TheOpenAnalyst

You are browsing the archives of 2008 September.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) are usually associated with large software or music companies. This impression can easily obscure the critical connection between open source and property rights.
Just because software is given away, it does not mean all property rights are thrown out of the window. In fact IPR is critical to the health of the [...]

Netherlands-based HITT is poised to release open-source software aimed at simplifying the processing of port data.
Current practise sees port authorities providing information on arrival times and the position of ships on request, which as a non-automated process is viewed as time-consuming and open to miscommunication and delays.
Port Strategy: Open source promises greater collaboration

Giving code back to an open-source community can be like giving a gift when you don’t know the cultural rules: There’s always a chance your basket of code won’t be accepted. At the same time, fresh open-source projects can wither on the vine if not properly tended. Therefore, it is prudent for enterprise developers to [...]

Jack Repenning, CTO of Collabnet, takes issue with my complaint that contributing code to open-source projects is hard. Jack’s suggestion that “while community membership requires more than ‘casual contribution,’ you shouldn’t have to ‘become a key member’” in order to play a part is fair and spot-on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really tackle the big issue.
Most [...]

Asia is in the middle of a mass adoption wave of open source technology, and the floodgates of innovation will open following this wave in two to three years, according to open source vendors.
Following recent remarks made by MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Asia’s lack of contribution back to the open source community, fellow industry [...]

Some projects derived from open source have licensing fees based on who’s using them — a good idea in practice, but sometimes it can become unintentionally thorny. This goes double if the criterion is “commercial use,” one of those terms that, in the words of The Princess Bride’s Fezzik, does not always mean what you [...]

InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock takes a fascinating look into the pros and cons of open-source mergers and acquisitions, and comes up with some interesting perspectives in the process. In sum, if you want to acquire an open-source software company, you’d better be very clear about what you’re buying, and how you’re going to pull value from [...]

The intelligence community has set strategic goals for how to analyze the constantly growing amount of unclassified, publicly available information for intelligence purposes.
The National Open Source Committee, whose members include representatives of the government’s intelligence agencies, announced four goals today for using publicly available data, which officials call open source. They made the announcement at [...]

I’ve heard the open-source search engine, Simplexo, come up twice in conversation this week, and so was interested to dig a deeper into what Simplexo offers. My own company, Alfresco, has worked with Lucene, another open-source search engine, for the past few years and has been both pleased and disappointed with its capabilities, but I’ve [...]

Roy Fielding, chief scientist at Day Software and co-founder of the original Apache Web server project, is the kind of guy who oozes cred in the open source community. He was lead architect on the HTTP specification and described Representational State Transfer–we know it simply as REST today–as a development method in his doctoral dissertation [...]