proprietary

Is Apple joining the "Don't be evil" brigade?

I can't help but ask after reading Apple's attack on Adobe's Flash for being "closed and proprietary," while dressing itself up as the openness prom queen because of its support for HTML5, JavaScript, and other industry standards.

Flash may be closed and proprietary, but Apple is hardly the patron saint of openness. Nor has it ever seemed to care much about pretending to be anything other than religiously devoted to a beautiful consumer experience, regardless of open standards, open source, open anything.

What has … Read more

With open-source software businesses, you have two options. Actually, three, but the third belongs to Red Hat, and it applies to roughly no one else.

The first option is to sell support for open-source software. This option is generally advocated by those who have never grown a business beyond $10 million. It's a terrible model unless your only aspiration in life is to run a services company.

Hence, the support model might be good for Accenture or systems integrator, if they want to take on the burden of support, but it's a poor model for Red Hat, MindTouch, … Read more

When an open-source project is working optimally, can proprietary-software companies hope to compete?

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a prominent Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow, suggests that the answer is no. Speaking to the How Software Is Built blog, Kroah-Hartman makes the case that the pace of Linux development leaves competition in the dust:

[The Linux kernel development team adds] 11,000 lines, remove[s] 5,500 lines, and modif[ies] 2,200 lines [of code] every single day.

People ask whether we can keep that up, and I have to tell you that every single year, I say there's no … Read more

Last week I posted a review of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX1, but this post is not really about my review. It's about two user reviews (written by users I doubt have actually used the camera). One calls my review flawed, while the other praises the camera and then gives it a half-star rating out of five stars. Why? Sony's use of Memory Stick media for storage.

According to the first user review, the reason my review was "flawed" was because I didn't mention the use of Memory Stick media as a con and a reason … Read more

It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.

Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open … Read more

MySQL 5.4 has just been announced, evaporating the open-source database's previous four cores per instance limitation. Now, as Betanews reports, MySQL can handle up to "16-processor ("16-way") support for x86 servers with multiple cores per processor."

In other words, MySQL, long the leader in Web-focused database applications, just became a serious contender in the enterprise. It's unlikely MySQL's new owner, Oracle, is going to welcome this news.

While Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady suggests that MySQL nicely complements Oracle in many ways, he's also right to note that "the Oracle … Read more

In the midst of an engaging Times UK article on the rise of open source, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and a Red Hat executive, declares that proprietary software has outstayed its welcome:

A few days ago, I was visiting several banks in Canary Wharf and the city. On television the entire day was one apology after another from banks whose fundamental business was trust and reputation.

We are now living in a moment where claims of reputation are not sufficient to ensure delivery. We are using source code instead of reputation as a means to grade … Read more

If you were to try to think of the two most diametrically opposed software companies in the industry, Red Hat and Microsoft come to mind. One is the open-source leader, while the other has tenaciously held to its proprietary software background.

Red Hat believes that real customer choice comes from an open ecosystem of software. Microsoft believes something similar, but prefers customers buy into its own software ecosystem (Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.) and stay there.

And yet, something has brought the two companies together in a manner which suggests to me that both are converging in the way they … Read more

Reading through a Jane's Strategic Advisory Services report entitled "Open Source Software in Defense Markets" (PDF), I was struck by this passage:

A key trend in the current software and IT environment is the convergence of open source and commercial software approaches. While significant differences do and will continue to exist, both open source and commercial providers are increasingly taking hybrid approaches to providing software and software support.

Some open source providers, such as Red Hat for example, have sought to monetize open source in ways that are not always compatible with long-held open source movement principles … Read more