TheOpenAnalyst

You are browsing the archives of 2008 December.

I just ordered my first computer yesterday: 4GB RAM, a 250 GB SATA 3gb/s hard drive, a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and a comfortable 20″ monitor. But while these were all expensive (especially the video card), none of them compared to one item on the list: Windows. That’s the [...]

During the OSCAMP event in Beijing, I had a chance to talk to Cedric Thomas, the CEO of OW2 open source organization. Here’s an extract of our conversation:1. Can you tell me about the origins of the OW2 Consortium? We hear OW2 is the result of a merger between OrientWare and ObjectWeb.In 2002, a joint [...]

Starting about the time that Bill Gates wrote his infamous Letter to Hobbyists, the commercial software industry has sought to control and restrict access to source code. Before that time, code wasn’t explicitly free, but it was often freely exchanged. The rise of the commercial software industry put an end to that.
When the modern open [...]

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld’s “Future of Open Source” roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that’s not the real story.
No, the real story is who InfoWorld chose to profile.
The new face of open source [...]

There’s no question that the open source community is a passionate one — and one with significant influence on technology directions and options. We’re way past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe to depend on in business. Open source is now a mainstream part of the technology fabric.
Yet it remains [...]

Linux has proven that the open source model works — it addresses two of the biggest challenges for IT professionals: the high cost of infrastructure software and the limitations a closed stack imposes on the enterprise. Open source is particularly appealing for the following reasons:

Cost savings — Users do not pay a license fee to [...]

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we’ve seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
I suspect that in 2009 it [...]

It’s funny, but “open source” and “burgeoning” are not exactly words I would have expected to see in the same sentence with “Microsoft” even last year. But that’s exactly how writer David Worthington described Sam Ramji’s take on open source at Microsoft — burgeoning.
In an interview published Wednesday in SD Times, Ramji explains that Microsoft [...]

Microsoft has begun to realign its legal department, allowing it to work in collaboration with its engineers so that product teams can have more flexibility with open-source software. The company is evangelizing—internally—that more interoperability can be good for the bottom line. Microsoft’s Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, discussed with SD Times his company’s [...]

While some might argue that it’s too early to call, Red Hat’s open source model seems to be paying dividends despite the soft economic climate. Could penny-pinching managers looking for cheap solutions be a boon to the open source industry?
Red Hats revenue grew 22 percent to $165.3 million in the third quarter over the same [...]