TheOpenAnalyst

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Image via CrunchBase
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 [...]

Image via CrunchBase
rPath founder and CTO Erik Troan recently discussed the future of open source as part of a series of Ostatic contributions written by select participants in this week’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). In his commentary, Erik argues, convincingly, that the future of open source belongs to the developer community–but with an emphasis [...]

If you haven’t read the news, the Australian state of New South Wales has signed a deal to deploy 267,000 Windows netbooks into secondary schools, as part of the Australian federal government’s multi-billion dollar netbook-in-schools programme. This was a golden opportunity to explore the deployment of Linux and open source software in education. An opportunity [...]

Image via CrunchBase
When it comes to open source, Microsoft has a balancing act that would be tough for Philippe Petite. Redmond must pacify shareholders by hanging onto commercial licensing, but it can’t totally irritate open source-friendly IT pros. If Microsoft is too much of an open source enemy, IT can turn their backs and move [...]

Recent survey data compiled by Forrester Consulting on behalf of information systems specialist Bull suggests that we’re at the front end of a long cycle of open-source infrastructure and application adoption.
That’s right. Despite Gartner finding that 85 percent of enterprises have already adopted open source and Forrester Research’s consulting arm finding that 45 percent of [...]

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 [...]