Open source executive moves: Charlie Martin to MuleSource
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Blog: Charlie Martin leaves Novell to join MuleSource.  Not a jackass move at all.
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Brian Aker talks about the differences between community and company open-source, how to get started in the open-source world and what the future holds for database services "in the cloud."
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Louis Gutierrez, the Massachusetts CIO who has been involved in efforts to move state agency toward open-source software, has resigned because of concerns over a lack of funding for state IT projects.
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Open-source spam blocker gets legal makeover with switch to Apache license. Oh, and tech upgrades.
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The company Monday announced it has hired Tom Baeyens, the founder and lead developer of jBpm, an open source workflow engine. As with its other products, JBoss will sell services and support for jBpm (which
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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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MySQL developers turn to an unlikely source for database tool: Microsoft. Also: SGI visualizes Linux, and the return of Java veteran Kim Polese.
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Open-source champion Red Hat has taken its new CFO from the traditional business world. Charles Peters, who becomes executive vice president and CFO of the Linux-based firm, has a solid background as a qualified
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In a new post to her Oracle blog today, Alison Holloway shares the presentation she gave at this year's Melbourne Opensource Developers' Conference titled "Working with PHP and Oracle".   I don't think the organizers are going to post the presentations, so I wanted to make it available here.   The talk covers things like the free Oracle tools available, the OCI8 extension, connection management, improving performance, and some Oracle resources. You can grab the PDF download here.
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com November 22, 2004, 7:41 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories for several months, but for many IT managers, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and open source initiatives are on the horizon.
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Company plans to begin shipping in February its Open Enterprise Server, which combines open source and commercial networking platforms.
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Open-source software start-up SugarCRM Inc. tomorrow will release Sugar Sales Professional 1.5, the first commercial enterprise version of its Linux-based open-source CRM application.
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Mitchell Baker has stepped down as the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where she helped make the Firefox Web browser a potent rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer.Baker is handing over the CEO job to John Lilly, Mozilla&#39;s chief operating officer, who becomes responsible for pushing out the updates to Firefox and Mozilla&#39;s Thunderbird e-mail software, the company announced Monday. Baker will retain her role as chairman and stay active within the group, she said.Baker has been with Mozilla since its inception. She was an attorney with Netscape Communications in the late 1990s when it created the Mozilla Organization, and she stayed with the group after AOL bought Netscape and helped to create the Mozilla Foundation in 2003.Since then the open-source browser has built a worldwide market share of about 15 percent, according to estimates, and as high as 30 percent in some European markets. Mozilla says it now has 125 million Firefox users worldwide.In a blog posting Monday, Baker said she&#39;d been thinking for some time about the best way to use her time and about which of her duties could be handled equally well by someone else. Those duties, it turns out, are the day to day management of Mozilla&#39;s software, while Baker sees a wider role for herself in improving the Web experience for end-users.&quot;I have a vision of the Internet and online life and a positive user experience -- and of Mozilla&#39;s role in creating these -- that is far broader than browsers, e-mail clients and even technology in general,&quot; she wrote.She said she&#39;ll focus on efforts to make the Web standards process more effective, make security &quot;understandable enough that people can protect themselves,&quot; and encourage more &quot;hybrid&quot; organizations like Mozilla -- &quot;organizations which serve the public benefit but support themselves through revenue rather than fund-raising.&quot;&quot;I want Mozilla&#39;s influence on the industry to go beyond the bits we ship as software. More particularly, I want to use the impact Firefox gives us in the market to get openness, collaboration and user control embedded in other products, services and aspects of online life,&quot; she wrote.Lilly, her replacement, will be focused on getting the next version of Mozilla&#39;s Web browser, Firefox 3, out of the door. He also wants to be more open about how Mozilla operates and how it will support itself in the future. &quot;I&#8217;d like us to start talking more in public about how the future looks for Mozilla,&quot; he wrote on his blog.Baker remains chairman of both the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit side of the project, and the Mozilla Corporation, which was formed a few years ago to help raise funds and manage product releases.&quot;I&#39;ve been involved in shipping Mozilla products since the dawn of time, and have no intention of distancing myself from our products or [Mozilla Corporation,]&quot; Baker wrote.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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Open Source Initiative general counsel Larry Rosen is now an advisor to Black Duck Software.
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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(InfoWorld) - The pace of change in the open source software business is likely to accelerate in 2007 as developers climb up the software stack from the operating system and databases to applications. Proposals to invest in open source-based software companies increased by a factor of two or three in 2006 over 2005 at Index Ventures, said Bernard DallÃ©, general partner at the venture capital firm. Index Ventures invested about $10 million in open source companies in 2006. These include investments in MySQL, a provider of database management software, and Pentaho, which delivers business intelligence software. For a variety of reasons, software companies are increasingly looking to add value on top of base open-source platforms. The main Linux distributor, Red Hat, is a case in point. The move in October by OracleÂ to undercut Linux distributor Red Hat on price for servicesÂ shows that an open source company is vulnerable if it relies primarily on platform support for revenue. Red Hat made its own move beyond the operating system in June with itsÂ $350 million acquisition of Java application server vendor JBoss. Although JBoss is considered open source software, JBoss, now division of Red Hat, has more control over the source code for its software than Red Hat does over Linux. With control comes a greater ability to monetize the code. "The days of making money off the open source operating system are over," said Cameron Lester, a general partner at Azure Capital Partners LP, a venture capital firm that also has invested in several open-source startups. "These companies have definitely responded to the evolution of the industry." Over the course of the decade the open-source realm has become an incubator for innovative business models. Venture capital money will continue to fuel developments. For example, Zend Technologies Ltd. develops Web applications based on the open source hypertext preprocessor programming language known as PHP. It has received $36.7 million in venture capital, including funding from Azure and Index. Zend has adopted a hybrid business model, participating in the PHP open source community and improving the underlying code, while also offering proprietary Web applications and development tools, said Andi Gutmans, the company's co-founder and vice president of technology. "The big benefit we get from open source is, first of all, we have a huge community that helps us to develop (PHP). We have a very large R&D team, so to speak," Gutmans said. Zend's proprietary products give the company a unique value in the marketplace. For instance, Zend Studio 5.5, launched Dec. 6, offers full lifecycle management of PHP-based Web applications. Members of the PHP community also are a ripe market for Zend's commercial products, Gutmans said. By basing applications on top of open-source software, companies get a built-in adoption and distribution channel, according to Pradeep Tagare, an investment manager specializing in open source at Intel Capital, which also invested in Zend. "As the applications get more and more specialized, the community of developers who can contribute to it becomes smaller," Tagare said. "But, by using open source as a distribution channel, these application companies can really reduce their sales and marketing costs and reduce the barriers to adoption." Intel Capital has also invested in MonoSphere Inc. which uses the open source PostgreSQL database management platform to build its Storage Horizon storage-capacity planning software product. MonoSphere has raised $26 million from various venture capital sources, including $11 million in funding Oct. 25. Building the product on open source made better economic sense than to build it on a more expensive proprietary platform such as from Microsoft. "We basically made a cost decision," said Ray Villeneuve, MonoSphereâs president and chief executive officer (CEO). Open source software also helps Fonality Inc. undercut larger competitors in telecommunications, said Chris Lyman, co-founder and CEO. In January Azure invested $5 million in Fonality, a provider of IP-PBX (Internet Protocol-private branch exchange) telephone systems for small and medium-size businesses. Lyman got the idea for the business when he first launched Fonality. The company was originally intended to be a residential VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service provider. He balked at receiving a quote for $15,000 for a mere 5-phone office IP-PBX from Avaya Inc. "I said, 'That's our new business,'" said Lyman, and changed Fonality's business model to selling IP-PBX systems. Fonality's IP-PBX offering is based on the Asterisk open source program for telephony management. Developing proprietary call management products on top of Asterisk enables Fonality to offer IP-PBX systems for smaller companies at about a quarter of the cost for systems from companies like Cisco Systems Inc. and Avaya. Asked whether he's worried that they will also develop open source products, Lyman responded, "They better hurry because open source is about to eat their lunch." Red Hat sees the open source trend as not simply moving up the software stack, but growing in all directions, said Scott Crenshaw, general manager of Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. Crenshaw sees a second wave of open source innovation in 2007 as virtualization and service-oriented architecture, which enable operation of an IT infrastructure dynamically, become open sourced. "The goal isnât just to move up the stack," he said. "The real goal is to fundamentally change the economics of IT once again."