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tecosystems » Open Source Bits and Pieces
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In retrospect, however, this is a logical choice given the needs of Chrome OS. Portage, which was the first package management system I used, offers very fine grained control of the build process, allowing you to easily compile for different chipsets, optimizations and so on.
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Sam Ramji, who spearheaded the open source efforts at Microsoft and currently with Sonoa Systems, has joined the board of Mindtouch Inc. (Disclaimer: Mindtouch is a Diversity Limited client). Mindtouch is a leading vendor in the collaboration space offering both open source and cloud version of their product. They have a mission to support open standards and Sam Ramji’s expertise on the board will help them in their mission. Congratulations to Mindtouch on this news. (more…)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Feb
12
Image via CrunchBase
I am a strong supporter of Open Source Software and a proponent of the importance of open source in cloud computing. It is my strong opinion that open source will empower the customers giving them access to the software even after the company behind the product goes out of business. In this regard, I have even called Open Source as a SaaS endgame. Even though Open Source plays a predominant role in empowering the customers, there are some vendors who use open source as a pure marketing ploy. These vendors use open source to entice users to their product and as soon as they gain reasonable traction, they stop supporting the open source version of the product. (more…)
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tecosystems » Facebook Rolls Their Own PHP: What HipHop Means
Grady offers an interesting take on how a third party can monetize Facebook’s HipHop project.
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History indicates, then, that HipHop could easily be supported, on a for profit basis, by a third party. Who might the logical candidate be? Well, why not Zend? They know the runtime as well or better than any other third party, leaving them presumably well positioned to understand how the code can – and can’t – be translated to C++. They have existing support agreements in place with many of the potential HipHop users. So what if they didn’t author the project? The market is littered with companies supporting products written by others.
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Open Source Clouds On The Rise — Government Clouds — InformationWeek
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On Selling Exceptions to the GNU GPL – Free Software Foundation
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Seeking Profit in Open-Source Search Software – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
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This setup has a boil-in-the-bag flavor because the software has already done the hard part: it found a devoted audience. All the entrepreneurs have to do is try to cash in on that proven popularity through support contracts and some marketing polish.
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The case in favor of the open source enterprise database | IT Systems News – Betanews
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One might argue that MySQL (ignoring the pending acquisition for a moment) is already mainstream, that the database has been commoditized, and there is a viable open source alternative to the dominant vendor. Not so. MySQL never challenged a major enterprise DBMS — nor did it try to. The success of MySQL stems from the fact that it filled a market need that was largely being ignored by commercial vendors.
The low-end, low-cost database market had no incumbent, and MySQL quickly filled the void giving developers a quick and easy tool for quickly creating Web-based applications that were easy to deploy and to administer. MySQL is developer-friendly and is geared for programmers who typically build client-rich applications using Ajax, PHP, or Perl.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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I have been advocating my theory on Open Source as a SaaS endgame for sometime now. My recent post on the topic quoting the example of Storytlr has kcik started a round of debate in the web. Matthew Aslett of 451 Group pointed out that releasing the SaaS application as Open Source doesn’t guarantee its success. Serdar Yegulalp of Information Week agrees with Matthew’s assertion and I also agree that any open source project (for that matter, any software) needs a vibrant vendor or developer community to succeed. In response to Matthew’s post, I clarified where I am coming from. My argument is that Open Source licensing of a SaaS application going down will ensure the business continuity of the users of the application. The author and Enterprise Irregular, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, pointed out to the SaaS Bill of Rights which states that when a SaaS provider goes out of business, their customers would be to receive a virtual machine image with the software configured as they have in the multitenant instance and with their data. This is definitely a good idea but, as I pointed out to Nenshad, the customer will be left in the lurch if something goes wrong with the software installed using VM. With an open source solution, the user has the option to hire a developer to fix any issues that arises later on. (more…)
I recently revisited my “open source as a SaaS endgame” theory quoting a news about another web app releasing their code under an open source license before shutting down the shop. As I do with many of my posts here in Cloud Ave, I was wearing my evangelist hat and it resulted in the crux of the post getting hyped up a bit. It appears to have given an impression that I am predicting the SaaS app to flourish if it had an open source endgame.
Matthew Aslett, of 451 Group who writes the CAOS Theory blog, disputes this and makes a very important point.
with open source there is life after death – if there is a committed group of developers prepared to put in the effort to keep the project alive. For many open source projects that’s a pretty big “if”.
Many societies believe in the idea of Afterlife. As far as the human life is concerned, I do not believe in this supernatural concepts. However, when it comes to software “lives”, I believe in eternity (a life without death). I believe that a software can live eternally without the death faced by the lesser mortals, by adopting open source licensing model. A proprietary software dies mostly with the company or with the ones that acquires the original company. However, open source software, even if it is tied to a particular company, does not die with the company. It is usually cloned or forked and developed by volunteers or another company interested in solving the problems for a niche group of customers. As long as there is an itch in the hands of at least a handful of users, open source software will continue to live. Even if no one is interested in a particular open source software, it will continue to live in one of the open source repositories waiting to be consumed by some soul sometime in the future. This is clearly not the case with proprietary software. In short, my argument is that if the software is released as open source, it can still be useful even after the developer(s) or company behind the software vanish in thin air. (more…)
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The beauty of Open Source is that the customers are not tied or locked into a single vendor. For example, customers can use any Linux distribution and take support from third party support services companies. Plus, anyone can take the source code of any open source software, do some customizations and offer it as a clone with their own branding. CentOS is an example of such a strategy. It is also possible for companies to take a particular OS distribution and fork from it to develop their own Linux distribution and bundle services on top of it. Canonical and Ubuntu can be considered as an example for this. (more…)
Nov
21
Libcloud Joins Apache Software Foundation Incubator
Posted by
krishnan in
Data Portability, Federated Clouds, Open Clouds, Open Source, Open Standards on
11 21st, 2009 |
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Image Credit: Linode.com
Libcloud, the open source python library released by the vendor Cloudkick, has taken the first steps to be part of Apache Software Foundation by joining the ASF Incubator. Libcloud offers a single programming interface for apps to access different cloud providers including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, vCloud, Terramark, etc.. Even without any standards, Libcloud can offer interoperability between various Cloud providers. (more…)
- Image via CrunchBase
Yesterday, DeWitt Clinton of Open Web Foundation announced that Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) is now available for use by the developers
The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.