Open Source and the Cloud: Pay Dirt or Parasite?, Apr 20, 2009

Does using open source software pay off in a total cost sense when compared to commercial offerings today? Is it worth the usually lower cost, or will an enterprise that casts its lot with FOSS be trapped in a high-risk situation where they can't get support and innovation?

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 - aka Jaunty Jackalope - Canonical has paired its Linux distro with Eucalyptus, an open-source software platform that mimics Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) inside your own data center.

Cost is the primary driver for open-source consideration, as a recent Forrester report suggests, but what is most significant is the overwhelmingly positive experience CIOs are having with open source.

Imagine a trailer hooked on to the back of an Indy car - the effect on performance would be similar to what happens when you hook up hard drives to a server. That's because a hard drive is a slow, delicate, mechanical component attached to a computer system that is otherwise made up of solid-state electronics built for speed.

IBM has decided it no longer wants Sun at any price, but Dell is taking another tack... With Sun setting itself up for sale, a number of companies have started gazing towards its direction. While some of them are fixing their sights on the company itself as a whole, others are locking in on smaller, tastier prey - Sun's customers. Dell is one such predator.

Is Microsoft a friend or foe of open source? Going by the company's actions, Microsoft can't seem to decide whether to make love or war. But if it's war, Microsoft appears to lack the legal weaponry to defeat or even disturb its adversaries.

One by-product of the need to get netbooks onto the market with a small price has seen major laptop manufacturers embrace Linux as the operating system they pre-load the machines with.

Microsoft is reportedly taking a version of its XP OS intended for entry-level PCs, and repurposing its post-Vista incarnation to run netbooks. Its name and functionality do little good for the company's brand.

Recently there has been tremendous buzz surrounding a method of running a full Ubuntu Linux installation within Windows. Unlike similar alternatives for Windows, however, the user is not installing Linux only to have to reboot out of Windows to enjoy their new Linux install.

Oracle CEO says Sun's OS is 'by far the best Unix technology' available, cites Java as a key component of $7.4B acquisition

So much for a big blue Sun. Instead, the company is being gobbled up Oracle for about $7.4 billion. Does this mean that Oracle will become “the biggest contributor to open source,” or a gaping hole in the FOSS ecosystem?

Oracle Corp. agreed to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for about $7.4 billion in cash, stepping in after International Business Machines Corp.’s talks to purchase the server maker collapsed.

We all know that Google Android netbook devices will be hitting the streets in the coming months. They are going to be running on really inexpensive ARM-based hardware and be getting an easy, unified interface, care of Google.

Microsoft knew this day was coming. This was the reason it desperately wanted — no, needed — to take down Netscape in 1996. Netscape wasn’t just trying to build a program for reading text and photos across a network of connected computers. Netscape was trying to build a new platform - the ultimate platform - to run software and share information instantly and on a global scale. And no one understood that better than Bill Gates.

Is Microsoft a friend or foe of open source? Going by the company's actions, Microsoft can't seem to decide whether to make love or war. But if it's war, Microsoft appears to lack the legal weaponry to defeat or even disturb its adversaries.

Choice is a wonderful thing. Not everyone wants the same thing, after all. Freedom of choice means the most accessible, best-suited or cheapest products tend to thrive, while the unsuitable or unsupportably expensive simply fade away.

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