Stories about: Open Source Solutions

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst expects the enterprise open source software business to emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market.

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 per cent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren't necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 per cent said their policies are very effective.

Red Hat released a beta version of a Linux-based hypervisor Wednesday that can be loaded onto servers and desktop computers with a flash drive.

Open source icon Stormy Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters recently discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open source software is more secure than proprietary code.

Open source players will need to swap baggy jeans for suits if they want to secure lucrative enterprise and government contracts, experts say.

OpenGroupware.org is relatively unknown outside the Open Source developer scene, yet it's one of the oldest projects around: This groupware has origins dating back to 1996.

Everywhere you turn nowadays, another company is targeting the Small and Medium Business (SMB) marketplace. SMBs are growing, and represent a segment of the IT market that has not been fully exploited by many, including open source software vendors that boasted early successes with large enterprises.

In 2006, Massachusetts' then CIO, Peter Quinn, described the open source community as the "sandal and ponytail set," and claimed that image and appearance made open source a harder sell for use in his state government. While those are some pretty powerful words, it begs the question: is there such a thing as a "Linux person?"

Novell will head to court this April to find out what it is owed, if anything, by SCO, which had been trying to earn royalties from Unix code it did not own.

Openbravo, an Open Source web-based ERP product, was project of the month on SourceForge in September. The project uses a Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1). It has 68 developers and over 200 contributors and has been downloaded over 350,000 times; with that number increasing by about 1,000 downloads per day.

Open source is disruptive, it develops rapidly, is adopted quickly, and it efficiently meets market needs while enabling new market capabilities. These were some of the statements made at an open source symposium held in Western Australia (WA) earlier this month.