Commercial Open Source Software

Opengear, a leading provider of next-generation console server solutions, yesterday announced its record order bookings, largely due to its (open source) channel, according to a report.

Opengear generating 75 percent of its revenue via partners, recently has put in place a very aggressive partnering program offering channel partners 25% margins, to further speed out-of-band management solutions sales.

Todd Rychecky, VP of Sales at Opengear, told me more about the company, and how power management and an open source approach to console servers has helped Opengear achieve record sale.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Console Servers: Opengear goes well and emphasises Channel Importance’

Coverity - a company specialized in software integrity products and testing services - today announced the publication of application architecture data from over 2,500 popular open source software projects on www.scan.coverity.com.

All data is provided as an extension of Coverity’s work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with a Creative Commons license, and individual developers and open source vendors can freely benefit from it.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Quality: Application Architecture Data from Over 2,500 Projects Made Available’

Mårten Gustaf Mickos - formerly MySQL CEO and now open source strategist at Sun until the end of Sun’s fiiscal 3rd quarter 2009 - and Ulf Michael Videnius (aka Monty) - MySQL co-founder and CTO, now driving the development of Maria, the new storage engine Maria - both quit Sun Microsystems.

Continue reading ‘MySQL Open Source Heroes Leave Sun’

In such a down market, raising $12m with Balderton Capital and get Bernard Liautaud, founder and CEO of Business Object, on board is a testimony of the fact that some VCs keep investing in open source companies.

Marc Brandsma, a Partner at Chausson Finance who advised Talend on its three rounds of funding, yesterday twittered about the deal, and I asked him few question about his personal story with the company, and why he thinks that Talend is a great company.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Investments: Talend’s Third Round, News from an Insider’

Renato Brunetta, Italian Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, two days ago disclosed his plan for Innovation. Open Source is not mentioned, as well as there is no mention of cloud computing.

The Italian e-gov plan is contained in two power-point presentations, and seems not taking in any consideration the most up-to-date trends in the ICT sector.

Continue reading ‘Open Source e-Government? No, thank you! by Renato Brunetta’

In a major victory for free speech online, the federal District Court in Philadelphia on March 22 issued a sweeping rejection of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), and a broad endorsement of the “user empowerment” approach to protecting children online.

Read the full article, and the CDT press release.

In its first day of availability OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been downloaded 390.000 times in the world, 32.000 of which in Italy!

PLIO, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association created an alternative source for downloads.

Comparing Firefox and OpenOffice.org downloads, OpenOffice.org 3.0 in its first day in Italy has moved much more bytes (4,7TeraBytes), roughly corresponding to 580,000 Firefox’s downloads, while during the Firefox Guiness World Record “only” 320,000 downloads were actually done.

Well done OpenOffice.org!

Post Scrittum: If you want to know more read also “This is not a Guinness, but is definitely a world record”

Technorati Tags: PLIO, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Guiness World Record

Updates from the Open Source Census, the survey launched in April by OpenLogic to collect quantitative data on the use of open source software.

Up today 2,181 machines have been scanned with OSS Discovery, discovering over 767 unique open source packages and nearly 300,000 open source package inm    stallations. founding on average 57 unique packages per enterprise.

Stormy Peters, now Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation, in the press release talking about how open source software compares across different operating systems says:

 As expected, Linux (an open source operating system) had the most with an average of 87 instances of open source found per scanned system. FreeBSD (also open source) was a close second at 81, but Mac wasn’t far behind with 75. Judging by the large number of Macs seen at open source conferences like OSCON and LinuxWorld, there are probably a lot of Mac users who are open source fans.

Windows, although not open source, still had a respectable amount of installed open source software, with an average of 39 instances per scanned system.

I suspect that the average Mac user is not an open source enthusiast, likely respondents belong to the OSCON and Linuxworld crowds. I would definitely be more interested in reading surveys run in broader audiences, though.

Register anonymously to the census, if interested.

Technorati Tags: open census, open source usage, StormyPeters

The GNU project yesterday celebrated the 25th anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

Happy Birthday Richard! by peribanyez

The Free Software Foundation after “Defective by Design“, the brilliant campaign launched to protect our digital freedoms, did a great move managing to bring Fry on the free software board. He generously donated his time to the cause of free software.

Well done, and happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: free software, FSF, Defective by design, happy birthday, StephenFry

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based IT management and network monitoring solution, is getting momentum in financial services environments.

Mary Knox of Gartner Research, says that the adoption of OSS is most notable in the financial sector because “they are impacted by escalating transaction volumes and data processing requirements as well as cost pressures”.

I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to tell me if his experience confirms Mary’s ideas on why adoption is arising in the financial sector.

Earlier this year, GroundWork conducted a survey of the GroundWork Monitor user community, including both users of the free, Community Edition and the subscription-based Professional and Enterprise versions. There were 361 completed surveys, a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

One of the questions asked was “Please indicate the importance of the following attributes of open source software when evaluating systems management technologies.” In order of ranking, the top answers were:

1. Continuity of technology support over time
2. Access to a wide community of experts
3. Ability to combine OSS tools together more easily
4. Less expensive
5. Higher quality product
6. Easier to customize
7. Avoiding vendor lock-in
8. More secure code
9. Access to the source code
10. Compliance with organizational mandates to use OSS

I agree with Davids saying that the cost savings doesn’t appear to be the most important factor, since commercial and extensive support sounds definitely more interesting to customers (along with integrating different OSS tools together).

How about the percentage of your subscriber base upgrading (nearly 30%)?

While GroundWork does have an increasing number of customers who use GroundWork Monitor Enterprise from the very beginning, the upgrade percentage is a reflection of customers who have moved from either GroundWork Monitor Community Edition or GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. These are deployments that are expanding their use of GroundWork Monitor, looking to add some of the capabilities GroundWork Monitor Enterprise can offer. Namely, support for distributed topologies, standby servers for high availability, or extended network management functions. GroundWork’s largest deployments are now above 10,000 managed servers, split across multiple geographic locations.

Thank you David, I see the increase include also customers upgrading from GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, and not only users becoming customers. Even if you didn’t find yet the philosopher’s stone I believe that running similar surveys can help Groundowork and other open source firms to better understand your market.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, groundwork, open source monitoring