customers demand it”. Despite the temptation to conclude a lack of support for the Unbreakable Linux plan it was hard to draw any conclusions in the face of such indifference.
Six months on and Oracle is finally in a position to talk about partner support for the plan, announcing a number of IHVs and ISVs who are supporting Oracle Enterprise Linux.
IBM to become a MySQL reseller
April 25, 2007
Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to start selling MySQL’s open source database it what represents a very significant announcement for MySQL.
How long will Marc Fleury stay retired?
April 24, 2007
Ahead of Red Hat's announcement of its strategy for JBoss I just stumbled across the blog of JBoss's founder and former CEO, Marc Fleury.
While Fleury officially retired in February after leaving Red Hat to pursue other interests, his latest blog entries suggest he is finding it hard to give up on the industry altogether.
Stallman: 'I love capitalism'
April 23, 2007
Well, not quite, but for anyone who is labouring under the false impression that the father of free software, Richard Stallman, insists that software has to be 'free' as in beer as well as 'free' as in speech, this GCN article is illuminating:
"'I’m neither for nor against selling copies of software,' he said. 'The question of money is secondary. There is no conflict between free software and capitalism.'"
The case for technological atheism
April 20, 2007
There may be some hope for Microsoft after all. Sam Ramji, the company’s director of platform strategy, has written a very perceptive post about the mistake of framing technology decisions as “traditional software vs. open source software”.
Combine it with James Governor’s call for the industry to stop taking a black and white view of technology and you have an argument for everyone to turn the religious fervour down a notch or two.
Microsoft’s other Linux patent deals
April 19, 2007
While Microsoft’s patent covenant deal with Novell has grabbed all the headlines, it is not the patent deal Microsoft has done recently regarding Linux and open source software.
Back in March in struck a patent deal with Fuji Xerox, while over night it announced a broad patent deal with Samsung.
What have these deals got to do with Linux? A lot, according to Microsoft’s representation of the terms.
SFLC's tax calculation is patently wrong
April 17, 2007
The Software Freedom Law Center has calculated that Windows users are forced to pay a patent tax of $20 per operating system to account for patent infrigment claims against the software giant.
It is an interesting calculation, and one that will get the legal firm plenty of headlines, but it is also based on a significant error.
Unbreakable Linux and a great big waste of time
April 16, 2007
On December 18, 2006, Oracle hosted a conference call to discuss its financial results for the second quarter of 2007, during which Oracle president Charles Phillips noted that “in the first 30 days, we had 9,000 downloads of Unbreakable Linux from our website”.
Given the absence of any other data on which to make an opinion of the Unbreakable Linux strategy, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was a significant disclosure from Oracle.
Some people might have considered that it was a sign of success (9,000 downloads being better than, say, 5,000, or indeed five) while others might have considered that compared to 325,000 downloads of SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution in its first 28 days, or an average of 12,500 Fedora installations per day in its first few weeks, 9,000 was an indication of unpopularity.
However, it turns out that the figure was in fact irrelevant. To quote Mike Olson, vice president of embedded technologies at Oracle, “counting downloads of Oracle Enterprise Linux is a waste of time”.
Holiday reading
I haven't read all of these myself yet (I could do with another holiday to get through a week's worth of email/blog postings) but of the many hundreds of blog postings I missed while I was away, these look the most interesting for further reading, including: the reality of open source adoption, a taxonomy of open source business models, and the differences between subscription and licensing.
Intermission
April 04, 2007
There now follows a short intermission while I'm on holiday until April 16. Stay tuned here for the latest Linux and open source news, or try here for something completely different (via Dave Rosenberg).
All change at the top
April 03, 2007
What is going on? First Open-Xchange announced a new CEO, then Univa did the same, and now Linux Networx has done it too. Is it just a coincidence, or does this changing of the guard reflect the maturing of a tier of open source vendors? Or is it a big flashmob-style game of musical chairs? Stranger things have happened.
Open source funding in Q1: down but not out
April 02, 2007
Penguin Computing announced that it had raised $9m in second round funding at the end of last week, ensuring that the first quarter of 2007 saw funding in Linux and open source-related vendors top $100m.
In total $100.4m was raised in the first three months of the year, and although that figure was down 27.5% from $138.4m raised in the first quarter of 2006, statistics can be deceiving and it is certainly too early to suggest that any bubble has burst.
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