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The GPL vs. Skype: Open source's bedrock license wins again

Groklaw is reporting that Skype has given up on its appeal against a lower German court's ruling that the GPL is enforceable, thank you very much. Skype had considered appealing on the grounds that the GPL inhibits (???) free trade, but a few minutes of serious reflection must have caused ...

SourceForge embraces OpenID

A great many open-source projects and companies have started on SourceForge.net. There's currently about 176,000 registered projects and 1.8 million registered users. Sure, not all of them are active or essential software, but if you want to build an open-source project, it can be a great ...

Do we need to protect open source from the cloud?

I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously. However, given ...

Google plugs open-source security holes with oCERT

Google is lending its security expertise to the open-source community to help plug security holes with its oCERT team. While much remains to be seen as to how successfully or actively oCERT will operate, it's a welcome addition to the open-source world by Google.

oCERT, short for the open-source ...

OLPC's capitulation to Windows: A community failure?

Is Nicholas Negroponte's capitulation to Windows last month due largely to a lack of open-source community involvement in the One Laptop Per Child project?

That's what Groklaw is suggesting--following a post by free software guru Richard Stallman.

According to Groklaw:

OLPC hoped for contribution from the community to its interface, Sugar, but this has not happened much. Partly that's because OLPC has not structured its development so as to reach out to the community for help--which means, when viewed in constructive terms, that OLPC can obtain more contribution by starting to do this.

Basically, Negroponte's decision to embrace Windows comes down to a belief that when community fails, default to whatever proprietary vendor makes the best interface. (If this is the case, Negroponte would have done well to choose the Mac's interface, but I digress...)

This is a weak-kneed, wrong-headed way for Negroponte--the founder and chairman of OLPC--to attempt to resolve the problem. It will only serve to perpetuate the very problem OLPC was designed to solve, as Groklaw writes:

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OpenOffice 3 beta: More compatibility, new features

Sun Microsystems has released the first beta for OpenOffice.org 3 for Windows and Mac. The new version of OpenOffice, which is a popular open-source competitor to Microsoft Office, looks to offer users improvements on every component from interface to features to behavior.

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Microsoft doesn't need open source

What do you do when you have billions of dollars in the bank and more money coming in each day than most companies can score in their corporate lifetimes?

You probably don't open source your software.

That's the conclusion that Mary Jo Foley and I arrived at following a long conversation at Sun's JavaOne Conference about what Microsoft should do about open source. It's nice to think of Microsoft fully joining the open-source community, but it's unlikely. The company has billions of reasons to make feints at open source to appease its critics while holding a proprietary line to appease its shareholders.

It's not pretty, but it's reality.

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Closing an open-source deal through your systems integrator

In an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.

Crippling this competition--so tempting on the surface--tends to cripple all the benefits that come from it, including facilitated adoption of the software, and lower sales and marketing costs.

The question, then, is how to foster unfettered adoption of one's open-source software while still preventing would-be partners from undermining one's own ability to profit from the software.

Over the past two and a half years, my company, Alfresco, has struggled with this tension and has, I believe, come up with some winning strategies and policies. I share them here, in case they're helpful to you in your own efforts to build an open-source business.

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Sun launches bundled OpenSolaris in latest push for developer support

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems gave developers a gift at the CommunityOne developer conference on Monday--a packaged version of OpenSolaris with a new logo. Now, Sun is hoping developers will return the favor by creating applications to run on the open-source version of its Solaris operating system and thus ...