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Paid developers power the Linux kernel

The Linux Foundation is releasing its "Who Writes Linux" analysis, illustrating who crafts the code, the pace of its evolution, and which companies are behind the kernel's development.

Kernel development follows a time-based release model with a new release occurring every two to three months. This is designed to help speed the development for all Linux distributions so that each one doesn't need to make kernel-specific updates or changes. More than 6,100 individual developers from more 600 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005, according the report.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, more

'Behavioral cloudonomics' cuts both ways

Understanding the economics of cloud computing is critical to driving the right operations decisions for IT organizations of all sizes.

Some months ago Joe Weinman, vice president of corporate strategy at AT&T, posted a primer of sorts explaining the mathematics of computing utilities. When should an IT organization choose a public cloud computing or storage utility? Should you select dedicated systems for your application, or perhaps a hybrid cloud envionment, combining public clouds with internal cloud computing resources? Weinman's post has formulas that can help answer these questions and more.

Last week, Weinman followed up that post with more

Microsoft--down but by no means out

The living dead never looked so good.

For several years now Microsoft has been written off by friends and foes alike as a shuffling shadow of its former self, doomed to feed off the profits of past successes while it goes gentle into the good night of irrelevance. And yet Microsoft's profits remain enviable and its outlook far from bleak.

It may be too soon to engrave Microsoft's headstone as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently did.

Microsoft, after all, has a history of making dramatic changes in direction, changes that have saved it more than once from software

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 ODF. The price is now $90 per user, more

Google and Sun: Same vision, different results

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is betting on a mobile, cloud-based future and is winning.

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz bet big on that same future...with dramatically different results.

What is the defining difference between these two executives and their companies?

It's easy to suggest that the answer must be because Google employees are simply smarter than their counterparts at Sun, or that Schmidt is a rock-star CEO while Schwartz was not. But history belies such facile reasoning.

For one thing, there's no shortage of Sun employees at Google, including, most recently and notably, Tim Bray, who more

Nokia: We will match Apple, RIM

Nokia is a rather interesting company. The firm is still a major player in the mobile space, holding on to the largest share of the market. But 2009 was a difficult year for Nokia as its grip on the space continued to slip.

Worst of all, Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry models have made Nokia devices look old and obsolete.

Perhaps that's why the company's new mobile chief, Rick Simonson, decided to speak with the India Times on Monday to clear the air. Simonson acknowledges that things aren't great, but he's not willing to throw in the towel.

"Yes, we have lost ground in the smartphone space over the past 18 months, but the decline has stopped and stablized in the second and third quarters of 2009," Simonson told the India Times. "The new year will see [our] recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilization of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally."

Simonson went on to say that Nokia shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2009. The main problem for Nokia, Simonson said, is that it's "not well positioned in North America, which is a huge market."

But his company has a plan.

Novell's quarter crumbles, but a new market beckons

The next time you feel tempted to laud the power of the open-source business model, take a look at Novell.

Novell has been struggling for over 10 years, yet it still manages to crank out nearly $1 billion in sales each year, most of which derives from the licensing of proprietary software.

Novell reported its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday, along with results from its full fiscal year. They're not pretty, but they do suggest a path forward for the erstwhile software leader.

Novell saw its sales slump over 12 percent from its year-ago quarter to $216 million. For the more

Amazon's move mocks EU's fear of Oracle

The European Commission must be feeling a bit silly right about now. Despite insisting that Oracle has not responded to its requests for comment and concessions in its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and the open-source database MySQL), Amazon.com recently offered the EC all the proof it needs that MySQL competition remains alive and well.

For those who missed it, Amazon announced last week a fork of the popular MySQL database, called RDS (Relational Database Service). RDS is essentially a hosted version of MySQL, one that developers can write to at the minuscule cost of pennies per hour.

Oracle more

EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source

It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.

Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?

In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed more

Can open source stop navel gazing and get real?

Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.

We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it's often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world--interoperability, transparency, etc.--are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.

As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise "no lock-in" as a more