Going where angels fear to tread, I wrote in Infoworld today a summary of the “Is the GPL in decline” debate and come to the conclusion that the use of the GPL remains strong and growing but the business game that was extensively played with in peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since.
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I updated and expanded my speculation about why Microsoft started “Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.” – sadly without any help from them as all their many evangelists and PR people were too shy to talk to me. Read the results on InfoWorld.
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If your perception of open source is that it’s all about volunteers and hobbyists working selflessly for the betterment of humanity, the cloud computing market today will be shattering your illusions. I explain more in my article today on InfoWorld.
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Talking to people about the Oracle-Google case which comes to court on April 16th, I realised much of the background knowledge that explains things is lost to the current generation of developers. My article on InfoWorld this week looks at that background as well as a possible bad consequence of the case for open source developers.
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My column on InfoWorld today connects the dots of the pragmatic value of software freedom to the CIO and the success of Red Hat. Open source delivers cost saving via freedom, not just by being cheap on licenses.
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The enterprise IT world is coming to grips with a new buzz-TLA; “BYOD”. It stands for Bring Your Own Device and considers the way employees are bringing their own laptops, tables and smart-phones to work and using them in the overlap of life and work. There’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.
My experiences at Sun Microsystems suggest BYOD is an opportunity waiting to be grasped for enterprise IT executives — a move to management by standards rather than centrally purchased company desktops. It means selecting a basket of server-supported standard capabilities (IMAP, LDAP, PDF, HTML5, ODF, and so on) and telling people that anything that works securely with those standards is acceptable. It also offers the prospect of letting people use open source software that works with those standards, rather than having to buy everyone the same expensive proprietary software and instantly-depreciating hardware, then manage them expensively until they are legacy systems.
You can read my thoughts on this phenomenon – and its potential impact on open source on the desktop – on InfoWorld today.
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Why does a successful entrepreneur like Mark Cuban hate software patents so much? Surely they are just the sort of business tool he would value? I explain why in my Friday column on InfoWorld today.
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You may have spotted two posts by me on InfoWorld in the US recently (one about LibreOffice and one about OIN). I’m pleased to say that I was approached by them to take over the widely-read “Open Sources” column. Naturally I accepted their proposal and I hope to write every Friday for them. Thanks to Savio Rodrigues for the excellent work he has done to build the readership there – those will be big shoes to fill. All story ideas welcome!
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Are you safer from software patents today, or more at risk? The news that the Open Invention Network (OIN) has extended the definition of “Linux” so that more software is covered by its patent pool is good news, no question. But the new definition also includes carve-outs that put all Linux developers on notice that Phillips and Sony reserve the right to sue over virtualization, search, user interfaces and more – including Android, which is conspicuously absent from the list. Seems consumer devices powered by Linux are in the cross-hairs. Read about it in my column today on InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld, Patents | Tagged: Linux, Open Invention Network, Patent | 3 Comments »
Following on from my blog post at ComputerWorldUK, InfoWorld in the US asked me if I would write a column for them about LibreOffice. I gathered together the rather large number of positive news releases from the community in February and found a very positive story writing itself. You can find it at InfoWorld Open Sources today.
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