Editor’s note: Following the closure of the print edition of US tech magazine InfoWorld, Neil McAllister has opted to stop writing his weekly “Open Enterprise” column. He will continue to contribute to the now online-only InfoWorld, but this is his last column. Expect to see more of McAllister’s incisive commentary on open source in Computerworld, but under a different banner.
Version 3 of the Gnu GPL (General Public Licence) is nearing completion. The third draft — expected to be the last before the licence is finalised — was released on March 28, fully eight months after the first draft was made available for public comment. Yet despite the long and painstaking public ratification process, the new GPL remains embroiled in controversy.
Thanks to Dell, it will soon be easier than ever to order a brand-new desktop or notebook PC with Linux pre-installed. But whether Dell’s new programme will really have an impact on the rate of Linux adoption in the enterprise is unclear at best.
In my previous column, I touched on the issue of what constitutes an open source vendor. Ask Andy Astor that question, and his answer is a shrug. “Honestly,” he says, “who cares?” To Astor, there are really two broad categories of companies with respect to their relationship to open source code: users and joiners.
Developers by the thousands flocked to the International Convention Centre in Hyderabad, India, last week as Sun Microsystems kicked off the second leg of its world-spanning series of Tech Days conferences. The theme of the event was “shape your future” — and indeed, no slogan could be more appropriate for Sun, its developers and its partners.
I came away from InfoWorld’s Virtualisation Executive Forum last week with two conclusions. First,server virtualisation is definitely a big deal. This time last year, customers and ISVs still seemed to be struggling to come to terms with this new approach to deploying and managing servers; today it’s full speed ahead. And, second, nowhere is virtualisation hotter than in the Linux market.
In October, Oracle sent Red Hat’s stock plummeting on the announcement that it would offer cut-rate support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, under the “Unbreakable Linux” brand. Could Larry Ellison now be planning a repeat with “Unbreakable MySQL”?
What do you get if you cross an open source development consortium with an organisation that promotes free standards? Answer: You get a Linux advocacy group. Or so it seems.
As 64-bit processing becomes more mainstream, the next major computing platform shift is due to arrive by 2008. And, if the open source community doesn’t step up to the plate and address major impediments to widespread desktop adoption Linux could be left behind.
I couldn't have an easier time playing fortune-teller this year. While some segments of the IT market might see the future as a wide-open plain, for the open source community, 2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business.
Let the spin control begin. In an open letter issued recently, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian attempted to distance his company from Microsoft’s claims that open source software, including the Linux kernel, infringes on Microsoft intellectual property.
Just when the Mono Project was beginning to gain traction, along comes Sun Microsystems to take the wind from its sails. I can’t help but feel it’s a mixed blessing.
The partnership between Microsoft and Novell has raised as many questions as it has provided answers. That’s a shame, because some of those questions should have been put to rest long ago.
Making standards is hard work,” writes Tim Berners-Lee in a recent blog post. And he should know. The creator of the world wide web, Berners-Lee is responsible for developing and popularising some of the most significant open standards in computing history.
It wasn’t the Oracle-branded Linux that many were expecting. In a way, it was something much worse.