Larry Augustin: Open source fueling enterprise software shift, Aug 18, 2009

Open source is giving a mighty boost to the enterprise software industry, changing the support equation for users and signaling to Microsoft and other proprietary vendors that it's time to catch on or be left out, according to Larry Augustin, an open source visionary and the current SugarCRM CEO.

Think of the annual Pwnie Awards delivered at the Black Hat conference as a geek version of the Oscars – if they were combined with the tongue-in-cheek Razzies that celebrate the worst of Hollywood.

There are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009.

Open-source software companies are missing out on a relatively inexpensive way to fight concerns about patent liability, according to an attorney who spoke at an open-source conference in San Francisco this week. More open-source companies should be asking the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine patents that may pose a threat to them, as a cheaper, sometimes more suitable alternative to waging a patent lawsuit.

Linux-based netbooks may encroach on Microsoft's success in the near future. Two looming threats: Google may decide to run its operating system, Android, on netbooks and low-power processors from smartphone chip licenser ARM may take off in netbooks.

Despite hiring freezes and budget cutting, several high-tech talents remain in demand.

The modularity and licensing of Linux makes it well suited as the platform of choice for the burgeoning software appliance market, a Novell executive said at the VMworld conference in Cannes.

A flock of new mobile devices unveiled this week at Mobile World Congress are part of the trend toward Linux-powered mobility, incorporating the open-source software stack from the LiMo Foundation.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers.

A low-cost XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Project that carries both Windows and Linux will be out within the next month or so, according to an OLPC official.

IBM has demonstrated one of the highest profile supercomputers yet to run Windows as well as Linux - the Akka system, installed at the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) in northern Sweden.

Network World published a test today that declared Linux -- especially Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 -- was more green than Windows Server 2008. RHEL drew less power on 13 of 16 test scenarios and came in with almost 10 percent savings in power over Windows Server 2008 in some of those cases.

Workloads running on Linux servers are shifting to become more business oriented, including databases and line-of-business applications, and the operating system appears headed for measurable growth over the next three years, according to a white paper released Tuesday by IDC.

The message posted Friday evening on emacs-eval by Richard Stallman was cryptic: "Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."

Wayne Kelly, leader of the open source Ruby.Net development project, announced last week that he intends to discontinue development of Ruby.Net and join up with Microsoft's IronRuby open source efforts. This might sound good on the surface, but it is a bad idea.

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

Novell will head to court this April to find out what it is owed, if anything, by SCO, which had been trying to earn royalties from Unix code it did not own.

Linux development is more like a social network built on trusted relationships and less like a democratic community of individuals dedicated to a single development process, according to Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

“The judge slapping down SCO in the SCO vs. IBM/Novell lawsuit was the smartest move,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, founding partner at Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist.

More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.