MongoDB’s efforts to get OSI endorsement a more business-friendly SSPL have failed. MongoDB is proceeding anyhow, reflecting a possibly pivotal moment. After all the drama around MongoDB’s change of license from the open source Affero General Public License (AGPL) to the hopefully-but-not-yet-open-source Server Side Public License (SSPL), the company has now decided to retire the effort. No, … Read more
Red Hat’s new vice president and general manager of its RHEL Business Unit, Stefanie Chiras, enthusiastically embraces the growing importance of Linux. While you may not spend a lot of time thinking about this, the role Linux plays in the technology that we all use everyday is growing quite significantly. In an effort to more … Read more
IBM just spent $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free. IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means … Read more
Microsoft has truly embraced open source, in a radical shift rare for a big company—and developers should be very happy. Microsoft is perhaps the most impressive company on the planet right now. While it doesn’t (currently) dominate markets like it used to, Microsoft has managed something dramatically more difficult, something that portends future success as … Read more
Some see this as a giant leap forward for Microsoft and open source. A few, however, see Microsoft’s open-source patent move as just more of the same old, same old. When Microsoft surprised everyone by releasing its entire 60,000 patent portfolio to the open-source community, someone asked me if I thought the move would finally convince everyone … Read more
When you think of open-source software, you think about smartphones, servers, and the cloud. You probably don’t think about movies, but you should. Out of 200 of the most popular movies of all time, the top 137 were either visual-effects driven or animated. What did many of these blockbusters have in common? They were made … Read more
A new open-source license addendum, Commons Clause, has lawyers, developers, businesses, and open-source supporters fighting with each other. Most people wouldn’t know an open-source license from their driver’s license. For those who work with open-source software, it’s a different story. Open-source license fights can be vicious, cost serious coin, and determine the fate of multi-million dollar … Read more
Both firms will give away software that gave them a competitive edge, a reflection of changing times. Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers. Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire … Read more
Called Licensed, the tool finds license dependencies early in the development life cycle. GitHub has open-sourced its Licensed tool, a Ruby gem that caches and verifies the status of license dependencies in Git repos. Licensed has helped GitHub engineers who use open source software find potential problems with license dependencies early in the development cycle. … Read more
Open source software imparts a number of benefits, including decreasing product development time, distributing development across a community and attracting developers to your organization. However, some organizations shy away from it due to perceived risks and disadvantages around intellectual property. Once you’ve incorporated open source into your products or open sourced your own code, it’s … Read more
