In a recent development IBM & Novell have joined hands together towards contributing code to an open source initiative to build a user centric, online identity management system. Quite similarly Eclipse IDE has been long supported by the consortium of big corporations (including IBM). Now it may sound quite repetitive to read IBM’s name again and again but its slowly but not so quitely making its way into the open source world. In a recent buyout of some open source milestone companies by Oracle, it appears Oracle is also headed open source way. But for the so called bought out open source start-up/established companies their future is now at the mercy of these big corporations. And it appears that for those open source companies it would never be the same again.

Looks like there is a lot of ground which these bought out open source companies have to lose. Company ethics and objectives will be mixed-up, lots of compromising and the challenge of facing threat to merge with the new culture. It might be a tough road ahead for these acquired companies.

For whatever reasons, the future still holds good for the big corporations, and sometimes we see ‘google’ or ‘yahoo’ in the making, but not quite often. Infact, we haven’t seen any in quite a while now.

Technorati Tags: open-source, eclipse, identity+management, initiatives, Oracle, IBM

In a recent development IBM & Novell have joined hands together towards contributing code to an open source initiative to build a user centric, online identity management system. Quite similarly Eclipse IDE has been long supported by the consortium of big corporations (including IBM). Now it may sound quite repetitive to read IBM’s name again and again but its slowly but not so quitely making its way into the open source world. In a recent buyout of some open source milestone companies by Oracle, it appears Oracle is also headed open source way. But for the so called bought out open source start-up/established companies their future is now at the mercy of these big corporations. And it appears that for those open source companies it would never be the same again.

Looks like there is a lot of ground which these bought out open source companies have to lose. Company ethics and objectives will be mixed-up, lots of compromising and the challenge of facing threat to merge with the new culture. It might be a tough road ahead for these acquired companies.

For whatever reasons, the future still holds good for the big corporations, and sometimes we see ‘google’ or ‘yahoo’ in the making, but not quite often. Infact, we haven’t seen any in quite a while now.

Technorati Tags: open-source, eclipse, identity+management, initiatives, Oracle, IBM

© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
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It lurked me today while getting into the unknown dimensions with which some applications architecture is deepened so deep. As I was surfing around the tools which are there on the open source world I found plenty which are duplicate efforts or efforts with minor changes to the one which are already out there. Now, this could be very much true for various other suite of applications. And its true that there is no control over the open source community on what you can or should build and what you cannot or shouldn’t! At SourceForge the possibilities are endless. And it should be because we are talking about the open source world. Its a free community of developers and by far the best. But the point here is should this community be controlled in terms of wasting the re-development of those products which are already out there?

Its a very debatable question. And it seems quite annoying argument to me personally. But if I look beyond the realm it might give a way into more innovative practices of the open source development community rather than limiting their innovation itself. I’m looking here only at the positive side folks. The negatives could be pondered on once we know what’s the benefit already.

Quite surprisingly its not a reality check now or something new which development community has never noticed before. But whenever we come across something like the scenario mentioned here above we simply pass on or just ignore that it exists. I for one wasn’t sure whether I should discuss this in length or breadth. But surely this a topic which could be brought up if not in the immediate future then in the future sometime.

I also suspect that with these buy outs of open source companies we might see a new standard evolving. Or for that matter a control of quality in producing those open source applications. Now I wouldn’t correlate this with the assumption that there would be a mass production of the applications or for that matter the effects of enterprise software would be seen in the open source world as well but surely things are going to change in the open source world with in the next couple of years. And we just have to wait and see what those changes would be or if we get lucky then we could probably get an opportunity to contribute to those changes.

© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Powered by Dextrus Prosoft, Inc.

It lurked me today while getting into the unknown dimensions with which some applications architecture is deepened so deep. As I was surfing around the tools which are there on the open source world I found plenty which are duplicate efforts or efforts with minor changes to the one which are already out there. Now, this could be very much true for various other suite of applications. And its true that there is no control over the open source community on what you can or should build and what you cannot or shouldn’t! At SourceForge the possibilities are endless. And it should be because we are talking about the open source world. Its a free community of developers and by far the best. But the point here is should this community be controlled in terms of wasting the re-development of those products which are already out there?

Its a very debatable question. And it seems quite annoying argument to me personally. But if I look beyond the realm it might give a way into more innovative practices of the open source development community rather than limiting their innovation itself. I’m looking here only at the positive side folks. The negatives could be pondered on once we know what’s the benefit already.

Quite surprisingly its not a reality check now or something new which development community has never noticed before. But whenever we come across something like the scenario mentioned here above we simply pass on or just ignore that it exists. I for one wasn’t sure whether I should discuss this in length or breadth. But surely this a topic which could be brought up if not in the immediate future then in the future sometime.

I also suspect that with these buy outs of open source companies we might see a new standard evolving. Or for that matter a control of quality in producing those open source applications. Now I wouldn’t correlate this with the assumption that there would be a mass production of the applications or for that matter the effects of enterprise software would be seen in the open source world as well but surely things are going to change in the open source world with in the next couple of years. And we just have to wait and see what those changes would be or if we get lucky then we could probably get an opportunity to contribute to those changes.

In the financial world of bulls and bears, we are encompassing a similar stream of cases with the information technology world. Big players eating and gulping the smaller players and wiping out the stream of innovation and creativity. This phenomenon not uncommon and its been happening for centuries in the form of different events not necessarily buyouts. But what’s the fate of these companies, what’s going to get at the end of the day when all these major players buy out those tiny innovative engines and kill that creativity for their own profits and benefits. I for self don’t know. May be there’s a way out of all of this. But for now there doesn’t see to be any. In a recent story published by Business Week it speculates that Oracle is preparing to buy JBOSS, ZEND and Sleepycat Software. The whole IT community to Larry Ellison is like Costco Wholesale. He’s buying in bulk – hopefully he’s getting better discounts and good deals on those buyouts. What’s next Oracle?© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
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The year 2005 was surely of Open Source. Past couple of years of hard work and dedication towards creating something new and challenging has been paying off for the open source developers and the community at large. The collaborative efforts of various teams crossing the borders and boundaries have surely gotten a way with the code they developed and development of systems which are now finding deep roots in an enterprise world.

Today corporate world is focused on acquiring and implementing open source tools and softwares, be it database, application servers, back-end infrastructure software or tools. And in this year 2005 the open source industry has seen some rising numbers of corporate customers confirming this trend.

The way to go today is open source. New business models are taking shapes around open source, and as a metaphor if you have an open source model for a new venture and you go and visit Sand Hill Road, the venture firms will throw so much money at you that you could get bruised! Not likely, but its a thought. Despite all this, the dual licensing process has kicked in fast and is spreading than ever before. New business models based on free for open source usage and charged license fee for a commercial product or free basic software and charge for higher end-version or service is now gaining ground. Venture funding is kicking in for SoA based companies. And in recent move by big corporations, Sun Microsystems was the clear winner, who made its flagship and ailing product ‘Solaris’ open source. Sun expects to have more demand for its services and servers as it goes open source. Also, later in the year Sun made the the entire gamut of its Java product line open source and also made it available free of charge.

Bottom-line to all this is to have a deeper penetration for a company’s products and services in the market, and gain a better market share in doing so. And given this scenario, we should be ready to accept that big companies such as Oracle, IBM, Sun, BEA, Google, and Yahoo would not be far behind in acquiring small and valuable companies who develop state-of-the-art open source products either complementing their technology or making them better.

Licensing is another big issue in the open source world. What’s there for free and what’s not still confuses a lot of people and most of all companies who actually want to use and implement these open source products. And with so many licenses floating around this is bound to happen. Until the industry finds a solutions to all this by standardizing the licensing process and come with a manifesto for the benefit of the open source community. This might be a good opportunity for the open-source software legal experts. A better understanding on open source licenses is a dire need today from the corporate customer viewpoint.

© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Powered by Dextrus Prosoft, Inc.

In the financial world of bulls and bears, we are encompassing a similar stream of cases with the information technology world. Big players eating and gulping the smaller players and wiping out the stream of innovation and creativity. This phenomenon not uncommon and its been happening for centuries in the form of different events not necessarily buyouts. But what’s the fate of these companies, what’s going to get at the end of the day when all these major players buy out those tiny innovative engines and kill that creativity for their own profits and benefits. I for self don’t know. May be there’s a way out of all of this. But for now there doesn’t see to be any. In a recent story published by Business Week it speculates that Oracle is preparing to buy JBOSS, ZEND and Sleepycat Software. The whole IT community to Larry Ellison is like Costco Wholesale. He’s buying in bulk – hopefully he’s getting better discounts and good deals on those buyouts. What’s next Oracle?

The year 2005 was surely of Open Source. Past couple of years of hard work and dedication towards creating something new and challenging has been paying off for the open source developers and the community at large. The collaborative efforts of various teams crossing the borders and boundaries have surely gotten a way with the code they developed and development of systems which are now finding deep roots in an enterprise world.

Today corporate world is focused on acquiring and implementing open source tools and softwares, be it database, application servers, back-end infrastructure software or tools. And in this year 2005 the open source industry has seen some rising numbers of corporate customers confirming this trend.

The way to go today is open source. New business models are taking shapes around open source, and as a metaphor if you have an open source model for a new venture and you go and visit Sand Hill Road, the venture firms will throw so much money at you that you could get bruised! Not likely, but its a thought. Despite all this, the dual licensing process has kicked in fast and is spreading than ever before. New business models based on free for open source usage and charged license fee for a commercial product or free basic software and charge for higher end-version or service is now gaining ground. Venture funding is kicking in for SoA based companies. And in recent move by big corporations, Sun Microsystems was the clear winner, who made its flagship and ailing product ‘Solaris’ open source. Sun expects to have more demand for its services and servers as it goes open source. Also, later in the year Sun made the the entire gamut of its Java product line open source and also made it available free of charge.

Bottom-line to all this is to have a deeper penetration for a company’s products and services in the market, and gain a better market share in doing so. And given this scenario, we should be ready to accept that big companies such as Oracle, IBM, Sun, BEA, Google, and Yahoo would not be far behind in acquiring small and valuable companies who develop state-of-the-art open source products either complementing their technology or making them better.

Licensing is another big issue in the open source world. What’s there for free and what’s not still confuses a lot of people and most of all companies who actually want to use and implement these open source products. And with so many licenses floating around this is bound to happen. Until the industry finds a solutions to all this by standardizing the licensing process and come with a manifesto for the benefit of the open source community. This might be a good opportunity for the open-source software legal experts. A better understanding on open source licenses is a dire need today from the corporate customer viewpoint.

I haven’t really been active from past couple of months on my blog as most of my energy is going towards my new project Dextrus Prosoft, Inc. And now, with my involvement increasing in open source projects I’ve finally decided to expand the horizon for my blog and come up with a space which is more info-sourcable (no such word but look at it as ‘information’ + ‘source’) than what it already is and hence the birth of Open Source World.

Open Source World would present a platform for Open Source News, Forums, Blogs, Articles, Books, and Jobs to name a few, also I’ll invite great minds working in the open source world to be part of this effort by joining the site and provide their valuable contribution on a regular basis. The idea behind Open Source World this is to provide the Open Source community a centralized avenue where the information on its technology and other areas can be easily obtained.

This blog will continue to be available on this site here and the RSS feeds would be available here.

I haven’t really been active from past couple of months on my blog as most of my energy is going towards my new project Dextrus Prosoft, Inc. And now, with my involvement increasing in open source projects I’ve finally decided to expand the horizon for my blog and come up with a space which is more info-sourcable (no such word but look at it as ‘information’ + ‘source’) than what it already is and hence the birth of Open Source World.

Open Source World would present a platform for Open Source News, Forums, Blogs, Articles, Books, and Jobs to name a few, also I’ll invite great minds working in the open source world to be part of this effort by joining the site and provide their valuable contribution on a regular basis. The idea behind Open Source World this is to provide the Open Source community a centralized avenue where the information on its technology and other areas can be easily obtained.

This blog will continue to be available on this site here and the RSS feeds would be available here.

© Manoj Khanna/Open Source World/rapidblog.com 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Powered by Dextrus Prosoft, Inc.