I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Juanjo Hierro from the Morfeo Project, a Spanish community of open source communities set up to speed up the development of Service Oriented Architectures-related software standards and create business opportunities for local suppliers.

Hierro explained that the Morfeo Project is based on “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Christensen’s law has also been used by Tim O’Reilly …

Open-Xchange raises Series B funding. The FSF enables Wikimedia’s potential move to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The “Bilski” decision and software patents. Mindtouch reports revenue growth. And more.

Press releases
Open-Xchange Closes Series B Venture Funding of $9 Million Open-Xchange

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications OASIS

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License Free Software Foundation

Federal Court Issues “Bilski” Decision Software Freedom …

Sun and Sourcefire report Q3 results. SpringSource elected to JCP executive committee. Alfresco launches Enterprise 3.0. How to go from 0 to 700 customers in one year. Open sourcing Jonathan Schwartz’s ponytail. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Reports Final Results for the First Quarter Fiscal Year 2009 Sun Microsystems

Sourcefire Announces 2008 Third Quarter Results Sourcefire

Sourcefire Adopts Stockholder Rights Plan Sourcefire

…

Actuate and Black Duck report on third quarter performance. Red Hat welcomes Microsoft to AMQP. Canonial launches Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition. How to pronounce my surname. And more.

Press releases
Actuate Reports Third Quarter 2008 Financial Results
Actuate

Black Duck Software Continues Phenomenal Growth in Q3 Black Duck

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition enables mobile, flexible computing for a changing digital world Canonical

Microsoft Joins Working Group for Open Standards Messaging Software Microsoft

…

VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

(Or “the return of 451 CAOS Links“)

Having been a bit busy for the last three weeks I have a bit of catching up to do on the latest open source software news. Here’s the headlines that caught my eye.

MySQL co-founder resigns from Sun
No, not that one. David Axmark resigned stating “I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.” If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one co-founder may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both …

Until this week Infobright’s claim to open source fame was its partnership with MySQL that enabled its analytical data warehousing software to act as a storage engine for the open source database.

However, the company is now taking the open source route itself by releasing the code behind its Infobright data warehouse (formerly Brighthouse) as Infobright Community Edition.

Earlier this month the company announced that it was moving to a subscription model for the commercial version of the product, Infobright Enterprise Edition, which comes with “enhanced features, services and support, warranty” amongst other things.

The company has also announced a $10m Series C investment …

CA and IBM, two of the so-called Big Four in systems management software, announced this week a federated configuration management database (CMDB) system for interoperability of their software. Something like this comoing from two of Big Four (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) wouldn’t normally hold much meaning for open source players such as GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss, but it actually does for a couple of reasons.

First, part of the technology that CA and IBM are using to link up their systems management software, which allows it to share information between the two CMDBs, is actually open source software itself from the Eclipse Cosmos Project. CA and IBM said the Eclipse Cosmos software accelerated implementation of the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and the two vendors plan to contribute code …

Still no official news on the rumour that Monty Widenius has left Sun, but Dave Rosenberg confirmed over the weekend that he is leaving MuleSource, the open source ESB vendor he founded in 2006 with Ross Mason, creator of the Mule project.

“After two and a half years I’ve decided to transition out of my operating role at MuleSource and will be devoting my full time efforts to a new company I have been working on,” he wrote on Friday. “I initiated a CEO search in June and we expect to have a new person in place by the end of the year at the latest.

“I started the search because I felt like a more …