TheOpenAnalyst

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While the Googlers want to talk today about improvements to GMail for mobile, there remains a serious concern for you to discuss this weekend.
Is Google really good at being part of an open source community?
There are three types of mobile source projects:
1. One-company projects. 2. Multiple-company projects. [...]

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Last week, I spent a lot of time with the folks from Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) paid $410 million for, only to turn around and donate the assets to an open-source foundation. What I wanted to know was how the employees—who were once programmed to make profits and [...]

To the right is an interesting, if controversial, graph offered today by Charles Taylor of Sirius Corp. and ZDNet UK.
It is meant to illustrate the costs of “upgrading” from a proprietary to a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solution in your IT shop.
The open source sea change and the Taylor graph | Open [...]

I confess, I never thought I would write such a title. Microsoft helping Linux? No way. I was always of the mind that Microsoft and Linux would forever be mortal enemies and one, hopefully Linux, would rise above the other in absolute world domination.
Well, that hasn’t happened. In fact it seems as if the two [...]

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Microsoft is drawing mixed reactions to the release last week of the source code for its ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC). The tooling was released under the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-recognized Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).
The move came just two weeks after the release of ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft’s design pattern for test-driven development of [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

Getting a business loan in this economy can be more difficult than landing a reservation at French Laundry in Napa, California. Now try selling the loan officer on an open source hardware project where the blueprints will be given away.
That’s why the hardware hacking community is turning inwards to fund its ideas. Two open source [...]

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A recently uncovered Red Hat patent application for dynamic message routing on XML has some open-source advocates theorizing the company has quietly forsaken its promise to claim Linux IP only for defensive purposes.
Conspiracies are bubbling out of Slashdot and other sites over a 2007 Red Hat patent application for a “method and apparatus [...]

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it’s as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies.
Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, [...]