Open Source Delivers

Although the cloud industry buzz has continued from last week, this week also saw new open source announcements. Certainly the most talked about news was Google’s Open Networking Summit announcement that it has updated its internal networks with an open source technology called OpenFlow. Read more about OpenFlow and other open source stories from this [...]

I just returned from POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina.  For a regional open source event, attendance at 700 was pretty sweet (and so was the Southern hospitality!).  Conference attendees range from large commercial organizations to universities to students.  While there are many developer events on the “left coast” there are few [...]

In my posting about a DoD meeting I attended concerning open source acquisition, I mention “discussion about a couple of ‘corner cases’ where certain licenses had clauses, which could conflict with federal law.” There were two that came up in the meeting: one having to do with disclosure of confidential information and the other an [...]

Nowadays it seems everyone is engaged in social activities through Facebook, Google+, Twitter and an onslaught of other social offerings. Most of these offerings are proprietary, managed by large commercial entities. And while they often propagate ‘open’ standards, integrating with or even building your own software environment on top of these is a daunting and often [...]

It was another week filled with open source announcements. HP, Hortonworks and Ford all made news with new open source offerings. Here are this week’s highlights: Ravi Mandalia wrote about the UK Cabinet Office Director of ICT Futures’s recent supporting statements about open source software, “Liam Maxwell: “Open Source is the Future Model for Delivering [...]

There was a lot of open source news this week! HP shared its roadmap for the WebOS release (it will be available by September under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (congrats to the 57% of you who correctly chose Apache in our poll!), the Android App Inventor was open sourced by Google and MIT and [...]

My team and I review tens of thousands of projects, their descriptions, their licenses and how they are referenced each year – it is our passion and our job.  As part of this work, I recently reviewed a set of data in Maven Central and noticed a plethora of different Apache Licenses… or, more precisely, [...]

This year, 2011, was one of the most active years in legal developments in FOSS. This activity reflects the increase in FOSS use: Laura Wurster of Gartner, noted in the Harvard Business Review blog that open source has hit a “strategic tipping point” this year with companies increasingly focused on using “open source” software for [...]

It’s the first week of 2012 and the open source world is starting the year off with a bang! Apache has launched Hadoop 1.0, Mozilla released the MPL 2.0 and NASA has started a new website to host their open source projects and encourage discussions around open source. Here is a sample of these stories [...]

With 2012 right around the corner, this Wrap Up takes a look back over the past year in open source news. There have been a lot of milestones in 2011: Linux celebrated its 20th birthday, Eclipse turned 10 and LibreOffice surpassed the 1 year mark. The tech world grieved the loss of a visionary and [...]