TheOpenAnalyst

Vodafone never put much stock in open innovation, or tapping outsiders for ideas. It didn’t need to. The company, after all, had grown into the world’s biggest wireless telecom operator on its own. But with such interlopers as Google and Nokia starting to tromp on its turf, Vodafone became a convert. “We were a bit [...]

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It’s ironic but fitting that executive bonuses, a subject that’s ignited popular anger against the very companies in Sun Microsystems’ core customer base on Wall St, helped kill Sun’s future.
It’s been reported that a disagreement between IBM and Sun over post-acquisition packages for both chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz and chairman and co-founder [...]

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Sun Microsystems share price has plummeted this week following the breakdown of IBM’s takeover talks. The board rejected an offer of $9.40 per share and terminated their agreement to negotiate exclusively with IBM.
Sun has been looking for a buyer for several months. The company has struggled for a few years [...]

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OpenMoko said it will not be making successors to its open source Neo FreeRunner smartphone.
Speaking at a conference in Switzerland, OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz said the company will discontinue development on the next iteration of its Linux-based smartphone, as the FreeRunner only sold about 10,000 units. The company will focus [...]

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The big IBM-Sun (JAVA) news has come and gone; so far without an outcome. It’s going to be ugly for Sun. A situation like this is absolutely fatal to an organization. The wheels of employee defection and revised customer spending plans are set in motion and there is little that [...]

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Red Hat’s CEO, in a blog post on Monday, is endorsing the Obama Administration’s call for openness and participation in government by likening the President’s statement to the open source software movement.
Linking to a White House statement in which President Obama calls for transparency, participation, and collaboration in government, Red [...]

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to [...]

OpenMoko’s work to develop an open-source smartphone is on the rocks.
Over the weekend, the company’s executive director, Sean Moss-Pulz, said that staff cuts would be implemented, and Ars Technica spotted a mailing list post from OpenMoko’s vice president of marketing, Steve Mosher, confirming that the successor to the FreeRunner is delayed, and might even have [...]

Although the open source movement has been active for more than a decade, it is only in recent months that such a copyright license actually has received the imprimatur of enforceability — from an unlikely court (the Federal Circuit) construing a perhaps unlikely license (the Java Model Railroad Interface for model train software). Open source [...]

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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, [...]