The Open Road

Once upon a time Red Hat was content to be the enterprise Linux leader and VMware was happy to be the dominant virtual infrastructure vendor.

No more.

As the two companies have sought growth, they've increasingly stepped on each other's toes, with recent VMware marketing taking strong swipes at its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, highlighting Pizza Hut as a high-profile customer defection from Red Hat to VMware.

Can't the two companies just get along?

Probably not. Back in 2006, Red Hat and VMware announced an "expanded relationship to support customers and ISVs who are deploying virtualization.&… Read more

Google attracts an ever-growing horde of Android-loving developers. But can Google's developer growth outpace Apple's?

It's not clear, especially as the developer battle spans both client and cloud.

I'm a big fan of Google's open-source approach, but there are signs that Apple's control-all-delete-competitors approach is working and will continue to work. That is unless, of course, Google can effectively counter consumer lust for Apple gadgets with compelling cloud services that tie to a broader range of devices.

Google, while making a lot of progress with Android, has a long road ahead of it. However … Read more

Open-source software had a very good 2009, and all indications are 2010 is on track to be even better.

Enterprises turned to open source to shave money in the economic downturn and are staying with it now to drive greater innovation and productivity.

This brings great hope to open-source vendors, anxious to cash in on open source's rising popularity, but it also introduces some specific challenges as they scale their organizations to meet demand.

Specifically, since support is the lifeblood of any open-source business, how can companies expand their support capabilities while simultaneously scaling profitability? The two don't … Read more

The more you roll the dice, according to the law of large numbers theorem, the more likely you are to hit an expected average of 3.5.

And according to Google VP Andy Rubin, the more the search giant blankets the industry with competing Android-droid based mobile handsets, the more likely Google is to hit its expected value of market dominance over Apple's iPhone.

"It's a numbers game," Rubin said. And the numbers look increasingly rosy for Android.

Consider AdMob's new report (PDF), which pegs Android as accounting for 25 percent of mobile ad requests … Read more

AT&T has a problem. The wireless carrier's subscriber growth is significantly slowing and its exclusive hold on the iPhone in the U.S. may come to an end in 2010.

Sure, AT&T can go back to the iPhone trough, hoping that the forthcoming iPhone 4G will prop up its sales. But that's not going to help the company as it struggles with the blessing and curse of heavy data usage the iPhone has imposed on its network.

What AT&T really needs is a software story, and Foursquare may be a good place … Read more

Is Apple joining the "Don't be evil" brigade?

I can't help but ask after reading Apple's attack on Adobe's Flash for being "closed and proprietary," while dressing itself up as the openness prom queen because of its support for HTML5, JavaScript, and other industry standards.

Flash may be closed and proprietary, but Apple is hardly the patron saint of openness. Nor has it ever seemed to care much about pretending to be anything other than religiously devoted to a beautiful consumer experience, regardless of open standards, open source, open anything.

What has … Read more

Despite Gartner projecting a 5.3 percent increase in IT spending in 2010 over 2009, and IT vendors reporting rosy earnings, venture capitalists have been moving away from investing as much in enterprise IT in the past several years. As The Wall Street Journal reports, IT represented 53 percent of VC deals in 2001 but it has plummeted to 33 percent in 2009.

It's not as if those VCs are holding their money. They're actively investing in health care, green tech, and other sectors...

...like mobile.

The irony with mobile is that while it's siphoning away VC … Read more

The open-source world has long debated alternatives to the word "free" to describe open-source software. It's "free as in freedom," they declare, "not free as in free beer."

For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, however, the answer is much simpler--"free as in $9,000."

As noted by The H, Oracle still touts its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office as a free download. But clicking through reveals that Oracle has changed its license terms for the formerly free plug-in, which enables Office users to read, edit, and save to … Read more

Even as Google and other technology companies bet big on mobile computing, open-source developers seem to be fixated with "desktop" and server environments. If the future is mobile, why isn't this where open-source developers are focusing?

To be fair, some are. There are a few open-source applications for the iPhone, including WordPress and Doom Classic, and others like Shelves for Google's Android. But these are the exceptions, not the rule.

And, yes, we have important open-source platform projects like Android, Funambol, etc., but there are relatively few, particularly in the area of applications.

This is a … Read more