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Posts Tagged ‘open source companies’

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 »

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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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 »

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 »