On the future of Open Source thought leadership |
| After over a decade of being in the shadow of the Free Software movement and 30 years of its inflexible dogmatic principles, disruptive new Open Source thought leadership is emerging that is truly able to compromise with the realistic needs of business and end-users without carrying the baggage of strict adherence to an ideology that is by definition a culture of exclusionRead more at blogs.zdnet.com |
96% of French Public Sector Using Open Source Says New Service |
| According to a French market survey, almost the entire public sector (96 %) is using open source. The most used applications are database management systems and content management systems. |
The major reason for using open source is that the products are mature, replied 77 % of the participants to the survey. The second most heard argument, at 67 %, is that open source offers independence from IT suppliers. Interoperability and the development of public policies are the reasons given by 48 and 43 % of the participants. |
The research firm says that furthermore, half of the respondents say that the current financial crisis is not a reason to switch to open source. However, 39 % think that it made it more of an option. In 2011, open source will take up less than 20 % of the IT budget of public sector institutes. Read more at www.egovmonitor.com |
Desktop Takes Back Seat at Linux Conference |
Leaders in the Linux community seemed resigned to the fact that Linux still hasn’t made headway in the desktop market, but they made it clear on Monday that their success in other markets, such as mobile, is at least as important. |
“I don’t know that it’s important that everyone or some large percentage of the user population is using Linux as a desktop,” said Ted Ts’o, chief technology officer for the Linux Foundation. |
Bob Sutor, vice president for open source and Linux in IBM’s software group, outlined what he sees as possible scenarios for desktop Linux in the years to come. One is that it just dies. “Or, we stop using desktops, so who cares,” he said. Read more at tech.yahoo.com |
What are the possibilities for an open source digital camera? How an open source camera will change photography |
Professor Marc Levoy plans to release a complete implementation for the camera in a year, a platform on which apps can be built. |
Already he has created software for the camera that does things no commercial camera can do, like extend its “dynamic range” so all distances are optimally lit, and enhance the resolution of videos with still images. Read more at blogs.zdnet.com |
IBM is its own open-source lab for social software |
Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they’ll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities. |
That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM’s vice president of social software, isn’t a “gimme,” but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes. Read more at news.cnet.com |
IT research firms tell us that open-source software continues to be adopted more broadly in the enterprise. But the cost savings anticipated by many users may not pan out — and it’s especially important that projects be well managed. |
Forecasts for open source are robust: IDC in July published a study predicting that worldwide revenue from open-source software will grow at a 22 percent compound annual rate to reach $8.1 billion by 2013. |
Zoho’s winning strategy: open source + cloud |
That’s the message I got from a conversation Friday with Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho, a leading competitor to Google Docs. According to Vegesna, the company–formerly known as AdventNet, now called Zoho Corp.–has been around for 13 years, and has always used free, but not necessarily open-source, software as part of its strategy. The company has released software under open-source licenses before, including the somewhat controversial vTiger project. |
With 1.8 million users of Zoho.com, growing at roughly 100,000 new users per month, and profitability expected in 2009, Zoho’s use of open-source software offers a glimpse into the development strategies of the next generation of software companies. Read more at news.cnet.com |
Yale researchers create database-Hadoop hybrid |
HadoopDB offers the data-crunching prowess of a relational database with scalability |
Computerworld -
Yale University researchers have released an open-source parallel database that they say combines the data-crunching prowess of a relational database with the scalability of next-generation technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce. |
Abadi and his students created HadoopDB from components including the open-source database, PostgreSQL, the Apache Hadoop data-sorting technology and Hive, the internal Hadoop project created by Facebook Inc. Read more at www.computerworld.com |
Group to push open source in U.S. government |
IDG News Service -
Open-source software needs a higher profile in Washington, D.C., according to a group of about 70 organizations and companies that launched a new campaign to educate U.S. government agencies about the benefits of open source. |
Members of the Open Source For America coalition, which launched Wednesday, include Google, The Linux Foundation, the Mozilla and Debian projects, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). |
| The coalition’s goal is not to convince the U.S. government to favor open-source software over proprietary code, but to give open source an equal chance to win government contracts, said Tom Rabon, executive vice president for corporate affairs at Red Hat.Read more at www.computerworld.com |
Original report: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10211462-16.html?tag=mncol;txt Open Source and Social Media: Community, Collaboration, Freedom |
In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following: |
| Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
Improve quality by 92%,
Ease integration and customization by 86%,
Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
Improve support by 84%,
Increase standards compliance by 91%,
Decrease time to market by 82%.Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
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Opinion: On the future of Open Source thought leadership
