JasperSoft’s business development director Andrew Lampitt has kicked off his new blog with an interesting post related to business models used by open source-related vendors.

In it he attempts to define the approach utilized by the likes of JasperSoft and SugarCRM, which offer open source products with core functionality, as well as commercial extensions. The approach is a twist on the dual licensing approach made famous by MySQL* where the vendor, as copyright holder, makes the code available under both the GNU GPL and a commercial license for customers that would rather avoid the GPL.

The approach taken by JasperSoft et al is not to segment by user base but by features. As Andrew explains, “the commercial license is a super-set of the open source product, i.e., it offers premium product features that you will not see in …

Continuent is probably best known for its database clustering technology for MySQL, as well as PostgreSQL, but the company has for some time had its sights set on expanding beyond open source databases and enabling horizontal database scalability.

It has just taken a major step towards delivering on both counts with the launch of Tungsten, its new stack of open source middleware technologies designed to enable low-cost databases to scale horizontally for database failover and continuity.

Tungsten includes includes Sequoia, the existing …

A couple of articles have been published recently that point to a growing realisation/admission about the role that open source will play in the future of enterprise software.

In “The Commercial Bear Hug of Open Source” Dan Woods details the various methods by which open source has become increasingly commercial in recent years, while in “The Microsoft-Novell Deal and Trust in Princes” Bruce Byfield discusses the relationship between business and open source.

Neither article is perfect. Woods, in particular, appears to paint open source in the role of the glorious failure - failing to surpass traditional licensing models and being subsumed into the mainstream (a subject …

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”

I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading BusinessWeek’s article on the potential perils facing open source vendors today. It seems to ask all the right questions, but not necessarily in the right way.

The report suggests that while industry giants such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Intel stand to benefit from open source software, investor impatience could spell trouble for open source …

Agenda:

* CAOS Report 8 - Community Linux
* Linuxworld review
* A look at SourceForge
* Microsoft’s new database push

iTunes or direct download (26:48, 6.1MB)

I was in San Francisco at the tail-end of last week and was fortunate to have some time to meet up with Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL core team and, until recently, a Sun employee.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including his reasons for leaving Sun (he didn’t go into detail but suffice to say he’s working a business idea), the future of the database market (more choice, more horizontal scaling, more use of specialist databases), the future of PostgreSQL (as a development platform), the level or authorization afforded to the Drizzle project, and the future of Sun.

I won’t go into the latter now, but the …

Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired.

The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source vendors most likely to go public in the next couple of years.

Looking at the list of contenders again it is easy to imagine that they could all be snapped up before they make it public thanks to the fact that 1) open source vendors are very attractive investments 2) it is difficult for open source vendors to build the momentum to do so.

I spoke recently with …

Kickfire and 10gen obtain new rounds of funding. BusyBox developers drop lawsuit against Supermicro. OpenLogic and EnterpriseDB release open source survey findings. (and more)

Kickfire Raises $20 Million in Series B Financing, Kickfire (Press Release)

10gen, New Cloud Computing Firm, Closes $1.5m Series A, 10gen (Press Release)

BusyBox Developers and Supermicro Agree to End GPL Lawsuit, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) (Press Release)

OpenLogic Releases Survey on Enterprise Open Source …

Dana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.

Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?”

He also notes that “On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to MySQL and Ingres.”

However, one need only remember …

We knew Marc Fleury couldn’t stay out of the business world for long. The founder of JBoss has leaked details of his new venture, an open source home automation community named OpenRemote.

The OpenRemote team also includes the creator of Asterisk Mark Spencer, JBoss veterans Juha Lindfors, Christian Bauer, Java X10 project creator Wade Wassenberg, and Linux Home Automation founder Neil Cherry.

Together they, and others, plan to create a complete open source home automation including the OpenRemote Controller hardware, OpenRemote Console Applications to make use of the iPhone and iTouch as a universal remote (although any device with browser will work), …