75 Open Source Replacements for Popular Small Business Software

For many small businesses, open source software represents an unexplored gold mine. When you run a small business, budgets are always tight. While you need many of the same kinds of software that larger businesses need, you don’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on that software like bigger companies do. The open [...]

Pentaho Open Sources Key Tools for Big Data Analytics

Among open source tools for business, Business Intelligence (BI) platforms are rapidly increasing in popularity. These applications are used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. The tools typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data, and produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. Among the [...]

How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers

Copyleft licenses have been the most popular choice for new open source projects. Recently, however, developers and companies seem to be moving from the GPL in favor of less restrictive permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind the trend and how does it impact your business? Read more at CIO

How Small Business PrintedArt Uses Linux and Open Source

Sure, Linux is great for big organizations like Google, Facebook, and others, but what about small business? Take a look at PrintedArt. Founded in 2010, PrintedArt is an online shop that sells limited-editions of fine art photography. It now has three full-time and three part-time employees and eight sales representatives. According to President and CEO [...]

Fight SOPA/PIPA, change your license

All over the free world, government laws and court decisions are limiting our access to free Internet. Not that these measures are very useful, most of us hackers are able to circumvent them within minutes. But in essence, these counter measures are simply work-arounds – they do not eliminate the root cause. The root cause [...]

10 Open Source Shopping Carts to Run Your Ecommerce Business

More and more companies have turned to the Web to transact business. And, of course, if you are going to sell on the Web, the right shopping cart can mean the difference between red and black ink. When shopping for your own ecommerce shopping cart software the most important aspect to consider is how well [...]

92 Open Source Apps That Replace Everyday Software

If you’ve never tried open source software, you might think that free applications couldn’t possibly be as good as those you pay for. This list might change your mind. Nearly two years ago, we put together a list of 75 Open Source Tools to Replace Apps You Use Every Day. This year, we made that [...]

Open source writing tools

There has been an impressive change in tools and techniques which writers can use for the good. It is easy to locate one (or more) for individual needs. Whether it is writing a novel, graphics applications or tutorials, these writing tools can serve multipurpose. Writing skills can gain unmatched dimensions on integrating with these advanced [...]

Using open source to build the ultimate walled garden

Much has been made about AT&T’s surprise entry into the OpenStack project earlier this week. Most notably, why the major U.S. carrier decided to sign up for OpenStack in the first place. That’s no slam on OpenStack, mind you: the Rackspace-owned cloud computing project is much-beloved in the open source community for the technology and [...]

Winners and Losers in Business Open-Source Software

We all know that Linux, Apache and Samba are vital for business data center servers, Web servers and file and print servers respectively in businesses both large and small. What you may not know though what’s trending below the top-tier of open-source software. That’s where OpenLogic, an enterprise open-source software provider and consultants comes in. [...]

Open Source Software and Intellectual Property Issues

Open Source Software and Intellectual Property Issues Open source software has proliferated in the last few years, and it’s not difficult to see why it’s so popular. The ability to get a quality product for free has revolutionised many people’s use of information technology. Rather than the world of IT being characterised by a power [...]

Going All-FOSS With a New Computer

Linux bloggers’ New Year’s resolutions tend to be many and varied in any given year, but one most can surely agree upon is the desire to outfit a new PC with nothing but free software. That sentiment, indeed, is just the one that was anticipated over at Computeractive UK, which published a compelling little story [...]

Hungary: Open standards for documents

The Hungarian government has decided that, from April 2012, public administrations in Hungary should only provide official documents in internationally recognised open standards-based document formats and must be able to accept and process such documents. Quoting Hungarian media, a report on the EU Joinup collaboration platform said that only the Ministry of Defence will have [...]

5 Best (and Easy) Open Source Website Builders

It is essential to have a Web presence for your business, even if it’s no more than a simple information page. Your customers will look for a website to learn about your business before they look for a phone book or newspaper ad. You can publish and maintain your website yourself, and with these five [...]

Open Source Apps: the Monster List

It’s become something of an annual tradition at Datamation to end the year with a gigantic compilation of all the open source software we’ve surveyed over the past twelve months or so. (See 2010′s Open Source Apps: the Ultimate List and 2009′s Open Source Software: The Monster List.) This year’s retrospective is bigger than ever [...]

Nine Open Source Discoveries I Made in 2011

When writing about free and open source software, sometimes I seem to spend all my time complaining. So, after last week, when I described 2011 as a whole as a disappointment, I thought I should add some balance by mentioning some of the free software-related discoveries that delighted me during the past year. Many of [...]

Open source licences: the GPL appears to be declining

According to an analysis by the 451 Group, the proportion of open source projects that uses the GPL family of licences has been declining for several years. According to the market researchers, in the summer of 2008, 70 per cent of projects were GPL- and LGPL-licensed; today it has fallen to 57 per cent. In [...]

Open Source Projects Focus on a Greener, Safer Planet

In the past, we’ve covered a number of open source projects focused on humanitarian goals, but did you know that open source communities are also increasingly focused on contributing to a greener, more sustainable planet? There are thriving open source communities focused on ecological goals. In this post, find out about some of the most [...]

European IT authorities want better OOXML in Libre/OpenOffice

IT authorities from Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are working together, under the auspices of the Open Source Business Alliance, to improve the way that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org display and process OOXML-formatted documents. The authorities involved include the IT groups from the cities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg im Breisgau, the Swiss canton [...]

Doing geospatial business with FLOSS: An Interview with CartoDB

This week we have for you an interview with Simon Tokumine and Javier de la Torre from CartoDB, an open source geospatial cloud database with a business model. Enjoy the interview! F4S: Please, give us a brief introduction about CartoDB. CartoDB: CartoDB is a geospatial database on the cloud. We enable developers and data explorers [...]