Commercial Open Source Software

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’

Sugar Labs - the no-profit foundation behind the sugar educational software platform running on the OLPC - joined the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board.

The GNOME Foundation after welcoming on board the Mozilla Foundation, and more recently Motorola and Google, keeps bringing on board third parties.

Reading the press release it looks like if the GNOME Foundation wants to explore the economics of technological clubs.

Continue reading ‘GNOME Foundation: Open Source Collaboration at Work!’

OpenOffice.org reached the ten millions downloads mark, a dramatic success that inspires friends and irritates enemies.

Despite converting users into customers seems still difficult for Sun, IBM started to recruit partners and raising PR interest. Savio Rodrigues, famous open source blogger and IBM employee, seems to prefer Microsoft Office 2007, just as Luis Villa does.

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org, Today and Tomorrow’