Archive for the ‘Open Source’s Blog’ Category
News that Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a MySQL 5.1 relational database in the cloud has met with a lot of interest. On the surface, this is good news for open source users and proponents.
When I read about RDS, I wondered if this was in fact good news for open source vendors. I asked if Sun/MySQL was being compensated for Amazon’s use of MySQL in RDS. Sun sources confirmed:
Oracle updated its FAQ overview of the impending Sun acquisition to address some important questions about the fate of Sun’s software assets beyond Java and Solaris.
Like many of you, I awoke Monday to read that whitehouse.gov was now running on open source products, including Drupal, Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, MySQL, and Apache Solr.
Raindrop is a Mozilla Labs project that could simplify the e-mail experience by increasing your inbox’s signal-to-noise ratio, along with the contextual information about a message. Raindrop’s mission is to “make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site.”
After finishing my post about Monty Widenius’s views on the Oracle acquisition of MySQL via Sun, I read that Richard Stallman (RMS) had published an open letter on the topic.
Last week at Oracle OpenWorld I caught up briefly with IDS Scheer, a longtime enterprise software company in the business process modeling (BPM) business. Its flagship product ARIS has been around since the mid-1980s, and it’s regarded as a pioneer in this category.
The open core business model has its roots in the traditional software business model. Open source vendors have learned what works in the traditional software business model and applied it to the open core business model. This learning has not been a one-way street. This is the first in a series of posts discussing how open source and traditional software vendors are, or should be, learning from each other.
Matt Aslett writes an interesting follow-up to his suggestion that open core vendors give up control over the “core” of their product offering. Matt writes:
…open core vendors should consider releasing the source code for their core open source project under a more permissive license, or better still via an existing community/foundation….
Brian Prentice over at Gartner has posted an interesting blog article called “Open Source’s Dying Narrative.” While I don’t quite get the title, it’s an insightful piece about how open source has attracted attention and (gasp) money from venture capitalists and large software vendors in order to become a bigger part of the software industry.
Open Source for America (OSFA) was announced as a coalition to encourage U.S. federal government support of and participation in open source projects and technologies. If that sounds like a broad-reaching goal, it is. Nearly three months after the group’s debut, I was interested to learn what progress OSFA has made toward this goal.