VC Insider: Open source software firm gets 2nd round
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Open source software companies have gotten a lot of buzz, but most have yet to prove their staying power.
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Blog: Novell takes a lot of heat for its patent deal with Microsoft, and rightfully so.  But there is much that the company is doing to advance the cause and state of open source in the industry.  In this second installment of the "Open Source @" Series, I talk
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Hewlett-Packard is returning to a software market where it suffered one of its worst defeats. But this time, the company has open-source software as its ally.
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Now for some real Apache code Column As I write this, I'm on the Eurostar train, just returning from O'Reilly's OSCon (Open Source Conference) in Brussels. Some fascinating insights there; and even my own talk generated some interesting discussion. Some of the delegates, including O'Reilly himself, are promoting opensource ideas going beyond software and into society more generally. I've touched on that in this very column before now, but a related argument that's new to me is that the open/closed debate in software could become largely sidelined, as the industry focuses on software as a service (such as Google's offerings) more than as a product.â¦
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The software company's investments are showing some promise.
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s recent announcement regarding a pair of free and open source software projects has irked one of its co-sponsors, OpenLogic.FOSSology is a tool for tracking the use of open source software in an enterprise, and is based on technology developed in-house at HP, the company has said. FOSSBazaar is an accompanying Web site housing best practices and other information concerning FOSS governance.OpenLogic&#39;s CEO, Steven Grandchamp, said in a blog post Tuesday that HP&#39;s media release essentially hogged the limelight, downplaying the fact that many other companies are backing FOSSBazaar, including Google and Novell.&quot;Although this initiative was started and led by HP, it is designed to be backed and supported by many in the open source ecosystem,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Just as no single member of a large open source community would claim responsibility for all the results, FOSSBazaar will need to follow these same open source community norms. In HP&#39;s desire to talk about their leadership on FOSSBazaar, they may have lost sight of the open and community aspects.&quot;In addition, the HP announcement mixed together news of the free information housed at FOSSBazaar and&#160;the&#160;company&#39;s&#160;new set of commercial services, he noted. &quot;Those details of HP&#39;s open source services may have been better left for a different forum or separate press release.&quot;Grandchamp also said he has received phone calls and e-mail regarding whether HP is now competing with OpenLogic, which makes a tool called OSS Discovery.Describing the two tools as &quot;complementary,&quot; he wrote, &quot;OSS Discovery can be used to discover which open source packages are installed on your machines (providing package names and versions), regardless of license. FOSSology can be used to search for open source licenses in a set of source or binary code.&quot;But Grandchamp extended an olive branch to HP even as he chided its actions. &quot;Bottom line, we think that FOSSBazaar can be a valuable resource for enterprises, despite some confusion around the announcement. Our intention is to work with all of the participants in FOSSBazaar to ensure that it is a valuable resource helping enterprises to become more knowledgeable about open source governance issues and therefore more comfortable in using open source software.&quot;HP could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
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Still in stealth mode, a company looks to use open source to make it easier to build social applications on the Web.
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In the second of a two-part interview, Open Systems Development Labs chief Stuart Cohen gives his views on Linux security, desktops, the Domino effect towards Linux, and why Microsoft will eventually port to Linux.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and other technology companies recently "donated" portions of their software to the open-source community. But those donations are not motivated by corporate generosity; there are tactics and strategies behind these moves.
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perspective Attorney Eric J. Sinrod explains the ramifications of a recent case on the future of open-source software.
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The company is shipping the open-source database for Linux and Windows to revive its usage. By Darrell Dunn. Computer Associates on Monday will take the next step in its open-source strategy with the announcement
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Previously, I have asked what happens to the software industry if enterprises expect to acquire their software for free via open source.
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(InfoWorld) - The open-source community doesn't always deliver software that customers want, according to Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems Inc. "The community builds what it thinks is good, but it is not always the same as what the customer thinks is good,â Levy said this week in Bangalore, India, where he visited BEA's R&D (research and development) center. The Apache Tomcat servlet container, for example, is not strong on management, because management features weren't seen as very important by the community, although BEA customers wanted it, Levy said. So BEA had to build a Tomcat management console for its WebLogic Java server platform, he said. BEA has adopted what it calls a "blended strategy" on open source. It has put products in open source, to take advantage of the innovation that comes from community development, and also supports open-source technologies like Spring and Hibernate on its own products, Levy said. BEA announced earlier this year that it will put in open source a significant portion of BEA Kodo, its persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. BEA acquired Kodo after purchasing SolarMetric Inc. last November. Open JPA is a set of Java persistence APIs (application programming interfaces) that are based on the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB 3) standard. "We pushed Kodo out in open source and we now have 2,000 people working on it, as against 50 people when we bought the company," Levy said. But there are other products that BEA will not release as open source so that it can retain full control over their development, Levy said. "The reality of life, specially businesses, is that you have to be a good corporate citizen, you want to know where a piece of code came from, because if you donât control it, how do you know there is nothing malicious in it," he added. BEA has bet the farm on SOA (service-oriented architecture) because it will be fundamental to the way businesses are run, Levy said. Industry and users can easily get taken in by the hype that SOA is going to halve IT costs, Levy said. There are some cost savings in deploying SOA, but the technology's real benefit is the agility and competitive advantage it gives companies to think up and add business services quickly, he added. Without SOA, adding a service involved a time-consuming process to integrate it with the company's existing services, Levy said. With SOA, a company can add a service without making any system changes, Levy said. Deploying SOA will also free company resources to focus on business processes, rather than the underlying IT infrastructure. "If you look at the total effort that is being used from business needs to applications and production, today it is very skewed towards IT," Levy said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Open Text's major software acquisition takes flight.
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The next generation of software players prep for public offerings.
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Three open-source software firms announced investments today: $27 million for Greenplum, $11 million for Zenoss, and $9 million for Alfresco.
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If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems? commitment to open source, it?s time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.Certainly, Sun isn?t the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where it continues to nurture a small installed base.In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. ?Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet,? he wrote. ?No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS.?Yet CA?s and Red Hat?s experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun?s commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.But there may be method to Sun?s madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.?I think the answer is simple: ubiquity,? says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. ?[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides.?According to MySQL?s own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What?s more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun?s enterprise support offerings.Sun?s new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.For his part, MySQL CEO M?rten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company?s aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle?s. And that?s only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle?s most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos? protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it?s already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun?s backing.What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL?s license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL?s success, and as a result, MySQL?s license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.Although all MySQL code is available under the GNU GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don?t want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.Ironically, however, MySQL?s stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun?s own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there?s really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun?s talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.Ah, but there?s the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, ?We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ? on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company.?So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.