Open Source Weblog: February 2008 Archives

Europeans ‘better’ contributors to open source community?
February 21, 2008

I had an interesting chat yesterday with Javier Soltero, the CEO of open source web infrastructure management firm, Hyperic. We got to talking about the different attitudes to open source in the US and in Europe; you’ll recall a recent blog entry I did found slightly higher Linux desktop penetration in some European countries than in the US.

Hyperic was founded in San Francisco but recently announced it’s targeting Europe more aggressively, hiring new community managers in Germany and Spain and on the look-out for more people in other European geographies.

The privately-held, VC-backed firm claims to be seeing strong growth across all regions, adding 100 paying customers in the second half of 2007 to take the total to 400, though it says the free version of the web management software, which lacks a support package and other enterprise features, has seen several thousand downloads since the firm was launched in 2004.

So how does an open source CEO see attitudes to open source differing across Europe from the US?

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 12:32 PM | Comments (1)

Red Hat wants JBoss to own 50% of middleware market by 2015
February 13, 2008

Red Hat has just launched an “Enterprise Acceleration” initiative that it says it hopes will enable its JBoss business to capture 50% of enterprise middleware workloads by 2015. IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun and plenty of others are surely hoping it fails...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

Sun lays its open source virtualization cards on the table
February 12, 2008

News just in is that Sun is buying innotek, the open source virtualization player whose VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris operating systems to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 04:32 PM | Comments (1)

Germany, Australia and Italy lead desktop Linux adoption
February 06, 2008

I’ve penned a few blogs about Linux on the desktop, and the fact that various statistics I’ve uncovered suggest it has less than a 1% market share.

There’s nothing wrong with that – Linux, indeed all open source software, has been doing pretty awesomely in other areas.

Anyway I just came across some more stats from OneStat.com, which analyses the operating systems in use based on a sample of 2 million visitors to a wide range of websites. Its technology can basically tell which OS you’re running when you visit certain websites.

Anyway as previously blogged, the stats showed that Linux has a 0.36% market share worldwide, with Macs coming in at 2.7% and Windows at 96.72%. Windows Vista came in at 3.23%. Even Windows ME, at 0.64%, is bigger than Linux. Big deal. Or perhaps since it’s ME we’re talking about, little deal.

Anyway I thought the data split out by country was quite interesting too. I would have thought Linux on the desktop would have been biggest in the US: it was obviously just an impression, but you always think of the US as having a particularly vocal and passionate Linux community.

That may still be the case, but they’re not necessarily voting with their feet when it comes to using Linux on the desktop...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 10:09 AM | Comments (8)