Riding on the open-source wagon

"In a market overflowing with Internet-enabled applications, vendors increasingly are counting on the magic words "open source" to attract venture capitalists, partners, and customer interest.

But are software vendors using open source merely as a way to stand out from the crowd? Or do open-source versions of applications merit consideration above and beyond the buzzword factor?"

Those nagging open source details

""Basically, their message is, the only way to run your business is to have one very-powerful database," Error said. "Maybe you can have one back-up [database] server for redundancy, or if you really want to get crazy you can adopt their parallel server product, but most companies can't afford that. [Oracle] is really neglecting the whole distributed idea, that you can partition a database across multiple machines and take advantage of the scaling effects that come as a result."

In other words, the same market forces that three years ago forced many Internet Service Providers to use Linux and Apache as Web servers have created the opportunity for growing open source marketshare in the database market as well."

Choosing Open Source: What Does It Mean?

"So I guess if I had to formulate a succinct answer to Joe's question, I'd have to say this: Linux is not behind Windows because Linux isn't following Windows. We're doing things a different way, the correct way. We admit bugs when they happen and do our best to fix them. Our feature sets are not dictated by marketing and PR departments. We give back to the community. We help each other. We foster the belief that stability and correctness are fundamental to design. We do not lie to our users or to each other. Money is nice, but it's not our primary motivator. We are proud, passionate, nettlesome, partisan, opinionated, occasionally muleheaded and foul-mouthed. Linux is a belief system and a philosophy as much as a body of software.

I choose to belong to this society because I want to stand for something. I want my code to stand for something besides profit and loss."

Inside Red Hat: An interview with the CEO

"People don't buy operating systems. They buy solutions to a business problem. I think back on this because there were 14 applications running on Red Hat Linux at the time of our IPO. Today we guesstimate that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 applications."

"The place that we have is at the root-directory level of Linux. So imagine our capability: being able to get inside of somebody's network architecture, server architecture, with complete open source solutions that allow me to automatically configure systems for you, with over 600 different open source products and packages that have been certified by Red Hat. That can be mirrored and delivered to you all online."

Open-sourcing the Apple

"A powerful OS that runs popular applications would represent a Unix that has finally grown up. And it would present us with a truly interesting question: Should Microsoft be worried? I say yes, because Mac OS X can potentially challenge Windows both in usability and in industrial reliability; but, no, because Apple's slice of the market is still too small, and Microsoft's sway with developers and independent software vendors is too high.

Apple's chances would increase greatly if instead of merely incorporating portions of an open-source operating system in Mac OS X, the company fully committed to the open-source software development model and freed all of its OS source code."

Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software

"Commercial software companies face many challenges in growing their business in today's fast-moving and competitive industry environment. Recently many people have proposed the use of an open-source development model as one possible way to address those challenges. This document investigates the business of commercial open-source software, including why a company might adopt an open-source model, how open-source licensing works, what business models might be usable for commercial open-source products, what special considerations apply to commercial products released as open source, and how various objections relating to open source might be answered. The target audience is commercial software and hardware companies and individual software developers considering some sort of open-source strategy or just curious about how such a strategy might work."