Entrepreneur Dave Rosenberg has a Christmas wish for you.
(This is the first cat my wife and I owned. Mouse over to get the name for this Cat of Christmas past.)
Dave wants to make everyone pay for open source in 2009.
Money is the fuel that keeps things going. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. It [...]

While commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has not grown enough to justify the ridiculous valuations that Wall Street put on the company when it went public a decade ago, the company is more or less on track to break $1bn in sales in the next couple years.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended November [...]

Welcome to the new series, Seven Ways From Sunday, that replaces the Crystal Ball Sunday Series. This new series focuses on a single aspect of IT management from an “in the trenches” point-of-view. Being in list format, it will help you, the busy professional, quickly absorb and assess necessary information.
In this introductory entry, I examine [...]

HP has been quirky over the years when it comes to open source. It has been, traditionally, a company that supports open source — especially in larger enterprises. While large businesses are a major focus for HP — and it has supported open source in other ways — a “smaller business” line of open source [...]

Customer refused refund guaranteed in Windows licensing agreement sues Dell, settles out of court. Case first of its kind in Israel
Zvi Devir from Haifa was recently able to do the impossible: He held Dell to the fine print in its end-user license agreement.
Many laptop manufacturers, such as HP, Lenovo and Dell, have an OEM agreement [...]

After the tech bubble burst, E*Trade’s technology chief, Lee Thompson, needed to find a way to do more with less. In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. “We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending and make alternatives to reduce those [...]

Whether the ailing economy is real or imagined, you might be looking for ways to shed some pounds off your bloated IT budget. You should seriously consider Linux and Open Source software to put your 2009 financial appetite on a diet. Here are 10 reasons to choose Linux in a bad economy and none of [...]

The global economic crisis is taking its toll on many technology companies and Mandriva, the Linux company based in France, has now taken a hit.
Last week, the company announced that it would be terminating the services of all its external contractors, that is those who work from remote locations.
This includes Adam Williamson, a moderator for [...]

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken.
Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks [...]

Running an open source company is not like running a proprietary company.
But how different should it be? Does the difference include publicly beating your breast about mistakes both real and imagined?
Sridhar Vembu is not afraid to find out. The CEO of AdventNet, creators of the Zoho online suite, has quickly become one of the industry’s [...]

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it’s not already here. The stock market’s performance resembles Disney World’s Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another.
Matt Asay of Alfresco, which makes a Linux-based open source content [...]

The other day, in the post How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go? I mentioned that Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems now have such incredibly low market capitalizations that the independent existence of these open source leaders is threatened. The situation is substantially worse a few days later, with Red Hat’s share price [...]

Open-source software is almost universal in the enterprise, a survey from analyst group Gartner Inc. has confirmed.
New research has highlighted how pervasive open-source software (OSS) has become, with 85% of companies currently using OSS and the remaining 15% expecting to in the next 12 months.
The findings come from a Gartner survey conducted in May and [...]

As noted on ZDNet, Black Duck Software, which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, just had a phenomenal third quarter, with quarterly bookings for its services up 62 percent. There were some other strong metrics for the company as well. This company has a shrewd approach toward the growing open source arena, [...]

The sour economy is causing industries and individuals alike to tighten their belts in just about all areas of spending, including software. Downloading free and low-cost open source software is often an attractive alternative to proprietary commercial products. The potential for enterprises and other users switching from high-priced software to open source alternatives poses a [...]

Small and midsize businesses are among the early adopters of open source enterprise applications in Asia, where the majority of open source vendors are based outside the region, according to an IDC report released Tuesday.
Beyond just cost savings, more businesses in the region are turning to open source because they desire to be free of [...]

Ever wonder how much money you could save on computing if you put your mind to it? PCs and Macs can be fabulously expensive if you want peak performance and bells and whistles. But a fairly modest investment is good enough for the basics of Internet and office applications.
Because of the weak economy, I thought [...]

Open-source email company Open-Xchange has raised a $9 million Series B round in a difficult financing environment, bringing its total funding to $17.8 million.
With this fresh infusion of cash Open-Xchange is expected to mount a more serious challenge to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Exchange product. Open-Xchange claims 8.4 million paid mailboxes worldwide.
Read more at CNet

The answer is Yes, it does, though with some qualifications. The short answer: it’s all in the implementation. The long answer starts with taking a look at Canonical’s successes in opening new doors for Linux deployments.
Canonical and Ubuntu have dominated the Linux news scene for several months now, even more than they did before. They’re [...]

Nearly everyday we hear about how the modern Linux distributions are not only ready for the home user, they can even meet the growing demands of many small businesses as well. But rather than debating this point, I’ll examine the tools that would potentially mean that more small businesses would feel the confidence to take [...]