Is open source still a grassroots social movement made up of idealistic underdogs trying to revolutionise an amoral industry? Or has it become a cloak used by IT vendors to disguise ruthless and self-serving behaviour?
When CA decided to open the source code to its Ingres database in 2004 sceptics described it as a marketing stunt and an act of desperation.
Separate reports from The 451 Group and Evans Data last week confirm what seems obvious: open-source software is impacting on commercial software companies and continuing to be adopted worldwide.
Still looking for ideas for bringing some Linux and other open-source applications to your company?
Leading Firefox expert Robert O’Callahan is planning to double the size of his Mozilla Firefox development team in New Zealand.
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.
The decision to use open source software is rarely driven by philosophy or matters of principle. Most ICT leaders integrate or implement open source as a pragmatic solution.
When containers are unloaded and shifted around New Zealand’s biggest container terminal, Ingres helps keep an eye on those movements.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer made it clearer than ever at a meeting with financial analysts that the company's recent deal with Novell is primarily about bringing the Linux threat to heel.
"I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free," Ballmer said. (See a transcript here.)
His remarks came the same week as the company announced more of the technical details of the deal. In contrast to that announcement, which focused on areas such as virtualisation, web services standards and an interoperability lab, Ballmer said the value of the deal to Microsoft lay in its potential to set a precedent that could force Linux distributors and users to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property.
The problem, Ballmer said, continues to be that Linux costs next to nothing. "Having a competitor out there who at least nominally looks to be close to free is always a challenge," he said.
He said the Novell deal was a "very important" step towards dealing with the price threat: namely, that Microsoft could begin to bring its patent arsenal to bear on Linux companies. "It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open source world," Ballmer said.
"Open source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will," he said.
His remarks risk reopening the rift between Novell and Microsoft over the way the deal should be interpreted. In late November, three weeks after the deal was announced, Ballmer said that Linux companies could be infringing on Microsoft's patents.
Novell begged to differ, and the solution was a statement from Microsoft explaining that the companies "agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe on Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents".
3Com has unveiled a new open-source approach to its networking products centered on a Linux-based module that fits into its Router 6000 family and which also supports multi-vendor applications for security, voice over IP and other functions.
The National Library is to digitise important parts of its newspaper collection following a successful pilot of optical character recognition (OCR) software.
Despite being distributed across the globe, and communications being largely conducted online, open source projects can benefit immensely from direct human contact, says one of the fathers of Debian Linux.
The president of the New Zealand Open Source Society has questioned the process used to select Microsoft software as the platform for New Zealand’s new online charities registration system.
EnterpriseDB, which sells an Oracle-compatible, PostgreSQL-based database for businesses, has begun offering support packages for PostgreSQL customers and has revised the subscription offerings for its own software.
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.