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Open Sources
How Chrome and Firefox aim to unseat IE
According to the latest Net Applications numbers, Internet Explorer stills hold 60 percent of the browser market, while Firefox is stuck at about 23 percent and Chrome has doubled its share over the past year to reach 7.5 percent. Yet the two open source contenders have a disproportionately large mindshare among smart business users -- and are taking distinctly different approaches to win hearts and minds.
For Google, the main selling point of Chrome is speed. Mozilla, on the other hand, is banking on Firefox's flexibility and functionality.
Should open source communities avoid contributor agreements?
Contributor agreements that aggregate the copyrights of open source code in favour of a single corporate sponsor are a sure sign of a community where one member has more rights than the rest. And equality is the key to success.
What Paul Allen and Larry Ellison have in common
At first sight, this extraordinary legal action against most of the digital world's leading lights might seem one of a kind:
What Paul Allen and Larry Ellison have in common
At first sight, this extraordinary legal action against most of the digital world's leading lights might seem one of a kind:
JavaScript enters the server room with Node.js
A browser mainstay for more than a decade, JavaScript has been gaining traction on the server side as of late, thanks to increasing developer interest in Node.js. This open source server-side framework allows Web developers to write event-driven JavaScript applications that run on Google's open source V8 JavaScript engine.
Gnu/Linux: Finally, it's really free software
Some ancient source code given away freely by Sun in 1984 turned out to have a non-free-software license all these years, upsetting the licensing purity of glibc and everything built with it.
This may come as a shock, but all Gnu/Linux distributions to date have been built with essential software under a license that clearly meets neither the open source definition nor the Free Software Foundations' requirements for a free software license. The tenacity of a Red Hat hacker has finally solved this problem for everyone, however, and I'm proud to have played a part, too.
The vendor-neutral cloud: How Red Hat could make it happen
Contrary to popular rumors, Red Hat's recent Webcast was not to announce an imminent acquisition. Red Hat instead laid out an ambitious cloud strategy, going as far as claiming that only two companies -- Microsoft and Red Hat itself -- are positioned to deliver an end-to-end cloud stack. However, the most important announcement from Red Hat may well be overshadowed by its comparison versus Microsoft Azure or its platform service plans.
Commercialization of volunteer-driven open source projects
In the open source software community, there's considerable nervousness about paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on its core software, a decision that has caused much debate in the Joomla community.
Enterprise Java: Oracle's real reason for suing Google?
By now you've read that Oracle has sued Google for patent and copyright infringement related to the Android platform. Google has responded that the claims are baseless and counter to the open source community movement. In all the hullabaloo, the press, pundits, Oracle, and Google seem to have ignored the impact on enterprise Java.
Here's why IT decision-makers shouldn't ignore the enterprise Java impact.
Oracle scorns open source: How to respond?
This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of U.S.
How companies can keep their programmers happy
Paul Graham describes himself as “an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer”. It's no coincidence that he puts “essayist” first, since it's probably how most people now know him, and he certainly is one of the finest programmer-investor-writers around.
He's just produced another of those gems, and it's well-worth reading:
IT executives and developers on open source collision course
Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond's LinuxCon keynote kicked off with the announcement that open source had crossed the IT adoption chasm. Hammond's data, drawn from five Forrester, Eclipse Foundation, and "Dr. Dobbs" surveys over the past two years, showed that nearly 80 percent of organizations are using open source software in IT development projects.
Linux Foundation makes enterprise open source boring
In the early days of free software, the struggle was just to get companies to try this new and rather unconventional approach, without worrying too much about how that happened. That typically meant programs entering by the backdoor, surreptitiously installed by in-house engineers who understood the virtues of the stuff -- and that it was easier to ask for forgiveness after the event than for permission before.
What SAP can teach you on how to adopt open source
SAP, arguably one of the remaining enterprise software vendors to accept and use open source in its products, recently made news by announcing a broader open source strategy. More important, SAP explained how it planned for the greater acceptance of open source components in its projects. Enterprise IT decision-makers can learn from SAP's approach to open source adoption.
Will Illumos bring OpenSolaris back to life?
Tuesday saw the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.
5 lessons for win-win open source projects
Lockheed Martin's newly open sourced social networking platform, Eureka Streams, has faced FUD when it should be received with open arms. IT decision-makers can learn important lessons from Lockheed Martin when evaluating whether to open-source an internal project.
OpenStack will not kill open core
Rackspace Hosting and NASA made headlines by announcing an open source cloud software project earlier this week. Some observed that OpenStack could be the beginning of the end for open-core business models for cloud infrastructure providers. IT decision makers are cautioned to ignore the predicted decline of open core and instead focus on selecting cloud technology that addresses business requirements.
Considering SugarCRM? Don't fall into the open source purity trap
SugarCRM's recent launch of Sugar 6 CRM raised the thorny "but is it open source" question yet again. The question puts too much weight on the accessibility of the product's source code or whether the product has a large enough user community. Current and prospective SugarCRM customers would do well to heed the lessons from the predicament OpenSolaris users now find themselves in and make the product selection based on your business needs, and not aspects such as access to the source code and size of the user community.
Considering SugarCRM? Don't fall into the open source purity trap
SugarCRM's recent launch of Sugar 6 CRM raised the thorny "but is it open source" question yet again. The question puts too much weight on the accessibility of the product's source code or whether the product has a large enough user community. Current and prospective SugarCRM customers would do well to heed the lessons from the predicament OpenSolaris users now find themselves in and make the product selection based on your business needs, and not aspects such as access to the source code and size of the user community.
Time to consider Ubuntu for your cloud needs?
Reports of Dell's decision to deliver Ubuntu-powered cloud infrastructure should motivate you to evaluate Ubuntu as an alternative to Red Hat in the cloud.