Business

Dave Rosenberg, CEO and co-founder of open source SOA infrastructure software vendor Mulesource, is well-versed in capitalizing on open source opportunities in the enterprise, transforming projects into products with viable business models. Here's how Rosenberg sees open source's business opportunities evolving.

Javier Soltero, CEO of open source IT management software vendor Hyperic, has garnered significant wisdom transforming open source projects into enterprise products and expresses keen interest in the need to match worthwhile open source undertakings with the appropriate business model. Here's how Soltero sees the open source movement evolving.

As senior director of platform technology at Microsoft, Sam Ramji is positioned uniquely at the nexus of proprietary and open source development models. Here's how Ramji sees open source and proprietary development models evolving.

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.

Chris DiBona is a key advocate of open source development at Google, where he spearheads the Google Summer of Code and oversees license compliance. A former editor of Slashdot, DiBona is no stranger to the passions of the open source community. Here's what DiBona sees brewing for open source.

Bruce Perens, a longtime leader in the open source movement, is rarely remiss in speaking his mind on open source matters. Here's how Perens breaks down the key opportunities and challenges for open source in the years to come.

As CEO of EnterpriseDB, Andy Astor endeavors to raise the profile of the PostgresQL open source database to the level of prominence he believes it deserves. But when it comes to capitalizing on an open source project's potential, there is much debate regarding the appropriate business model to employ. Here's how Astor sees the possibility of coexistence between developers and capitalists unfolding.

As vice president of business development at open source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco, Matt Asay is well-versed in the challenges open source projects face in capitalizing on today's business opportunities. Here's how Asay sees the open source movement evolving.

You're now with Qumranet which is the company behind KVM. Can you briefly tell me about the design of KVM and how that differs from previous virtualization approaches such as Xen and VMware?

Viewed by many as open source's most compelling business play in the past few years, MySQL made waves this year, accepting Sun Microsystems' US$1 billion acquisition bid, opening eyes on Wall Street as to open source's potential to shake up the software industry in the process.

The LiMo Foundation was formed on January 2007 as a consortium of mobile industry companies joining together to create for handsets an open and standardized software platform based on Linux. Their goal is to deliver an open handset format that will become more widely accepted and used over closed, proprietary platforms. The foundation's major founders include Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone. These companies and other members share leadership and decision making.

Two years ago, when Google took its first steps in the office productivity market, the move generated much buzz, mostly because it was seen as another competitive clash with Microsoft.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World.

The Internet engineering community will be eating its own dog food tonight. For one hour, the 1,250 network experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting will be able to access the Internet only through IPv6. The IETF created IPv6 in the mid-1990s, but this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol has not yet been widely deployed -- even by the technology's biggest proponents here. Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan talked with IETF Chair Russ Housley about the group's IPv6 experiment, why the transition to IPv6 is taking so long, and whether the IETF leadership is starting to panic about IPv4 addresses running out. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

The European Union's 899-million-euro antitrust fine is the result of a continuous effort by the European Commission dating back to 2000. Carlo Piana, a partner at the Milan law firm Studio Legale Tamos Piana & Partners, represented the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba project in the case.