Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay. OIN to acquire ex-Microsoft patents. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay
Despite widespread criticism of the European Commission’s decision to open a formal investigation into Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, Glyn Moody maintained that the EC deserves credit for making open source a central part of its analysis. Meanwhile Monty Program (by way of Steven J Vaughan Nicholls) explained why the EU should block Oracle/Sun, Roberto Galoppini reported …

Topics for this podcast:

*EC pauses Oracle-Sun over MySQL
* Open source licenses debated
* Red Hat growth opportunities and Summit roundup
* Reductive Labs seeking cloud role for Puppet software
* VMware-SpringSource analyzed

iTunes or direct download (26:04, 5.9 MB)

Red Hat round-up. EC to review Oracle-Sun. Dedicated Ubuntu support. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Red Hat announcements round-up
Red Hat announced a whole heap of products and projects this week. They should have organized an event to coincide with all the announcements. Or something. The biggest news was probably the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 including KVM and other virtualization capabilities, while Red Hat and HP partnered to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix. The company also revealed that Red Hat Network Satellite …

Intalio acquires Jetty. Red Hat updates JBoss platform. $12m funding for Medsphere. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Intalio acquired Webtide, developer of Jetty application server.

# Red Hat delivered JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, as well as JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.3 and launched Catalyst partner program.

# Medsphere raised $12m to support ongoing development and expansion in open source health IT.

Jay has already provided a good overview of the debate related to the apparent decline in the usage of the GPLv2. I don’t intend to cover the same ground, but I did want to quickly respond to a statement made by Matt Asay in his assessment of the reasons for and implications of reduced GPLv2 usage.

He wrote:

“as Open Core becomes the default business model for ‘pure-play’ open-source companies, we will see more software licensed under the Apache license”

I don’t doubt that we will see more software licensed under the Apache license, and also more vendors making use of permissively-licensed code, but I don’t see a correlation with the Open-Core model.

We reported recently on Red Hat’s revenue growth and deferred revenue. One of the things I have been looking at recently is the slowdown in Red Hat’s growth in recent years, and the opportunities that the company has to improve that growth.

For some perspective it is worth noting that while Red Hat’s revenue has been growing steadily:

The rate of growth has been in decline for some time:

We have also noted (451 Group clients only) that the company will in …

LINBIT will be a proud sponsor at this year’s LinuxCon in Portland, OR, held on September 21-23. We will also participate in the Linux Plumbers Conference, co-located with LinuxCon.

Phil is to speak at LinuxCon about DRBD 8.3 and beyond. At LPC, we will primarily focus on building highly available storage systems with DRBD, Pacemaker, and the STGT and LIO …

Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

*451 CAOS Links will return on August 25*

Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …

Red Hat is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of its initial public offering. An anniversary to be proud of for Red Hat, but one that has given The VAR Guy pause for thought about the relative success of open source in the past 10 years.

“Would anyone have predicted that no additional open source companies would launch IPOs over the next decade? Ten years without an open source IPO … amazing and somewhat depressing for open source business advocates,” writes the VAR Guy.

It is somewhat depressing that there are not more public open source vendors. However, the statement that there have been …

When open source goes bad. Is open source a success or failure? And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

When open source goes bad
The H reported on the apparent turmoil at the CentOS project, while Jay Lyman offered the CAOS perspective. Meanwhile Slashdot reported that Alan Cox has quit as Linux TTY subsystem maintainer.

Success or failure?
Danny Windham, Digium CEO, …