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Asking the right questions of open source
,----[ Quote ]
| BusinessWeek also states that Red Hat “has yet to crack $1 billion in sales,
| despite proffering Linux for well over a decade” and points out that MySQL
| took 13 years to go from start-up to $1bn acquisition, adding that “many
| investors won’t wait that long.”
|
| This is definitely a ‘glass-half empty’ look at the world. Although I have
| previously noted that open source vendors need time to thrive I believe the
| VCs that understand open source software are well-aware of this and have
| placed their bets accordingly.
`----
http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/08/18/asking-the-right-questions-of-open-source/
Sifting open-source wheat from the chaff
,----[ Quote ]
| BusinessWeek is asking an important question of open-source companies:
| despite the rapid growth of some open-source businesses (e.g., Red Hat,
| Novell Suse, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and others), it's still very much an open
| question as to whether open source can deliver outsized returns for
| investors.
|
| [...]
|
| However you choose to do it, you need to be looking three to four years out
| when building your open-source business, and providing for a life after a
| pure support model. That is, if you want to deliver the returns your
| investors expect.
`----
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10018877-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Yesterday:
Forbes rewrites the history of open source
,----[ Quote ]
| In the name of defining jargon, Forbes this week tries a complete rewrite of
| open source history.
|
| This is accomplished by someone named Dan Woods, who calls his company
| Evolved Media. (He might want to rename it Unevolved Medium.)
|
| Woods does this by ignoring Eric Raymond’s ground-breaking The Cathedral and
| the Bazaar, making Richard Stallman the father of something he frankly
| detests.
|
| Stallman personally lectured me on this when I first took this beat, so I’m
| not getting this from examining fossils or old newspaper clippings. It’s from
| the horse’s mouth.
|
| [...]
|
| Woods, for some reason, insists on calling open source “commercial open
| source,” when the whole idea of open source was that it would be commercial.
|
| This way, I suppose Forbes‘ editors get to twit the hippies and claim that
| open source is no big deal.
|
| In fact, open source is a very big deal.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2795
Recent:
No Justification Need
,----[ Quote ]
| What's at the forefront of my crabbiness is the almost-complete capture of
| the Open Source Business Conference's news cycle by Brad Smith's presence at
| that conference left me wondering who else was even there this week, other
| than Smith, Matt Asay, and a few pundits and luminaries. In a nicely done
| spin for the media, OSBC suddenly became about how Microsoft braved the
| lion's den, instead of the real progress a lot of companies are making in
| open source development and business.
`----
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2008-03-28-020-26-OP-SW
All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft's Thunder
,----[ Quote ]
| The best response I've seen was from Jonathan Corbet at a panel at the Open
| Source Business Conference in San Francisco last May. Corbet is a Linux
| kernel developer himself and executive editor of the Linux Weekly News.
|
| "I feel I've been called a thief," he said levelly during a panel at the
| event, and pointed out that Microsoft was one of the companies that had
| patented "thousands of trivial functions ... There's no way to write a
| nontrivial program that can't be claimed to infringe on someone's patents."
`----
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/message_to_brad.html
Brad Smith continues its FUD spreading, wants to tax RedHat
,----[ Quote ]
| Brad Smith continues its FUD spreading, wants to tax RedHat. The only
| solution for Microsoft to tax linux is software patents. Microsoft wants to
| render GPL free software non-free. The message is clear.
|
| [...]
|
| Microsoft needs to be sued more often, because in their current position they
| still believe too much in a patent system where no software developer has
| ever used a patent to write a computer program.
`----
http://www.digitalmajority.org/forum/t-49513/brad-smith-continues-its-fud-spreading-wants-to-tax-redhat
Microsoft's dilemma: The importance of the downstream
,----[ Quote ]
| To work within the open-source community, which Microsoft will absolutely
| have to do if it wants to remain relevant in the 21st century of the Web,
| Microsoft must stop polluting the downstream with patent encumbrances.
| Period. Full stop. Microsoft is not alone in being threatened by open source.
| Everyone is to a greater or lesser extent, including open-source companies.
| MySQL's biggest competitor is not Oracle. It is fee-free use of MySQL. Ditto
| for other open-source companies.
`----
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9899201-16.html
Feeling the heat at Microsoft
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| A couple of years ago you reiterated that IBM was Microsoft's biggest
| competitor and you said not just on the business side, but overall. If I ask
| you who is Microsoft's biggest competitor now, who would it be?
|
| Ballmer: Open...Linux. I don't want to say open source. Linux, certainly have
| to go with that.
`----
http://www.news.com/Feeling-the-heat-at-Microsoft/2008-1012_3-6232458.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc
Is Microsoft Hijacking Open Source?
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| What really worries me is what looks like an emerging pattern in Microsoft's
| behaviour. The EU agreement is perhaps the first fruit of this, but I predict
| it will not be the last. What is happening is that Microsoft is effectively
| being allowed to define the meaning of “open source” as it wishes, not as
| everyone else understands the term. For example, in the pledge quoted above,
| an open source project is “not commercially distributed by its
| participants” - and this is a distinction also made by Kroes and her FAQ.
|
| In this context, the recent approval of two Microsoft licences as
| officially “open source” is only going to make things worse. Although I felt
| this was the right decision – to have ad hoc rules just because it's
| Microsoft would damage the open source process - I also believe it's going to
| prove a problem. After all, it means that Microsoft can rightfully point to
| its OSI-approved licences as proof that open source and Microsoft no longer
| stand in opposition to each other. This alone is likely to perplex people who
| thought they understood what open source meant.
|
| [...]
|
| What we are seeing here are a series of major assaults on different but
| related fields – open source, open file formats and open standards. All are
| directed to one goal: the hijacking of the very concept of openness. If we
| are to stop this inner corrosion, we must point out whenever we see wilful
| misuse and lazy misunderstandings of the term, and we must strive to make the
| real state of affairs quite clear. If we don't, then core concepts like “open
| source” will be massaged, kneaded and pummelled into uselessness.
`----
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1003745
Let's Make a Deal - The MS-EU Settlement
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| The patent part is terrible. Worse than terrible. They are not blocked from
| offering patent deals, only constrained as to how much to charge for a
| license, which is not and never was the issue. So they'll beef up those
| initiatives, I'm sure. However, the good part is that they were compelled to
| separate the patent license offer out and make it optional. Thanks, but no
| thanks.
|
| [...]
|
| I'm guessing Microsoft lawyers are high fiving each other, having snatched an
| important victory from utter and total defeat. The rest is excellent, of
| course, and in no way do I mean to detract from the hard work and persistence
| that the EU Commission has shown. However, I don't think they understand how
| seriously broken the US patent system is currently, and how easy it is to
| abuse it, or they don't feel it's their job to fix the US problems, or how
| central patents are to Microsoft's current strategy against FOSS.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071022114731199
OSI approves Microsoft licenses
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| For now though it’s all eyes on Microsoft to see what the company will do
| next, and in many ways this will be more interesting than whether or not the
| OSI approved the licenses. For reasons that were never fully explained,
| Microsoft wanted open source licenses.
|
| Now that it’s got them, will it use them to release significant code to the
| community?
`----
http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2007/10/16/osi-approves-microsoft-licenses/
Do Microsoft's licenses stand a chance of OSI approval?
,----[ Quote ]
| the OSI has been actively trying to reduce license proliferation and it could
| be that Microsoft’s licenses are seen as too similar to existing licenses to
| warrant separate approval.
`----
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2007/07/do_microsofts_l.html
Microsoft Inches Closer to Open Source
,----[ Quote ]
| On the software side, Microsoft today announced a partnership with open
| source solution vendor SpikeSource to eventually certify all of SpikeSource's
| SpikeIgnited solutions on the Microsoft Windows platform.
|
| The move could make dozens of popular open source solutions available to
| Windows users in a fully supported manner. SpikeSource solutions include the
| gambit of content management, CRM and collaboration solutions. The first
| SpikeIgnited solution being made Windows-certified is the Drupal content
| management solution. Throughout the second half of 2007, SpikeSource plans on
| rolling out additional offerings.
`----
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3691071
Microsoft not so 'open' after all?
,----[ Quote ]
| Head of open-source group says more than half of licenses don't pass muster
|
| [...]
|
| Michael Tiemann, president of the non-profit Open Source Initiative, said
| that provisions in three out of five of Microsoft's shared-source licenses
| that restrict source code to running only on the Windows operating system
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| would contravene a fundamental tenet of open-source licenses as laid out by
| the OSI. By those rules, code must be free for anyone to view, use, modify as
| they see fit.
|
| [...]
|
| By his count, the OSI has rejected "two dozen" or so license applications for
| language that restricted the use or redistribution of software and its source
| code, even when the restrictions were written with what Tiemann
| called "moral" intent. For instance, the OSI has rejected license
| applications from Quakers and other pacifists who sought to prevent the use
| of software for weapons such as landmines.
|
| "I am highly sympathetic to that point of view," he said. "But the OSI is not
| in the business of legislating moral use. We allow all use, commercial or
| non-commercial, mortal or medical."
`----
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9028318&intsrc=news_ts_head
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