Open Channels

Archive for the ‘Companies’ Category

A while back I was doing some research for a client and came across an apparent GPL slight of hand engineered by Sun and IBM.  Time constraints and competing priorities kept me from writing about this until now, and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has taken Sun off of the hot seat (see in particular paragraph 2, Non Assertion), but it’s still a pretty juicy story.  What’s more, I think it’s healthy to expose vendor behaviors that cut against the spirit of open source, creating unfair advantages for a privileged few at the expense of everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

June 30, 2010.  Today LoopFuse, Inc. launched FreeView, a freemium edition of the company’s OneView marketing automation application.  In LoopFuse’s words, “FreeView is a fully-functional marketing automation platform designed to meet the needs of SMB marketers” and includes core marketing automation functionality such as lead scoring, visitor analytics and multi-level email campaigning.

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I’ve been doing research on open source licensing strategies and community interactions for an upcoming report.  My research brought me to the Ingres Community Forum, where I hoped to gain some insight about Ingres’ traction as an open source player.  Ingres uses a dual-license model (GPL v2 with FLOSS exception) and runs a vendor-managed community.

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You are the Marketing Programs Manager for an open source software company.  Your job is to spin flax into gold.  You must progressively engage hundreds of thousands of website visitors, integrate registered contacts with lead lists you’ve sourced from 3rd party providers, drive audience-specific email campaigns to contacts in your target markets, and pass qualified leads to your CRM system for follow-up by your sales team.  On the back end of all this activity, you need to provide your boss with weekly metrics that correlate pipeline and bookings to campaigns and lead sources.

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EnterpriseDB announced a new program today aimed squarely at Oracle users who are fed up with Oracle’s drumbeat of price increases.  Oracle recently announced a 40% hike in the price of its database tools on the heels of a 20% increase in the price its core database product in 2008.

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Open Channels kicks off a series of vendor reports with Bluenog Corporation, a venture capital funded start-up in the web application development space.  Bluenog’s solutions aim to help organizations develop, integrate and deliver high value Web content, positioning the company to play a vital role in the progressive engagement lifecycle.

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As disclosed by Peter Galli, a Microsoft open source community spokesperson, Microsoft intends to include C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in Microsoft’s Community Promise, a public commitment not to assert patent claims or other rights related to the implementation of those standards.  According to Galli:

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

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Bruce Byfield takes a rational position in his Datamation article about the ongoing Mono controversy.  For those new to the subject, Mono is a “free” implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework.  The crux of the issue is that Mono shares a core of intellectual property with .NET, and that core is covered by Microsoft patents.  The free software community fears that, if Mono becomes integral to popular open source distros (i.e., that wish to offer compatibility and interoperability with .NET), Microsoft will some day assert its patent rights.  Read the rest of this entry »

Many software companies are operating in the dark ages of marketing.  Their notions of demand generation are to drop hundreds of thousands of emails on cold, externally-sourced contact lists, watch for activity on their landing pages, and shoot at whatever moves. Read the rest of this entry »

After a cacophony of issues associated with its 5.0 and 5.1 releases, including those documented during the vocal departure of Monty Widenius, Sun is rejigging MySQL’s development model.  According to Robin Schumacher, MySQL’s Director of Product Management, the new release process will be comprised of the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Today EnterpriseDB announced the release of Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3R2.  This is a significant step for EDB’s product strategy.  8.3R2 creates meaningful distance between Advanced Server and the other products in EDB’s database line-up – Postgres Plus Standard Server and PostgreSQL community database. Read the rest of this entry »