TheOpenAnalyst

You are browsing the archives of 2009 February.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks.
Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the [...]

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses.
If you didn’t get to attend the event, don’t panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.
Building an open-source [...]

Novell’s $340 million lifeline from Microsoft appears to be losing its potency.
Although Microsoft originally gifted Novell $240 million to help fight Red Hat, and later added another $100 million to the pile, it doesn’t seem to be enough to revive Novell’s fortunes, as the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and a slide even in its [...]

The president of the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm) has diluted his statement that open-source software development lags proprietary development by several years.
Richard Steel told ZDNet UK that a Wednesday blog post he made as president of Socitm, which aims to promote the efficient use of information technology in the public sector, may have [...]

As the global economic crisis deepens, companies are considering options they might once have rejected out of hand in order to cut costs. Open source vendors have long waved the lower-TCO banner, and the recession seems to fueling business in the sector. It’s not quite clear, though, whether a switch to open source will result [...]

Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems was the first person The H called. He was pleased to see the updated policy, “It’s a great thing to see it published, as the 2004 policy didn’t help very much”. The new policy had “a lot of good things in it” such as the costing [...]

The flurry of lawsuits in 2008 alleging infringement of open source software licenses underscores the importance of investigating a company’s use of open source software and addressing the risks of such use in investment or merger and acquisition documents.
For businesses developing proprietary software products or electronic devices that run proprietary software (such as medical equipment, [...]

Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman Scott McNealy wants President Barack Obama’s administration to do what the U.K., Denmark and other countries have done: encourage, as a matter of policy, open-source software adoption.
Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government — particularly Linux and Sun’s own products, Solaris and Java — McNealy believes many [...]

It’s not all about the code in the Linux ecosystem. Any Linux project needs leadership. Markus Rex is one such leader.
For most of the last year, Rex was the CTO of the Linux Foundation, on loan from his employer Novell. Now, he’s back with Novell, where he is responsible for Novell’s open source and open [...]

Oh sure. Microsoft loves open source.
If your open source company is willing to admit Microsoft owns Linux, acknowledge the legitimacy of its proprietary standards, and put “whatever Microsoft wants” at the center of all your business plans, then Microsoft will let you live in its world.
For now. No promise they won’t sue you later though.
Microsoft [...]