How much open source software are businesses really using?
450833
Open source vendor OpenLogic is today kicking off a new industry initiative meant to help both users and software companies find out precisely what kinds of open source software is being used -- and who is using it.
459661
One great way to determine whether your digital product is destined for greatness is how many people want to steal it. The same goes for open source.
191751
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.
753500
(InfoWorld) - Separate reports from The 451 Group and Evans Data this week confirm what seems obvious: open-source software is impacting commercial software companies and continues to gain adoption worldwide. In a report entitled, "Going Open -- Software Vendors in Transition," The 451 Group found that open-source software is increasingly placing pressure on business models of proprietary software vendors. These companies now are looking to open source as a way to grow distribution, improve customer participation, and respond to competition. The trend of proprietary vendors going "open" has had companies either shifting away from licensing fees as a basis for customer usage or releasing some code via an open-source license. Open source is changing the relationship between software vendors and customers, The 451 Group said. Smaller vendors and startups can more effectively compete for enterprise customers by providing code and a community for ensured long-term viability. While services are often considered the most likely path for software vendors looking to generate revenues from open source, almost half of 31 vendors interacted with for the study indicated the greatest revenue opportunity was in commercial licensing. Meanwhile, Evans Data, in its just-released 2007 Emerging Markets Development Survey, found that developers worldwide are increasingly using open-source code. In a survey covering developers in regions such as Brazil, Russia, Eastern Europe, India, and China, 69 percent of respondents said they are using open-source software, which is up from 59 percent six months ago. The Eclipse open-source platform has had high adoption in countries like India and Brazil. Linux development has increased in many emerging markets as well. In the area of Web development, 36 percent of developers in emerging markets are using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). The figure was 21 percent six months ago. While open source is growing in popularity in these markets, all is not lost for commercial software. Forty-seven percent of Indian developers expect to be upgrading to Windows Vista as a primary or secondary host operating system next year. In the security area, 87 percent of Chinese respondents experienced at least one security breach at their company in 2006.
568987
SEC filing shows just how much open source is worrying the software giant.
5380
Open source is not always the best software.  When it's not, use something else.  Is this complicated?
697394
In a private study conducted by IDC for Open Source Development Labs, Inc (OSDL), IDC predicted that the overall Linux marketplace revenues for server, PC hardware and packaged software on Linux is expected to reach $35.7 billion by 2008.
320537
Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?
175181
In areas such as CRM software and portals, open source gained a foothold because users were willing to compromise -- less could be more, because the price was right. In security, open source rushed in because commercial vendors fell down on the job. As security problems in the enterprise outstripped the capabilities of commercial solutions, a number of talented security researchers stepped into the breach via the open source model.
60236
Blog: It's true that open-source applications and infrastructure don't necessarily play well together today, as Microsoft suggests.  But it's also true that more than enough integration is in place for current market demand.
393996
There's a lot of money to be made in open source, both as a shareholder and for the company.
60496
As companies ramp up open-source deployments, expertise is in high demand and short supply. The costs of developing talent can add up.
334089
Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco&#39;s community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.The surveys help inform Alfresco&#39;s technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco&#39;s chief marketing officer. &quot;It&#39;s important for us to know which platforms to test against first,&quot; he said, adding, &quot;It&#39;s in users&#39; interest to give us good data.&quot;Among Linux operating systems, usage of Ubuntu and Red Hat stood at 35 percent and 23 percent, respectively, according to the survey. Suse, OpenSuse, and Suse Enterprise collectively garnered 13 percent; Debian, 15 percent; and &quot;other&quot; distributions usage of 14 percent.Users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2 percent, compared to 63 percent for Windows XP and 28 percent for Windows Server 2003.Microsoft&#39;s Office suite remained strong, however, with 66 percent usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72 percent. JBoss&#39; entry stood at 18 percent. Entries from Sun, BEA, and IBM rounded out the field.In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61 percent. Microsoft&#39;s Virtual Server took 16 percent, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and &quot;other&quot; offerings, according to the study.MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60 percent tally, followed by Oracle with 14 percent and Microsoft SQL Server with 13 percent.&quot;It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack,&quot; Howells said of the overall results.Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, while 24 percent were in the U.S., and 26 percent from other nations, Alfresco said.
325391
At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
20846
Hefty valuations = a bet on the future.  That future is clearly open source + SaaS, based on the multiples people are willing to pay.
725185
TechWeb - Market-research firm Venture Development Corp. says a survey of retail IT execs shows that just 2% of point-of-sale systems use Linux, far less than expected.
553516
TechWeb - As Linux running on x86 servers continues to grow in corporate data centers, questions remain as to whether the open-source operating system introduces a higher level of management complexity than the proprietary Unix systems it replaces.