Foss News & Articles

A commercial open source company is releasing easy-to-use business intelligence (BI). Many of you are probably waiting for a sarcastic punch line, because the concept seems a little unbelievable. Isn’t open source free? An easy-to-use tool in a market known for requiring US$ 200-per-hour consultants to design reports? There’s no joke. Pentaho (news, site) has announced the general access (GA) release of version 3.8 of its BI Suite Enterprise Edition that focuses on delivering users an easy platform to build more engaging and interactive business intelligence solutions.

Packt Publishing (news, site) announced that it has donated over US$ 300,000 to open source projects. The technical book publisher has provided financial support to open source projects since 2004, long before open source gained its current favored position in the enterprise.

Organizations think open source software (OSS) is bad. You know, bad meaning good. Do people still say bad? Never mind. A Gartner (news, site) study has found that enterprises are increasingly including open source software in their technology portfolio. Propelled by rapid innovation, lower adoption and implementation cost and features rivaling commercial options, OSS is becoming pervasive.

Lucid Imagination (news, site), the commercial provider of services and support for Solr/Lucene, has opened its search for presenters for the second Lucene Revolution conference, scheduled for May 25-26 in San Francisco. The annual Lucene Revolution, the largest U.S. conference focused on open source enterprise search, brings together developers and industry thought leaders to discuss the use of Solr/Lucene.

SilverStripe (news, site) has started work on version 3.0 of its open source web content management system. Like a birthday, the version will be a year in the making and culminate with goodies and a celebration. The SilverStripe community is expected to introduce substantial enhancements to the existing v2.4.x series and help the platform remain a leader in the competitive open-source web CMS market.

A new player has entered the open source web content management field. Version 2.0 of PHP-based web CMS, ProcessWire, has been released to beta and is now open source. ProcessWire is entering a crowded and competitive market, but given the proliferation and importance of content, there is definitely room for another option to manage it.

Open source content management provider Magnolia (news,site) has set a clear, but lofty aspiration for itself – provide the best user experience of any web-based CMS on the market. Magnolia has set a goal and is adjusting its focus to achieve it. The company has selected web framework Vaadin to revamp its interface and, it hopes, become known for the most intuitive user interface in the market.

Apparently, January is the season for open source CMS goodies. The first week of the new year brought a major release by one market leader, and the treats aren’t slowing down in week two --the team at Joomla! (news, site) has announced the availability of version 1.6 of their Web CMS platform.

Water&stone recently released the third-annual Open Source CMS Market Share Report. We've already reported which platforms dominated the open source CMS space in 2010, but nobody stays on top forever, especially when the field of play is the web. So, which solutions are challenging the leaders and which are the projects to watch?

The debate over what's the better choice, proprietary software or open source has been raging on forever. But when it comes to web content management, the best solution may actually be a compromise of the two.

Water&stone has released their annual Open Source CMS Market Share Report. Who is dominating the open source web content management space? And who managed to move ahead of other contenders? Find out here.

CouchOne (news, site), provider of support, development toolkits, training and hosting for open source document database Apache CouchDB, is trying to change the perception that CouchDB is just another NoSQL platform. In fact, if CouchOne has its way, CouchDB will no longer be associated with NoSQL at all.

SilverStripe (news, site) and Microsoft (news, site) announced that SilverStripe Content Management System has achieved Windows Server 2008 R2 certification. Successfully completing the testing positions SilverStripe as the first open source web application to achieve certification on the platform. The certification also represents a continuing shift in Microsoft’s stance toward the open source market.

There has been significant growth in the open source software market over the last decade and as popularity continues to grow, the market doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon. The Open Source community frequently attracts very intelligent, motivated and experienced developers driven by pride, personal curiosity and peer recognition to develop valuable solutions. No matter how much personal satisfaction developers receive from seeing the result of their efforts however, software developers still have to pay the bills and have some money left over to eat. So, how can software that isn’t for sale actually make money?

Everybody who is anybody knows that learning Drupal or PHP or <<insert trendy open source technology here>>, is the gold-plated highway to developer riches. Right?  Well, not exactly. The need for popular open source packages is growing, but in most cases, utilization is still only a fraction of traditional packages.