The Red Hat Way
Really inspiring.
This is a very motivational article about open source and why companies may want to be involved in the development of open source software.
It happens to talk about Canonical, but it doesn’t matter it’s a sensible example (remember recent flames about Canonical contributions in Gnome), I believe it’s absolutely a must read.
What any company with interest in open source should do.
Felinx Lee sent a mail to Tornado developers mailing list announcing a new directory to expose different frameworks, languages, and web servers that power the web.
The website itself was made with Tornado, and its source code it’s available.
"Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine - OpenStack Compute - and a fully distributed storage engine - OpenStack Object Storage."
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From Opening the Rackspace Cloud.
Rackspace makes its cloud infrastructure open source! The site of the project is OpenStack.
"I actually quite like the model of a free* version of software and then a paid-for pro version with extra coolness. It’s a model that works well. But when you combine that with Open Source, it becomes a little more dubious (maybe) because there’s the possibility that you use the name of Open Source but create a system where in practice, people can’t meaningfully participate and it’s primarily a hook into the paid version."
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From Slashdot comment on ‘SugarCRM 6 Released, But Is It Open Source?’ (* I think he meant free as in free beer).
Very insightful and worth reading comment that sums up all the downsides I’ve seen in open core based products.
You may argue that the open core model helps the company use an open source development model while keep making money in the old-fashioned-way just selling licenses, but it won’t happen: there won’t be an open source community, because it would be enemy of your business model (which is selling licenses!).
Deltacloud Moved from Red Hat to ASF Incubator
I read from David Lutterkort blog that Deltacloud Core goes to the Incubator.
Deltacloud it’s an abstraction layer that provides an uniform API to deal with different cloud providers, supporting EC2, GoGrind, OpenNebula, RackSpace, RimuHosting, etc; and obviously RHEV-M, because Deltacloud was initiated by Red Hat as open source project.
According to Lutterkort, a lot of people liked the idea of a OSS cloud API, but they weren’t happy with it being a Red Hat project. To fix that, Deltacloud it’s now an ASF Incubator project, and in the future most likely will become a full Apache Software Foundation project.
With all the recent open core debate, it’s very interesting this move from Red Hat: you don’t like us to have control over a 100% open source project, so we’re donating it to ASF. Brilliant.
"Why would StarDivision want to draw attention to their traditional feature gap, by making noise about shipping multimedia support four+ years late? while simultaneously alienating valuable contributors and continuing to tear down its developer community (that would love to help close OO.o’s feature gap)?"
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From OpenOffice & GStreamer, by Michael Meeks.
Very good question, and a worth reading post.
I really enjoyed the quality argument part, because you know how pleased I am with OpenOffice.org’s quality (just in case: I’m being sarcastic).
"In short, open core is a model where a company produces a product that is mostly available as open source, but then there are some closed source components around the open source “core”. The point of the model is that it is supposedly easier to sell closed source than open source."
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From Open core is not open source.
I agree that the open core model
makes you produce more close source software, because the open core it’s based in selling closed source software and not open source.
Henrik Hingo uses Red Hat and Canonical as a good examples of open source based companies that are doing it well, but I’m not that sure.
The open core advocates say that selling closed source it’s good, because that allows them to make more open source software. It makes sense, to some extent, and we’ve seen Canonical use the same argument to support some unpopular decisions (even the closed source of their Ubuntu One services).
You know, because a company needs to make money to hire developers to work on open source. It’s scary, isn’t it?
"We simply did not notice, but should have. We did not check the files on all mirrors regularly, but should have. We did not sign releases through PGP/GPG, but should have done so."
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From Linux Trojan Raises Malware Concerns.
Linux, let’s say OSS, isn’t secure per se. You have to do your work.
"As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the ‘open source’ brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of ‘open source’ as we know it."
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From Google’s WebM license could undermine the meaning of ‘open source’ (via Google WebM Calls “Open Source” Into Question).
That’s true, and it comes with the hype of any technology or trend. Is Open Source trendy? That’s good news, isn’t it?
I don’t think Google it’s undermining the meaning of Open Source, and I’m sure that they’re going to fix it (if there’s a real problem).
