TheOpenAnalyst

I was presenting to a full house at the Pentaho Partner summit yesterday talking about open source’s inflection point. Over the last nine to twelve months, we’ve seen a change happening, what I call the perfect storm for open source:

Open source software is good enough (and in some cases, better than [...]

I just read Gartner’s estimate of the open source database market; the report states:
We also believe this growth will continue during the next five years at more than 40%, passing $1 billion in revenue by 2013.
Two things surprised me about this forecast.
Gartner’s open source database forecast doesn’t make sense | Open [...]

Image via CrunchBase
We’re going old school — like, long-before-your-editor-was-born school — to set the mood for this one. Microsoft’s been talking open source again, which usually leads to anger in the open source community, double-talk from Redmond and confusion for the rest of us.
Not long ago, Microsoft dropped a white paper on how great a [...]

Just the other day Arstechnica.com ran an article discussing the fact that Red Hat is succeeding despite the recession. It seems that the global economic chaos is forcing an increasing number of companies to search for ways to reduce IT costs, which means that more and more companies are turning to open source solutions in [...]

Microsoft has published its .NET architectural pattern under an OSI-approved open-source license to a mixed reception.
The company’s ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09 just last month, has been published under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).
Microsoft’s latest open-source release catches a wrinkle • The Register

A patent attorney named Gene Quinn (left) is out with a post making the usual complaints about open source overwhelming IP rights and creating a “race to zero” with quality forgotten.
In the post he mentions Sun Microsystems’ problems, and worries aloud about other patent attorneys using the Internet to undercut his application costs.
Moore’s second law [...]

Image by Getty Images via Daylife
As critics continue to question Microsoft’s commitment to working with the open source community, a key Microsoft official last week argued the company has made significant progress while defending its right to enforce patents. And he made his defense on the open source community’s turf: the Open Source Business Conference [...]

Image via CrunchBase
With rumors of a takeover by IBM swirling around him, Sun Microsytems’ chairman Scott McNealy tried to pitch a room of customers this week on the idea that Sun is a wily innovator whose software and hardware are far less costly than proprietary solutions from Oracle and, yes, IBM. But McNealy had little [...]

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Open-source software companies are missing out on a relatively inexpensive way to fight concerns about patent liability, according to an attorney who spoke at an open-source conference in San Francisco this week.
More open-source companies should be asking the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine patents that may pose a threat to them, [...]

A startup called Rhomobile announced the first formal release of its dual-licensed, open-source framework for smartphones. Rhodes 1.0 enables “write-once” development, using HTML and Ruby, of native smartphone applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and now Android, the company says.
Rhodes reduces development costs by “up to five times” by eliminating the need to develop [...]