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Year in Review: Open source

Grappling with open source

The world of open source is moving ever further from its unpaid volunteer roots. The past year saw the $420 million acquisition of JBoss, as well as a Microsoft-Novell deal that tested the legal limits of commercial open source.

With the momentum of a freight train, open-source technology spread more widely in the software industry in 2006. Upstart challengers, such as open-source database company MySQL and middleware maker JBoss, grew rapidly over the course of the year, while incumbent vendors dealt with the open-source effect in different ways.

Perhaps the most dramatic events of the year were Microsoft's attempts to come to terms with open-source products and development techniques. The highlight was a deal with Novell to improve interoperability between their respective products.

With the ink barely dry, though, the two companies got into a spat over a patent protection arrangement, with Novell's CEO sending a letter to the open-source community claiming that a patent payment between the companies did not indicate any legal liability on the part of Novell or its customers.

Legal experts asked whether the deal conforms to Novell's open-source license, while other free-software and open-source adherents panned the legal agreement as unacceptable.

Oracle, which had been rumored to be interested in acquiring JBoss, entered the Linux business by offering Red Hat customers direct support--at less than half of Red Hat's price.

That initiative, along with the Microsoft-Novell deal, turned up the heat on leading Linux distributor Red Hat as it sought to expand through its acquisition of JBoss.

Oracle made a few other efforts to boost its standing in the open-source world. After buying a small company closely linked to MySQL, it purchased embedded database provider Sleepycat. It even offered to buy MySQL itself but was rebuffed.

IBM, feeling competition from open source, decided to make its DB2 database free of charge, in keeping with moves made by Microsoft and Oracle.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems finally released the source code to its implementation of Java, after years of internal debate and requests. The main surprise was the choice of license: the General Public License, which is used with Linux and many other open-source products.

The GPL itself is getting an upgrade to version 3. Early in the year, its authors presented the proposed changes, which included stricter limitations on software patents and digital rights management. The changes were not universally well-received; most of the Linux kernel developers gave it poor marks.

In the development tools area, open source has become de rigueur. A number of tools-related initiatives were launched, such as the Ajax Toolkit Framework, which aims to bring Ajax-style development to the open-source tool framework Eclipse.

And Adobe Systems announced that it would contribute its script virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in future Firefox browsers.

--Martin LaMonica

2006 Highlights

Behind the headlines

Topics

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Opensource is where we came from
by markwdalton December 19, 2006 10:55 AM PST: The software, internet, etc. originated on OpenSource. This is in the early and pre-consumer internet days from the 1960's to mid-1990's.

We had BBS's, ftp sites, Gopher sites, and the web were all based on Free and OpenSource software. We worked together to provide the best solutions, versus proprietary solutions.

There were true Standards, where competing companies agreed on standards (we still do this for compilers like C, C++ and Fortran, etc.).
Because customers require codes to work.

OpenDocument, the web, and video/audio broadcasts
should use Open Standards. And that encourages companies to do a better job of writting the servers and the clients and portable. Currently Microsoft and other companies do poor quality programming and don't offer portability, reliability or security.

So it is not a move to OpenSource but a return to Open source and accountability.

A quality company would embrase opensource. That does not mean they do all their work in the OpenSource, nor that they would not be working for a profit. It just means they work toward quality, security and standards. (work together versus attempting to re-work other peoples work).

The other issue is the messed up patent system where companies patent basic concepts, (like the famous one-click, welcome to a computer with a database.. or a configuration file).

Mark; Like this Reply to this comment