TheOpenAnalyst

You are browsing the archives of 2008 December.

Recently, the The Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by MIT alum Richard Stallman, has filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems for copyright infringement. The suit contends that Cisco distributed software originally written and distributed under the FSF’s General Public License (GLP), and has thus failed to fulfill the requirements of the GPL under which the [...]

Matt (friend of the blog) Asay tells Oracle today to expand its open source strategy, but I want to ask the opposite question, namely whether Oracle hasn’t got the best strategy for fighting open source.
The answer depends on whether you blame its weak earnings for the quarter on a strong dollar and the general malaise [...]

The adoption of open source software is being driven by increased involvement by big commercial tech firms such as Microsoft and IBM, a study has claimed.
Open source is no longer just project based and developer driven, but increasingly involves vendors and their software, the report by analyst firm Saugatuck Technology suggested.
Big commercial firms driving open [...]

Linux Professional Association on Kenya, a group of local software developers, has embarked on a sensitisation programme among government bodies with the aim of wooing them to use Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
Among government bodies targeted are the Public Procurement Oversight Authority (PPOA) and the Kenya ICT board. PPOA is mandated to enforce and [...]

There was a time that we thought that open source was a happy band of code-literate hippies. That was before we actually paid attention to who was involved.
Years ago Boston Consulting Group did an analysis of open-source contributors, finding that 58 percent are experienced IT programmers and/or system administrators with an average of 11 years [...]

We have looked closely in the past at the importance of post-election audits and the essential role that they play in guaranteeing election integrity. Many state and local governments have been slow to institute adequate audit procedures, but that could soon change. Colorado’s Boulder County has taken a big step forward with a comprehensive auditing [...]

The advent of Linux-powered netbooks, the launch of Google’s Android and Chrome, and Nokia’s move to snap up Symbian pushed open source further into the mainstream, despite ongoing legal wrangling.
The year 2008 showed open source — both in the form of Linux specifically and as a software development model generally — coming into the mainstream [...]

On Thursday Oracle, one of the strongest enterprise software vendors, reported weak earnings, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Most troubling is Oracle’s first year-on-year decline in new software sales in five years, with license revenue falling by 3 percent from 2007.
Some of Oracle’s struggles relate to a strengthening dollar, as CNET suggests. But [...]

As I listened to David Mihelcic, CTO with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency talk about the benefits of open source on Federal News Radio’s presentation of “Open Source Solutions – 2 Years In Review,” I couldn’t help but be impressed with just how far open source has come in the past decade.
When I first [...]

Open source is just a step up from shareware which really never took off.
The computer industry like other industries likes to keep re-inventing itself to keep the sales cycle going. For example we are now talking about Web 2.0 and even before that gets going it will be then Web 3.0.
The big con – open [...]