centos

EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source

It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.

Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?

In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed … Read more

Oracle and Novell Linux: Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.

There's just one problem with this marketing spin: the "low-cost alternative" to Red Hat isn't Novell. It's CentOS. And CentOS is free as in $0.00.

It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. … Read more

Linux is booming, but unpaid adoption may hurt vendors

Even as the recession continues to cool CIO appetites for software purchases, Linux is bucking the trend, according to a new IDC report.

IDC is projecting Linux revenue to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 16.9 percent from 2008 to 2013, topping $1.2 billion in 2013.

As IDC notes, this growth will comprise just 4 percent of total software market revenue by 2013, up from 2.2 percent in 2008. However, for the second time, IDC has also examined nonpaid deployments of Linux, revealing some troubling data.

I've always assumed Red Hat's primary Linux … Read more

CentOS Linux developers threaten mutiny

Offering a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux turned out not to be such a simple matter after all.

The CentOS project aims to reproduce Red Hat's tested, supported, and certified version of the operating system, without its per-server subscription fees. Because RHEL is open-source software, it's theoretically possible for an outsider to select the same software packages, apply the same patches, and produce a version of the Linux product that works the same.

But several lead programmers in the project went public on Thursday with complaints that CentOS founder Lance Davis is threatening the project with … Read more

Ubuntu displaces CentOS at Groundwork: Good?

What's the takeaway when one free operating system displaces another when running your application?

That's the question I'd be asking myself at Groundwork in the wake of news from the Works with U blog that 29 percent of its new users are using Ubuntu to power its IT management application instead of CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. When your users are falling all over themselves to avoid paying for an operating system, can the application be far behind?

Within my own company, we weight leads heavier if they are running our application with a paid … Read more

Best enterprise open-source applications announced

Infoworld does an annual review of the best enterprise open-source applications, called the BOSSies, and just announced the 2008 winners. An Infoworld editorial team makes the selections, so this isn't a matter of open-source projects rallying the troops to vote for their projects (which sometimes has odd results, though often gets things right)

Alfresco, Content Management Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning dotProject, Project Management Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management JasperReports, Reporting Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management

Other categories include the best open-source productivity applications, … Read more