I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).

Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email raises a valid point about how we determine which companies are considered “open source vendors” and I wanted to use the opportunity to outline the rules I use to make that decision.

As a technical snafu at our end had prevented Tarus from leaving a comment on the blog I hope he won’t mind me using his words to explain the issue he raised.

He wrote:

“You …

Sun reports second quarter results. Compiere reports 216% quarterly revenue growth. EnterpriseDB grows customers accounts. Hyperic and JasperSoft team up on BI for IT. Microsoft embraces Apache but resists GPL. And more.

Sun up or Sun down?
There was some comparatively good news from Sun, which reported a net loss of $209m on revenue down 10.9% at $3.2bn. As Sam Diaz at ZDnet notes, however, “after excluding one-time costs related to recent layoffs and other costs, the company posted a profit of 15 cents per share, beating analysts’ expectations of a 10 cent loss”. In regular trading, shares of Sun were up more than 5%.

Matt Asay noted the impact open …

Red Hat gets a new VP. rPath appoints former Red Hat COO as chairman. Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source. Open source Windows. SCO formally files for Chapter 11. And more.

Official announcements
Industry Veteran Greg Symon Joins Red Hat as Vice President and General Manager of North American Sales Red Hat

rPath Welcomes Ex-Red Hat COO Tim Buckley rPath

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition LifeRay

Adaptive Planning …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

EMC buys some, but not all, of SourceLabs. Cfengine launches data center automation software. Open source and TCO. Measuring corporate contributions to open source. And more.

Official announcements
Self-repairing Data Center Automation solution released Cfengine

Acquia Joins Red Hat Exchange Bringing Social Publishing Expertise to the Open Source Ecosystem Acquia

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex DotNetNuke

The BitRock Network Service Improves Product …

The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?

Much of the open source blog chatter over the Christmas period was related to open source business models/strategies, largely triggered by a post written by Dave Rosenberg in which he declared that commercial licensing, and specifically open core licensing will be all the rage in 2009:

“Typically we now see an “open core” freely available with “exclusive” or proprietary features only available when you pay. If you are trying to build a commercial business on top of an open source project, this is likely the right answer.”

…

A bumper CAOS Links rounding up the news and views from the festive period, including: Red Hat revenue up 22% in 3Q. Alan Cox departs for Intel. Evolving open source business strategies. The commercialization opportunity around OpenOffice.org. And more.

Official announcements
Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Results Red Hat

OpenLogic Survey Highlights Enterprise Perspectives on Open Source Application Servers OpenLogic

Asianux Concludes Triumphant Year, Welcomes Fifth Member Asianux

News articles
The future of open source …

Red Hat increases its service levels. Linux Foundation appoints Ted Ts’o CTO. Sun delivers VirtualBox update. Novell cancels BrainShare. BBC enables iPlayer for Linux. And more.

Note: This is the last 451 CAOS Links post of 2008. We’ll be back with a bumper holiday special on January 2. Happy holidays!

Official announcements
Red Hat Increases Service Levels and Reduces Costs for Customers with Extended Update Support Red Hat

Linux Foundation Appoints Ted Ts’o to Position of Chief Technology Officer Linux Foundation

…

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

FSF sues Cisco for GPL violations. JasperSoft and Lucid Imagination raise funding. Sun updates OpenSolaris. WaveMaker launches IDE for the cloud. And more.

Official announcements
Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations Free Software Foundation

Jaspersoft Secures $12.5 Million in Venture Funding JasperSoft

Sound Investment Red Hat

Jaspersoft Announces New Community Edition of the World’s Most Widely Deployed Business Intelligence Software JasperSoft

…