Mark Cuban is no fool. A tech billionaire, the no-nonsense owner of the Dallas Mavericks is just the sort of person you'd expect to value software patents. So the title of his blog post this Tuesday, "I hope Yahoo crushes Facebook in its patent suit," may not look out of place to you.

read more

The open source community should feel a little safer from software patent attacks today. The Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of Linux contributors formed as a self-defense against software patents, has extended the definition of Linux so that a whopping 700 new software packages are covered, including many developer favorites.

Just one hitch: The new definition also includes carve-outs that put all Linux developers on notice that Phillips and Sony reserve the right to sue over virtualization, search, user interfaces, and more.

read more

Apache Web Server, GNU/Linux Operating System, MySQL Database, Mozilla's Firefox Browser.

All pillars among the open-source community.

Each of these deserves its imminent position as a venerated project. Each has changed the world, and not a little. Moreover, they are the projects that spring to mind when we seek to justify the brilliance of the open-source licensing and development models.

But if this is intended to be a list of the highest-impact and most significant open-source projects, there is a project missing from this list.

VA VistA.

VA VistA is arguably the best electronic health record (EHR) in existence. It was developed over the course of several decades by federal employees in a collaborative, open-source …

Few weeks ago I was invited to a dinner in Manchester with a group of CIOs. It was the occasion to talk about Open Source and the use of Open Source Software in the Enterprise.

The conversation went on for quite a while on what is OSS, why OSS is relevant for an Enterprise and how a relatively large organisation can get benefit from OSS. To me, it was time for a sanity check.

When you work in the OSS world, as many of us do, you tend to forget the fears, the doubts and all in all the deep differences between companies who have embraced OSS and others who have not. I am not referring to Linux as a server platform here, since Linux distributions are nowadays recognised as a great server environment and people tend to forget it is OSS. I refer to OSS in general and to the way OSS is used by developers, IT professionals and end users.

Back to my original subject, i.e. the dinner with the CIOs, I will skip the details of a …

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding smartphone market and open source software. The first question is: what is Oracle doing?

Many are speculating that this is simply an effort to further and more effectively monetize Java, a storied program language that has move more toward openness and survived several supposed death sentences as newer languages arrived. Still, with all of the open source parts — GlassFish application server, MySQL database, OpenOffice.org suite — is Java the most significant to Oracle? It may be, but regardless of what Oracle is doing, its legal moves here may certainly have an impact on the …

I have always considered MySQL as the best model for open source companies. Their approach to the market, the execution of different business models, their relation with the community or the way their work internally as a virtual organization have shown an innovative and successful example of how an IT company in the 21st century can be managed.

The agreement with Sun, announced last January, was the crowning point of all the efforts put in the company since the beginning, proving the success of their innovative model. Since then I have been trying to put some order in my ideas about their model and summarize them in a few blocks that could serve as a quick guide to emulate their success. I discussed my ideas with Henrik Ingo, a friend of mine …

These are the news that left me flabbergasted today. Sun announces an agreement to acquire MySQL for $1bn. I had heard rumors of an IPO and about MySQL going to launch a huge announcement some when this year. But this is much better than what I could ever imagine

Sun has an impressive background in open source development. Systems and applications such as OpenOffice, OpenSolaris or NetBeans, together with the Java programming language, have been developed by Sun. It is also one of the largest IT companies in the world and can bring a very strong global support network. But most importantly, with this move Sun is going to boost MySQL’s credibility in the corporate world, and open source’s credibility by extension.

As Sun’s CEO explains in his …

I just stumbled upon an excellent article where Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL) gives some tips about how to become a disruptor in the software industry. Here is a short summary, though, as always, I recommend reading the whole interview.

• Follow no model: At MySQL, [...] we took our cues from other industries
  

Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have been in the last year. The first day I ended somehow being invited to Novell’s diner for special guests and I was lucky enough to sit close to …