Larry Augustin confirmed as SugarCRM CEO. Red Hat’s Fedora Project is 12. And more.

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

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Larry Augustin was confirmed as full-time CEO of SugarCRM.

# Red Hat, by way of the Fedora Project, announced the launch of Fedora 12.

# Microsoft is to …

UPDATE: The final vote is in and a winner has been declared, with Matt Asay and his arguments for the GPL taking the prize. You can see the debate or follow links to the other judges’ votes and thoughts here.

This is my assessment as a judge of the recent open source license debate held by the FOSS Learning Centre. We’ll have to begin with some qualifications and definitions, starting with the fact that there is no ‘best’ open source software license. Still, a star-studded open source software panel provided a lively, informative debate on the merits of some top open source licenses. For that, I congratulate and thank the panelists, Mike Milinkovich from the Eclipse Foundation arguing for the Eclipse Public License, Matt Asay of Alfresco arguing in favor of the GPL and David Maxwell from Coverity arguing for …

Code scanning and management vendor Black Duck reports the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) now dipping below 50% share of open source software. While we already knew that GPLv2 was somewhat in decline from its far greater share of open source code over the last 5-10 years, it is useful to know what pool of code we’re talking about. We must also remember that while GPLv2 may not be as dominant as it once was and that other licenses, particularly GPLv3, are quickly gaining share, GPLv2 is still quite relevant to enterprise open source software, is used in a variety of newer and popular applications across the enterprise stack and is likely to remain in the top 10 licenses for a long time.

Regarding GPLv2 and Black Duck’s findings, some folks are rightly asking what code and how much of it are we considering where GPLv2 accounts for half or less of the …

Microsoft has announced that it is to contribute code to the Linux kernel development effort under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. What on earth does it all mean? Here’s our take on the situation. With thanks to Jay Lyman for his contribution to the following:

Q. This is a joke, right?

A. Not at all, although if any announcement is better suited to the image above, we can’t think of one. Microsoft has announced that it is going to contribute code to Linux under the GPLv2.

Q. What code is Microsoft contributing?

A. Microsoft is offering 20,000 lines of its own device drivers to the Linux kernel that will enable Linux to run as a guest …

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license and concern over the openness (or closedness, depending on your perspedtive) of the latest devices. Amid all of it, we’re pleased to present our latest long-form report, CAOS 12 - The Myth of Open Source …

Governments. Governance. Customers wins. And more.

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

Governments
The Examiner provided a two part interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards, open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was reported that Vienna to …

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

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Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

Oracle buys Sun. Sun previews MySQL update, makes GlassFish Portfolio, OpenSSO and OpenDS available on EC2. Numerous partner announcements from the MySQL conference. Red Hat maps open source adoption. And more.

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Oracle to acquire Sun
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or like me you decided to take a few inappropriately-timed days off) you probably noticed that Oracle announced an agreement to acquire Sun this week. Jay delivered our assessment on Oracle’s open source credentials, while I followed up with some …

The open source vendor definition debate rumbles on. How open source could save the US government $3.7bn. Red Hat plans MASS migration to JBoss. Open source content management invades the US. Exploiting the attribution loophole in the GPLv3. And more.

Definition debate rumbles on
Roberto Galoppini joined the open source vendor definition debate, with a perspective looking at the impact on community engagement, and also caught up with David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, about the company’s strategy, noting that not all open source core vendors are created equal.

Meanwhile Tarus Balog of OpenNMS, who …

Giuseppe claims he didn’t want to get involved, but this tell-seven-things-about-you game is as fun as it is useless. The rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So, here come seven completely useless facts about myself:

1. My first programming language was APL, which I learned from my father (1924-2001, worked for IBM Finland 1951-83). The picture is of an APL ball for an IBM electric typing …