Open source and the corporate elephant, Dec 14, 2007

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.

The giant software companies are increasingly boasting of their open source credentials but developers need to guard against encroachment on their principles.

Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat Inc.'s goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the US by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company's chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.

The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) is deploying Suse Linux Enterprise across 30,000 desktops and 1,880 servers in schools in southern India.

The open source community doesn’t always deliver software that customers want, says Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) may soon have some full-time, paid staff, including an executive director, according to a member of the board of directors of the Delaware foundation.

The biggest challenge for the open source community is that there are too few open source developers, according to Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc.

IBM has partnered with a computing organization and an educational institution in India to promote the development of open-source software in the region, the company said Thursday.

Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4 products, scheduled for release early next year, will support five Indian languages, reflecting the growing importance of the Indian market, according to an executive of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux company.