ZDNet is a good example of open source journalism applied to a vertical market. (To respond to the graphic at the right click here.) We use open source tools. A small staff works with a large group of writers who are paid based on performance. The key is to monetize pages enough so income equals outgo with a bit left over. ... [
Dave Rosenberg is worried about Sun, a question discussed here last week. “If it fails,” he writes, “Sun will be the harbinger of sorrow for the rest of the open source world.” The open source business, yes. The open source world? Not so much. Open source is a fact of life. Gartner Group estimates all large businesses will be deploying it ... [
I think you can draw a straight line from the Vista Capable brouhaha to recent introductions of laptop Linux by HP and Dell, once Microsoft’s most loyal OEMs. (That is the HP 1000 to the right, from the screen of our own Erica Ogg.) Up in Seattle, TechFlash is gleefully poring over court filings related to Microsoft requiring a specific graphics ... [
President-elect Barack Obama is being told he will have to give up his Blackberry, by aides who fear subpoenas, the Presidential Records Act and e-mail insecurity. (Framed copies of this Time cover are already priced at $19.95.) While this is not entirely an open source story, it does get to the heart of what the Internet (and open source) make possible ... [
Etolos, which survived the dot-bomb as an enterprise Web application distributor outfit, hopes to survive the latest recession by moving to SaaS. Founder Danny Kolke signed back on just last month, re-worked the Web site, and re-launched the company this week. Unfortunately he is not coming to a happy little start-up, but a public company that is being chatted up on ... [
The news reminded me of a flower popping through a crust of lava after a volcanic eruption. Is this nature returning, or is this just a shoot that will be stomped on next time the mountain urps? It’s Sonatype, a start-up built to commercialize the Apache Maven project. Maven creator Jason van Zyl has recruited Mark de Visser, former chief marketing ... [
One of the big IT challenges of 2009 will have to be assuring that cloud computing really does represent a move forward. While there has been a lot of talk about clouds over the last year, about Amazon, about Google and about Microsoft, in fact Amazon’s is the only one open for business. Google has a consumer focus, and Microsoft’s Azure ... [
Re-reading some notes from yesterday’s work, and recalling several other stories from the past year, I may have come upon Google’s fatal flaw. Not invented here syndrome. A clue was found in the words of Black Duck’s Peter Vescuso, noting how Google released versions of Chrome and Android with well-known flaws in them. The flaws were patched in underlying technology but ... [
Black Duck Software said its business grew 68% last quarter, and that was without catching some of the big fish it was baiting its hook for. Senior vice president Peter Vescuso said what started as a business of open source license compliance has become an enterprise aimed at “the full lifecycle of application development. “We’re helping developers find the right components, ... [
Matt Asay was quick today to dismiss a prediction from Trip Chowdhry, published in Barron’s, that we’re all about to go bankrupt. So far as I could tell, Trip was just riffing off economic bears like Nouriel Roubini who predicted our current trouble and see more of it ahead. A lot more. Like Roubini I tend to see trouble long before ... [
After spending a pleasant hour with Flat World co-founder Eric Frank it seems obvious that the key to making “open source” textbooks work lies in the author’s bottom line. Frank is telling textbook authors that if they offer students their work for free online they can make it up on the back-end, through reprints, study guides and ancillary products. “We are ... [
Sun has laid the hammer down in enterprise storage, with an “open source” offering that really does pass the savings on to the customer, as they must be passed. Enterprise storage costs more than what you have in your home. My son is a gamer who has 850 Gigabytes of storage. The low end of the new Sun line is 2 ... [
If you want to know what the telco monopolists are feeling, deep in their multi-secretaried lairs, the best place to start is with Scott Cleland. Scott, through his Precursor blog, would like to be seen as the Karl Rove of telecom. He’s actually more the Frank Luntz. Or to put it another way, we wanted Denzel Washington. We’d take Andre Braugher. ... [
Whenever I write the word Microsoft on this blog I can be pretty certain of big traffic and big talkbacks. It’s a measure of just how much open source advocates loathe and fear Microsoft, and perhaps how Microsoft advocates return the compliment. The latest is Matt Asay’s report of Microsoft refusing to sponsor a conference unless tiny Zimbra was denied a ... [
Pingdom, a Web site monitoring outfit, did a piece on open source corporate valuations on its blog recent and they make sobering reading. You’ll never be Bill Gates working in open source. The valuations offered are, frankly, birdseed. Mozilla brought in under $67 million, 85% from Google. Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, still isn’t profitable. SUSE Linux may book $110 million ... [There is an interesting article in the NY Times this morning titled ” Dollar Dips Below 100 Yen as Markets Tumble” . The dollar has tumbled yet another 1.6% over concerns with the health of US Financial Sector and the Fed’s [possibly necessary] actions to avoid or mitigate a recession.
This is really becoming a tough pill to swallow. The dollar has been on a constant decline since the Iraq war began and our fiscal policies are doing nothing more than fanning the fires of inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. This recent action by the Fed hd a very short term effect of giving the stock market a quick shot in the arm but now that the euphoria has worn off the money markets are reacting as one would expect. Yes, pumping a huge amount of dollars into the market will surely ease credit and perhaps spending in the short term, but it will also have a profound effect on the actual value of those dollars. When you have a fixed amount of good and services being chased by more dollars they’re worth less. That causes the devaluation of the dollar which we see very clearly in the London Markets today.
I’m not really sure how much the dollar has dropped over the last 5 years or so, but I hear from some local lawyer friends that the amount of business they have for people applying for citizenship has dropped off sharply. It turns out that as the dollar sinks in the US and the dollar in their home countries improves in no longer becomes a good business decision to work in the US and send dollars home.
They can actually go back home to a stronger job market and higher paying jobs. So much for the Immigration Problem. If we keep this up, not only will the immigrants be leaving but we’ll be seeing more US Corps expanding in overseas markets rather than domestically.
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