Open Source Delivers

Google’s Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge has dominated technology news all week. The tech giant formally declared that it will not sue any users, distributors or developers over certain patents associated with the MapReduce data processing model it developed (unless it is first attacked). This was an important step for the company to state its support [...]

I have been involved with the Future of Open Source survey as both part of the analyst team at 451 Research conducting the study, and as a collaborator and promoter with SugarCRM. This survey has, for many years, provided both research and vendor perspectives with great insights into real decision-maker outlooks on how open source [...]

Mozilla announced new developer preview phones for its upcoming Firefox mobile OS, while Canonical started recruiting the developer community in the creation of its core Ubuntu Phone apps. Here is the latest on new open source mobile operating systems and other highlights from the OSS world: Mozilla’s new preview phones for developers were covered in [...]

The holidays are over and a new year has begun, which means it’s time for (seemingly) every tech journalist and pundit to make their predictions for what 2013 will hold. Lucky for you, we’ve decided to turn this post into a crystal ball containing all the forecasts for the future. In the LinuxInsider article, “Top [...]

The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. During a recent webinar with Black Duck, we noted that FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by December 2012. In addition, a Dr. Dobbs’ survey in the third quarter of 2012 stated that more [...]

Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act 0f 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) (“TAA”). Open source software adoption by the US Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be [...]

About two years ago — more or less for my own amusement — I wrote a piece about weird licenses that had been uncovered by the Black Duck KnowledgeBase team. Clearly I was not the only one amused, as the blog went a bit viral and was ogled by over 60,001 other eyeballs (including that [...]

Imagine for a moment you’re the CIO of a Global 2000. You’re responsible for your company’s IT services and infrastructure, as well as how well technology investments support the overall mission of the business and its employees.  Your company has tens or hundreds of thousands of external customer relationships that depend on your systems, with [...]

This week’s open source news revolved mostly around the Linux Foundation and the two big events they were hosting: LinuxCon North America and (the first ever!) CloudOpen. From keynote coverage to new foundation members, Linux news was practically inescapable – we even published a live blog from the LinuxCon exhibit hall! To help you catch up, [...]

With all the excitement about the amazing feat of technology that sent Curiosity to Mars, we had to wonder: Would any of this be possible without open source?  We know some of the software used by NASA is open source, but how much?  What’s your best guess?