Compliance. Funding. Financial results. Copyright assignment. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Compliance
# The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program, including tools, training, and consulting.

Funding
# VentureBeat reported that Joyent has raised $7m in a second round of funding.

# Basho Technologies secured $2m from angel investors in a Series C preferred equity financing.

# …

Topics for this podcast:

*The latest in VC funding for open source
*VMware’s SpringSource buys cloud messenger Rabbit
*Open source monitoring vendors’ key cloud partnershps
*Oracle moves ahead, back on MySQL, OpenSolaris

iTunes or direct download (25:38, 7MB)

One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the …

A recent pitch from the folks opposing Oracle’s ownership of MySQL via acquisition of Sun Microsystems got me thinking. The plea, ‘Oracle can have Sun, but not MySQL’ may make sense to some, but to me it speaks to the irony of closing out Oracle or any company or anyone from open source. Upon further reflection and given 2010 is off to a roaring pace of M&A, I also began to wonder what the impact of the ‘Save MySQL’ campaign could be on open source in M&A, particularly if it was to successfully derail the acquisition or somehow decouple MySQL from Sun under Oracle?

What would it mean to carve out the open source projects, components, teams and support from companies involved in mergers and acquisitions over …

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

Topics for this podcast:

*EC pauses Oracle-Sun over MySQL
* Open source licenses debated
* Red Hat growth opportunities and Summit roundup
* Reductive Labs seeking cloud role for Puppet software
* VMware-SpringSource analyzed

iTunes or direct download (26:04, 5.9 MB)

We reported recently on Red Hat’s revenue growth and deferred revenue. One of the things I have been looking at recently is the slowdown in Red Hat’s growth in recent years, and the opportunities that the company has to improve that growth.

For some perspective it is worth noting that while Red Hat’s revenue has been growing steadily:

The rate of growth has been in decline for some time:

We have also noted (451 Group clients only) that the company will in …

Governments. Governance. Customers wins. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Governments
The Examiner provided a two part interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards, open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was reported that Vienna to …

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Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors - Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital - no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to acquire the other without shared investors).

When examining the open source vendor landscape it is tempting to imagine that the combined total could be bigger than the sum of its parts - that a combination of many open source product specialists could mount a challenge to Red Hat and Sun to claim the title of biggest open source software vendor.

Benchmark and Accel are among …