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Displaying posts with tag: Trolltech (reset)
Fear and loathing and open core

Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so.

My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment.

The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

The evidence? Mark praises the strategy Trolltech took of selling proprietary licenses.

The problem? Trolltech did not follow the open core licensing strategy. Neither did MySQL, which Bradley suggests …

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Does Consona-Compiere mean community doesn’t matter?

There was another acquisition involving open source software recently when Consona bought Compiere, but what is perhaps most striking about the deal from an open source software perspective is how little it and the Compiere community mattered in the deal.

By most accounts, including that of fellow open source ERP player xTuple CEO Ned Lilly, who offers an interesting and accurate depiction of Compiere’s changes, acknowledge the movement away from community that occurred over the last few years at Compiere. As discussed in our own recent report on the deal, we are also somewhat skeptical over the fate of what is left of Compiere’s open source community, even though Consona plans to …

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Save MySQL would not spare open source M&A

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 …

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A decade of open source IPOs

Red Hat is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of its initial public offering. An anniversary to be proud of for Red Hat, but one that has given The VAR Guy pause for thought about the relative success of open source in the past 10 years.

“Would anyone have predicted that no additional open source companies would launch IPOs over the next decade? Ten years without an open source IPO … amazing and somewhat depressing for open source business advocates,” writes the VAR Guy.

It is somewhat depressing that there are not more public open source vendors. However, the statement that there have been …

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2008 The Year of the Acquisition: Microsoft Bids on Yahoo!, Amazon buys Audible

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

  • I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
  • Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder …
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Trolltech: Another Open Source Company Get?s Gobbled Up

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners …

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Showing entries 1 to 6