OStatic

In the wake of Microsoft's announcement of new openness and interoperability initiatives, market researchers at Gartner are warning open source developers to tread carefully. In particular, a report from Gartner warns that underlying patents could create litigation risks if open source developers decide to play fast and loose with the documentation and APIs that Microsoft is making available. Are the warnings to be taken seriously?

Is the open source community too clubbish for its own good? Several thought pieces Iﾒve seen recently got me to thinking that this might be the case, at least in terms of relevance to businesses. Dominic Sartorio makes a good case that open sourcers are increasingly balkanizing, instead of pursuing multilateral approaches that could increase adoption and help the growth of commercial open source efforts. Meanwhile, recent comments from Obsidian Systemsﾒ director Anton de Wet suggest that open source needs a whole new breed of business matchmakers to speed adoption from reluctant companies. Is the whole business outreach program in need of an overhaul?

Last week Novell released version 1.9 of the Mono open source .NET framework as well as a new IDE called Monodevelop. The newest version of Mono now supports a number of the advanced features found in Microsoftﾒs .NET 3.0 framework.

While Mono and Novell, which sponsors the project, have been much maligned by various factions within the open source community, the overall impact Mono could have on Microsoft and the open source community could in fact be large.

It's not every day that a Microsoft executive as highly placed as senior vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel Brad Smith shows up at an open source conference, but he made an appearance at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week. I enjoyed the title of InfoWorld's summary of his visit: Microsot's Brad Smith Tries to Make Nice with Open Source Community.

Making nice was probably part of his motivation, but there's more to it. Especially after a huge fine from the EU, Microsoft needs to take concrete steps to work more closely with open sourcers. Also, people keep missing how Microsoft's proposed Yahoo deal would force it to embrace open source.

As the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco gets underway this week, the tech publication is posting a series of interesting transcripts from roundtable discussions on open source topics. The roundtables include a number of well-known pundits, including CNet writer Matt Asay, Bruce Perens (credited by many as coining the term open source), Sam Ramji (senior director of platform technology at Microsoft), Zack Urlocker (vice president of products at MySQL) and many others. Much of the talk surrounds the trend toward commercialization of open source products.

Late last month Microsoft received a tentative slap in the face when the ISO\IEC didnﾒt approve Microsoftﾒs OOXML (Open Office XML) format as an ISO standard. This came as a bit of a surprise to industry analysts as Microsoft has been lobbying hard to get its Office file format approved.

Late last year the head of the working group handling Microsoftﾒs application at the ISO accused the company of stacking his group and interfering in ISO business.

Looking to start a wiki? Socialized Software has an interesting discussion of Deki Wiki, reported to be ultra-simple to use.....Attorneys at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) have published an analysis of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (see our story below), cautioning that it offers FOSS developers no real protection. See The Inquirer's take on it.....Web Worker Daily has a look at mind-mapping, brainstorming software, including good input from readers, and a look at the open source application FreeMind.