OStatic

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?

Word is expected Wednesday on whether Microsoft's OOXML will be approved as an international standard, but there are charges of voting irregularities.....Mac OS X and Windows Vista fell easily in a money-backed hacking contest but Ubuntu was unscathed.....Adobe has released an alpha version of its AIR application for Linux, and is joining the Linux Foundation.....Does the world of open source need a new breed of business matchmakers to spread adoption?.....

Red Hat, a titan among Linux software companies, is out with strong quarterly numbers along with some commentary from new chief executive Jim Whitehurst. The New York Times referred to the positive financial performance as a welcome present for Whitehurst, but I really see it as proof of the efficacy of Red Hat's open source business model: Deliver strong products and get revenues from support.

Red Hat's quarterly sales rose 27 percent and earnings were above analysts' conencus estimates. The company is forecasting growth of 30 percent for the fiscal year that it just begun. How is the company putting all this together, and can it stay independent?

SearchEnterpriseLinux has a good interview with Sun Microsystems' Barton George about Sun's plans for open source and MySQL integration.....

As the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco winds down, it's worth looking in at the news out of the get-together. Lots of pundits were on hand, and the conference brought several new announcements.

Acquia representatives at OSBC said they are on track to deliver a value-added social publishing system named Carbon based on the Drupal open source content management system (OStatic is built on Drupal).

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.

Are negative U.S. socioeconomic factors working in favor of open source? Red Hat president/CEO Jim Whitehurst said at the Open Source Business Conference that overseas disdain for the U.S. is helping.....Likewise, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said on a panel this week that the weakening U.S. economy is benefitting open source.....CNet has an interesting report on how CBS Interactive is aggressively adopting open source.....A survey from OpenLogic says open source developers are motivated by both money and altruism.....

Do businesses necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars on network routers from giants such as Cisco? Vyatta, with the company tagline welcome to the dawn of open source networking, is challenging the idea with an open source network appliance for the small- and medium-sized (SMB) business market. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is a small appliance that uses the company's Linux-based applications. Pricing starts at $697, with products from Cisco and others costing thousands more, but the jury's out on whether businesses will trust the core of their hardware/software network infrastructure to 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.

Does widespread commercialization of open source software create unique pressures on those doing open source projects?.....

Is Apple stonewalling open source developers?.....

Check out some interesting predictions about the future of open source from the Open Source Business Conference.....

ProcessMaker and KnowledgeTree, both open source document management solutions, are working together in a new mashup.....