OStatic

When Codice recently released its parallel development tool, Plastic SCM 2.0, it promised to offer a more efficient way for engineers to create applications in a development environment where increased collaboration among geographically dispersed team members often means decreased efficiency. Although Plastic SCM is commercial software with a varied pricing structure, Codice uses some open source tools to develop its products. CEO Pablo Santos feels strongly about giving back to the community, so Codice is making its new tool available to open source project leaders at no charge. I caught up with Santos this week to ask him more about Plastic and what it takes to qualify for a free license:

According to a talk by Benchmark Capital's Rob Bearden at this week's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), the nature of open source business models are changing. He says open source companies should strive to become the enterprise standard in their market space in order to effectively monetize their commodities. He also notes that if companies are willing to embrace the idea of making money off their open source projects, then they might be rewarded with an infusion of venture capital cash.

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.

By Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

I was having lunch with Kelly Herrell, the CEO of Vyatta (one of our portfolio companies) and he gave me a great quote on why the momentum of open source software is impossible to fight. Kelly said, ﾓCompetitors can try to lock the front door of an enterprise and effectively stop traditional software vendors from entering the building, but it is impossible to stop free bits from coming in over the network.ﾔ

The open source community has been suspicious of Microsoft for years - and often, one must admit, with good reason. But when the company does something that appears to actually benefit open source, it's worth noting that too.

One such move is the partnership, announced today, between Microsoft and major European open source integrator Sourcesense.

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.

At the last conference of developers using open source tools I attended, I noticed two things: everyone had a laptop, and the overwhelming majority of those laptops were made by Apple. This situation is hardly unusual--MacBooks are endemic in many corners of the open source community.

But why? Surely developers using open source tools would be better served by running on open source from the ground up, rather than paying for a proprietary operating system.

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.....

If you're intrigued by what you've heard about open source applications and want to see for yourself what the fuss is about, you might be concerned about getting in over your head or doing irreparable harm to your computer. While that fear is understandable, there are some ways to safely experiment with open source apps, without putting your system in danger. Once you get your feet wet, you'll wonder what you were ever worried about.