Is open-source software support better than closed-source software support?
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Open source doesn't necessarily automatically translate into better paid support for customers.  But it does offer a lot more options and aligns customers with vendors more tightly.
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Christopher Lydon's RadioOpenSource is one of the best programs on radio. It's not about open source code, but about radio modeled on open source values and methods. As the show puts it, Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media &#151; a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.  \
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Blog: Open source is not up to each individual to define.  It's up to the community, and the community has traditionally delivered its verdict on licenses through the OSI.  CentricCRM has given no good reasons for this to change.
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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Choice is an important element of free software, so it's perhaps no surprise that even at the level of the desktop environment there is more than one offering.  But the main alternatives â KDE and GNOME â represent more than just a way of placing icons on a screen.  Nowhere is that more evident than in their respective views on Microsoft's OOXML document standard, which are very far apart â perhaps dangerously so. read more
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Ziff Davis - The emergence of stacks of open-source infrastructure software will spawn new opportunities for companies to enter and succeed in the open-source space, according to a panel of experts at the Harvard Business School's annual Cyberposium conference.
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I&#39;ve always been mixed about the Open Source movement because while my feelings suggest that this is surely a great innovation in software development scene, there are other (many) things that I don&#39;t agree with.
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KDE and GNOME, the open-source software projects that together form the face of most Linux installations, have undergone revisions that boost their usability and enterprise readinessâadvances that build the case for Linux as a viable alternative to
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People are people, sang Depeche Mode.  But people adopt open source in very different ways, as I've seen at Alfresco.
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HP is giving away a lot of value related to open source adoption.  Here's why this is a good strategy.
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Low cost and flexibility are selling points for the open-source VoIP software, but is it right for your shop?
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Open source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census -- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.The number of licenses sold gives vendors of proprietary software a pretty good idea of how many people are using their code, assuming there are not too many pirated copies in use, or licensed copies gathering dust on shelves. They can also draw on information about paid upgrades or service contracts, or sell unique license keys, verified by a central server each time the software is installed -- or even used.Open source software developers have no such luck; the very nature of open source licenses makes such verification methods impossible. One clue they have is a count of how many people have downloaded the software from their Web sites. Reaching 1 million downloads is a rite of passage for open source projects.&#160;SugarCRM, for example, passed that landmark in May.Such counts, though, may underestimate the number of users, as anyone who obtains open source software is free to redistribute it by any other means they choose -- as long as they accompany it with a copy of the open source license and make the source code readily available.On the other hand, they may wildly overestimate the number; people may download the software with no intention of using it, since there is no financial disincentive to doing so, or they may download it multiple times if they upgrade it, wipe and reinstall their system, or have several computers.To come up with an accurate figure for the number of users of various open source applications in the enterprise, OpenLogic has released an automated census tool, OSS Discovery, itself available under an open source license.It hopes that businesses will scan their machines using the tool and contribute the data about the applications they are using to an open database.The tool could offer advantages to IT managers too, said OpenLogic, enabling them to build up a picture of the software installed on desktops and servers around their business and compare it with that used in other enterprises.OpenLogic is looking for partners to distribute or deploy the software and wants open source software developers to contribute digital &quot;fingerprints&quot; of their applications that will enable the discovery tool to identify them. Those who help with the project will be offered access to the anonymous data gathered.OSS Discovery 2.0 is based on the company&#39;s OpenLogic Discovery tool and is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. This recently introduced license extends the GPL license to ensure that changes to software used to power publicly available services will be contributed to the free software community, even if the modified software is not itself distributed.OpenLogic hopes to begin collecting census data early next year.
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As open source becomes pervasive, software giants like Microsoft, Oracle and Sun are adapting in different ways.
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Open Solutions Alliance hopes to make open-source software programs work better together.
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It seems that the proprietary world is doing just fine in the face of open source.  But for how long?
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IT vendors are championing highly integrated and flexible systems through offerings such as IBM's 'on-demand computing' initiative and HP's 'adaptive enterprise' strategy. But what's really important, users say, is support for open standards.
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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.