One of the favourite blog topics on CAOS Theory blog over the years has been our quarterly and annual updates on venture capital funding for open source-related businesses, based on our database of over 600 funding deals since January 1997 involving nearly 250 companies, and over $4.8bn.

There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

Following the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever in Q3, Q4 was the second largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors …

Topics for this podcast:

*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

iTunes or direct download (27:35, 4.7MB)

Oracle last week quietely announced the addition of new extended capabilities in MySQL Enterprise Edition, confirming the adoption of the open core licensing strategy, as we reported last November.

The news was both welcomed and derided. Rather than re-hashing previous arguments about open core licensing, what interests me more about the move is how it illustrates the different strategies adopted by Sun and Oracle for driving revenue from MySQL, and how a single project can be used to describe most of the major strategies …

While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor.

OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office for years and in many ways demonstrated the advantages of open source, helping usher in wider use of it, as well as greater usability. OO.o was in fact my reason for originally investigating and moving to open source software more than a decade ago. Regardless of past mismanagement of community and technology, that competitive factor has been diminished greatly since Oracle took ownership of OO.o. Now, after prompting a fork — as has …

In November a Mark Schonewille posted a blog on when you can't and cannot use the GPL version of MySQL together with your closed source application. The post was a result of actually talking to an Oracle lawyer which makes it valuable information. Unfortunately Mark's blog is now offline (it seems he didn't renew his domain registration?)

This is just a repost of the disappeared blog post. (The small print allows me to copy it verbatim.) There is no commentary from myself, except that what Mark wrote is the same I also heard Oracle say a year ago. That Oracle is being consistent on this point is very welcome and deserves to be kept available online.

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I have recently come across two examples of unintentional FUD. For different reasons, my …

Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so.

My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment.

The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

The evidence? Mark praises the strategy Trolltech took of selling proprietary licenses.

The problem? Trolltech did not follow the open core licensing strategy. Neither did MySQL, which Bradley suggests …

Stephen O’Grady and Simon Phipps have both recently published interesting posts on the current state of open source, with Stephen pondering the relative growth of open source and Simon wondering whether the “commercial open source” bubble has burst.

What they are describing, I believe, is the culmination of the trends we predicted at the beginning of 2009 for commercial open source business strategies – specifically the arrival of the fourth stage of commercial open source.

What is the fourth stage of commercial open source? In short: a return to a focus on collaboration and …

In my time at MySQL AB in the Community Relations possition (2004-2006) I wrote several articles on MySQL’s licensing for the MySQL web site. The core reason for having to explain anything was (and still is) the dual licensing of MySQL, in particular the client library. I left MySQL AB years ago, but people still ask me licensing questions. Below is an excerpt from one such question, and my response.

> Hi, Found a post on the mysql website from Arjen Lentz to do with the whole
> mysql licensing question.
> Do you know if the issue with, php scripts (that use a mysql database) issued
> under a proprietary license require you to have a commercial license for
> mysql, or will the issues be covered for the GPL version through the fact
> that the scripts run via php which in-turn connects to the GPL mysql server
> for which the FOSS exception applies.

Note: I am not a …

If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one.

It ought to be simple: either the software meets the Open Source Definition or it does not. But it is not always easy to tell what license is being used, and in the case of software being delivered as a service, does it matter anyway?

The ability to deliver software as a hosted service enables some companies that are claimed to be 100% open source to offer customers software for which the source code is not available. Coincidentally, James Dixon has this week highlighted one …