I remember when the big open source debate was whether a piece of software was really open source, meaning it was released under an OSI-approved license. The tides are shifting, debates now center around which open source license to use. Adding to the complexity of the debate is proliferation of OSI-approved licenses. Now discussions are rising over the open source licenses that are in the best interest of all stakeholders of an open source project. In the case of collective software works there is also the added intricacies of license compatibility.

Part of the problem is that companies are trying to drive their own vanity licenses that reinforce their branding and leverage the goodwill associated with the open source seal of approval. SugarCRM once mounted an offensive asking for acceptance of their Sugar Public License (a derivative of the OSI-Approved Mozilla Public License) that for a brief time was gaining popularity among commercial open source developers. The license was rejected and Sugar has since moved to the GPLv3. Ironically the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) submitted by Social Text, which bears many similarities to the Sugar Public License, was accepted by the OSI. Even Microsoft has successfully lobbied the OSI-board for approval of two licenses. The Microsoft Public License (M-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) which are very similar to the BSD and GPL licenses.

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Technorati Tags: AGPL, BlackDuck, CPAL, gpl, Launchpad, Licensing, Open Source, Palamida, SocialText, SpringSource, SugarCRM, Ubuntu

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienating the community that so far has driven their success.  

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community.  Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

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Technorati Tags: Acquia, Alfresco, Drupal, Hunter S. Thompson, Joomla!, marketing, Open Source, SugarCRM

Fortune Magazine has published a list of hot IPOs for 2008. What’s notable about the list is that four out of five of the highlighted companies have a significant investment in or are driven by open source related-products and services. 

• MySQL – MySQL is perhaps the best example of pervasive adoption of open source in the enterprise after Linux. After years of giving away millions of copies of software MySQL has built a thriving (and I suspect profitable) business. I had the opportunity to spend a few days with MySQL CEO, Marten Mickos last spring and I have the sense they are a class act from the top down. (Maybe there is a correlation between corporate character and financial success…at least I can hope.)
• Ingres – Since being spun out of Computer Associates (CA) Ingres the database company has gotten new legs. I was surprised to see their revenues were approaching the $100 million mark (per the Fortune article). I also like their management team, Ingres SVP of Engineering, Emma McGrattan is a firecracker and I have had great interactions with many of their other execs. Unlike many open source projects Ingres (the database, not the company) has been around since the 1970s proven itself over the course of decades without an open source community. Should Ingress develop that muscle they should have a rosy future. 
• SugarCRM – I am a SugarCRM user and have used many of the proprietary alternatives (Seibel, Clarify, Salesforce.com, Onyx, etc.) my observation is that Sugar’s got some big enterprise features at a small business price point. They also have a thriving community which is critical for someone who bases their business on open source, it’s what gives them leverage and allows them to rapidly gain adoption, brand awareness, and ultimately financial success. 
• Parallels (formerly SWsoft) – SWsoft was probably best known for their Plesk Control panel used by hosting providers until they acquired Parallels and beat VMware to the virtualization punch on the fast growing Mac OS X desktop. They also launched an open source operating system level virtualization project, OpenVZ in fall of 2005 which has made steady progress. I would be interesting to see if they can be successful running second to VMware by carving out an appropriate niche.  

Matt Aslett from the 451 Group has some additional analysis on the topic. For those of us that are in open source software this is a big deal. What will be an even greater proof point of our model will be their financial success once they trade in an open market. Either way it’s an exciting time for open source software. 

(via Matt Asay)

Technorati Tags: Ingres, IPO, Matt Asay, Matt Aslett, MySQL, Open Source, Parallels, SugarCRM, SWSoft

If you want an easy way to install open source software you might want to take a look at Bitnami. There isn’t a huge amount of information about BitNami but a quick whois shows me that Bitnami.com was registered by BitRock founder, Daniel Lopez Ridruejo.

I would guess that this is the same technology as the open source BitRock installer that I have used to install other open source packages for MySQL, SugarCRM and NetDirector. The advantage here is that their stacks are an all inclusive package with dependency resolution that are updated from a single source. It’s the same problem that WISE and Installshield solve for Windows. However, Bitnami has a number of cross-platform packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

They also have a voting system to determine what stacks they should package next. So far they have four main stacks (Ruby, LAMP, WAMP, and MAMP) and list about 12 downloads for popular LAMP applications including:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Mediawiki
• Dokuwiki
• Drupal

I haven’t had the chance to test the Bitnami stacks on many different Linux distributions yet but if this is really the work of BitRock I am sure it will make it a lot easier for more people to install Linux.

Technorati Tags: Bitnami, Bitrock, Daniel Lopez Ridreujo, LAMP, MySQL, NetDirector, SugarCRM