To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Turkey kept its hopes of qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 alive with a last-minute victory over hosts Switzerland last night and now faces a winner-takes-all final group game against the Czech Republic on Sunday.

When it comes to open source software adoption, details of public and private deployments are thin on the ground, and we are indebted to Erkan Tekman, Pardus project manager, for contributing his insight into open source adoption in Turkey (see below).

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To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Switzerland is co-hosting EURO 2008 along with Austria and will be kicking off the tournament with a game against the Czech Republic on Saturday. The country is of course famous for its neutrality but has shown itself to be less than neutral when it comes to open source (see what I did there) with the federal government having adopted an open source software strategy as long ago as February 2004.

Key policies:
The …

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source software between today and Friday June 6.

It promises to be an interesting discussion, and CIO.com has been good enough to give us some starting discussions points with its survey of attitudes towards open source in the CIO community. I’ll be …

I just got around to reading Stephen O’Grady’s post on the relative openness of open source vendors and realized I had failed to be as clear as I could have been in my original post on the subject.

Responding to my note about Milking the GNU’s suggestion that a new independent organization could be formed to judge vendors on their level of openness, Stephen wrote:

“Those in the industry that might care have, I would argue, already formed their opinions on whether or not a project such as MySQL?s is or is not open source. And those outside the industry, well, I don?t expect they?d care. At all. Most of the enterprises I speak with are …

There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

When we write about investors on this blog we are normally referring to angel and VC investors and the funding they provide to open source start-ups. There is a small, but growing, list of VCs that clearly understand the open source development and distribution models and the long-term profit potential of open source software vendors.

Can the same be said of individual and institutional investors buying and selling shares in publicly traded software companies? Not according to the analysis of Oliver Alexy, a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Technische Universität München TUM Business School in Munich, Germany.

Oliver has analyzed the impact that releasing software under open source licenses has on a company’s share price. Details have been published this week in the …

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans …

It is perhaps fitting that the last word on the recent MySQL licensing row should belong to Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz. In a twitter Q&A with Web 2.0 Expo attendees, courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, he states that:

“we have no plans whatever of ‘hiding the ball,’ of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.”

Which would appear to be pretty conclusive, despite his additional claim that “leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just …

I really thought I was done writing about MySQL for a while, but I attended a Sun/MySQL event in London today and have some shocking news to impart. It seems we’ve got MySQL all wrong.

At the event, MySQL co-founder David Axmark talked through some of the history of the MySQL project and company, confirming what has previously been reported about the origins of the database’s name.

It was, he confirmed, named after co-founder Monty Widenius’s daughter, My. …