Commercial Open Source Software

Florian Mueller - the EU campaigner involved in the software patents war - a couple of months ago talking about the Sun-MySQL merger called IBM a “false friend of open source”, but when I asked for more details he told me to wait.

Today he pointed me to his new foss patents blog entry reporting IBM has concerns about unauthorized use of proprietary IBM information by TurboHercules contributors.

Roger Bowler - CEO of TurboHercules, the company behind the mainframe emulator distributed under the Q Public license - asked IBM to consider adding such intellectual property to the IBM “non-assertion” pledge to the open source community.

Is there any chance that IBM would consider that?

Read more at The Register and at Dana Blankenhorn’s blog.

Now that the European Commission has approved the Oracle/Sun merger, while waiting Larry Ellison’s webcast about Oracle + Sun strategy update, I asked again Florian Mueller to share his opinion on Commission’s clearance of the deal.
Continue reading ‘EU Oracle Sun Investigation: Florian Mueller’s Comments the Day After the EU Deal’s Clearance’

On the 3rd of September the European Commission has decided to conduct a phase two inquiry, which includes forwarding surveys to Oracle’s competitors and customers as well as organizing “crowded“ private hearings.

While lobbyists of both sides are arguing to convince the EC that the deal may - or may not - limit competition in the database market, Monty Widenius asks hecklers for help to save mySQL, and Oracle makes commitments.

Florian Mueller - known EU campaigner and strategist, involved also in the software patents war - shared with me some of his current ideas, and I took the chance to speculate around the events.

Continue reading ‘EU Oracle-Sun Investigation: Hobbyists and Hecklers at Work’