Industry news

Google rivaled by open source in angel investing?

Nearly six years ago, Google went public and unleashed over $170 billion in employee wealth--money that is now being actively re-invested in building the next wave of Googles.

Is Google the exception, or is such reinvestment the rule for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?

A quick scan of the industry suggests that Google is, indeed, exceptional, but perhaps not to the extent that people think.

Googlers aren't alone in spending their wealth on technology investments, of course. Well-known entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen and other angel investors have gone on to fund new start-ups like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Such angel investors get … Read more

MySQL's new best friend forever? Oracle

MySQL, once the darling of the database world, is now under attack from all sides. The NoSQL movement questions MySQL's relevance for the Web applications that made it hugely popular. The Drizzle project derides its relevance for the cloud.

MySQL still has one major ally, however, and it's the one that most people thought was its biggest enemy:

Oracle.

The European Commission, among others, worried that Oracle's purchase of Sun, which bought MySQL for $1 billion in 2008, would cripple database competition by stifling MySQL's development. According to Wim Coakaerts, Oracle's Vice President of Linux … Read more

Tim O'Reilly: 'Whole Web' is the OS of the future

SAN FRANCISCO--Open-source developers and businesses are focused on the wrong opportunity, according to industry luminary Tim O'Reilly. The future isn't programming for Linux or MySQL. The future is programming for the "whole Web."

And it threatens to be controlled by open-source savvy, data-rich companies like Google.

On Wednesday in San Francisco, O'Reilly closed the first day of the Open Source Business Conference by shaking up some comfortable assumptions of the open-source commercial ecosystem, which has tended to focus on commoditizing established markets with low-cost, high-value distribution, all driven by open-source licensing.

This is nice, according … Read more

Red Hat CEO: Open-source economics key to innovation

At the inaugural Open Source Business Conference in 2004, the discussion centered on how to fund open source's survival. Just six years later, the OSBC conversation has taken a 180-degree shift to focus on whether proprietary software's shelf life is nearing its end as open-source software economics increasingly drive technology innovation.

What happened?

In a nutshell, the cost benefits of high-quality, free software came to outweigh the industry's former concerns about risks associated with "rebel code."

This trend, not visible in 2004, started with early adopters like Google. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst highlighted … Read more

If the desktop is dying, mobile sync is king

Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.

That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open Web.

Traditionally, sync has been that thing you do between your desktop and your one mobile device to ensure that calendars, address books, and even browser bookmarks are current between the two islands of computing. But in … Read more

Why Google Android is winning

The global smartphone market is still RIM's to lose, with Apple in the pole position to profit from its mistakes. But new ComScore data on the U.S. smartphone market suggest that both should be worried by what they see in their rear-view mirrors:

While Android still claims only 7.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, "objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." This certainly seems to be the case with Google, which added 4.3 percentage points of market share in just four months. And while Android's user base may … Read more

What Apple's and Microsoft's patent threats mean for start-ups

Perhaps retirement doesn't suit former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Just weeks into his post-Sun life, Schwartz offers some delicious anecdotes in a blog post, summarizing Apple's and Microsoft's threats to sue Sun for patent infringement as more about bluster than substance.

But that's not the lesson I learn from Schwartz's commentary.

Instead, what is immediately obvious to me is that a) the technology industry is a morass of conflicting patent claims, b) since there's really no way to completely avoid others' patents the best defense is to have a hefty counterbalancing patent portfolio … Read more

Is ad blocking the problem?

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher recently wrote an impassioned plea to turn off ad-blocking software like AdBlock Plus to save the online publishing industry. His attempt to turn back the clock on digitization, however, would likely accomplish the opposite.

Fisher has a good point: ad-blocking software almost certainly does hurt sites like CNET by denying them revenue. As he points out, "[m]ost [large] sites...are paid on a per view basis," not a click-through basis, which means that ad-blocking software very literally takes money out of the pockets of publishers, leading consumers to "devastat[e]...the … Read more

If Novell gets bought, will Red Hat follow?

Elliott's proposed acquisition of Novell promises to shake up the software industry, which has grown a bit staid in the past year or two. But what will it mean for Red Hat, and for the broader open-source software industry?

In particular, Novell's acquisition might well spur a mergers and acquisitions revival, as Barron's notes. But will it create overwhelming pressure for Red Hat to sell, too?

Red Hat has been the subject of buyout rumors for well over a decade, but has never been particularly close to indulging the temptation, according to sources close to the company. … Read more

Novell's buyout and its effect on the industry

For years, Novell has served as an odd bargaining chip between Microsoft and enterprises looking to move to Linux.

Novell's Suse Linux distribution, while a distant No. 2 to Red Hat's leading Linux server business, has helped Microsoft keep some measure of control over its open-source competition--or, at least, to keep a close eye on it.

With Novell now up for grabs through a $1.8 billion buy-out offer from Elliott Associates, what is likely to happen to the Linux market, and to Microsoft, if it goes through?

The easy view is that Red Hat will benefit and … Read more