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, …

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 …

My CAOS colleague Matt Aslett wrote recently about how we expect to see an uptick in open source merger and acquisition activity given the current economic conditions and bargains for the larger, mostly proprietary players. Matt also discusses the difficulty of further VC funding, though we have seen some significant investment announcements, such as Open-Xchange, Infobright and others. Still, Matt is probably right that funding will be harder to come by for any company, open source or not.

I also continue to see a number of startup and younger open source vendors — would-be fundees — that are opting to hold off on venture funding and stick to building up business, customers and …

A busy week for Sun includes new product releases and an annual shareholders’ meeting. Microsoft tries to unseat open source with BizSpark for entrepreneurs. Who is making money from open source? Obama: Open source President? And more.

Press releases
IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union To Grow Adoption, Community and Software Innovation Sun Microsystems

Sun Unveils New Systems And Storage Solutions For MySQL Sun Microsystems

Microsoft Jump-Starts Global Entrepreneurs With BizSpark Microsoft

…

Last but not least in my series of podcasts from this year's My SQL Conference and Expo, is my conversation with Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock.  BitRock is the company behind BitNami and InstallBuilder and counts as its clients companies like MySQL, JasperSoft, KnowledgeTree, SugarCRM...

My interview with Erica (9:34)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

 
Erica, still standing and smiling at …

I was complaining in an earlier post that I have problems with linux style installation.
I found a company that can help me solve that!
BitRock makes open source software easier to use by providing a complete automated solution for Open Source Application Deployment.
Its quite cool and they have a LAMP stack installer here.


Now I am suggesting that someone at Erlang does it too. They have a Lyme stack which is Linux + Yaws + Mnesia + Erlang. (a …

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent "quality" links. [Updated: Actually check the post comments for …