Open Source Business News & Articles

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?

In early September they told us it was going to happen, and now it has. eZ Systems (news, site) has just released eZ Publish 4.4 Enterprise. Let's have a look at what's new and improved.

Open source web content management vendor eZ Systems (news, site)  has announced that with the release of the v4.4 edition of eZ Publish -- targeted for late this month -- the company will split the software into distinct but highly related Community Project and Enterprise editions. Read on for the details.

One way or another, everyone needs to eat -- and that includes all of you open source people too. Fortunately, there are as many ways to make money in the world of open source as there are people who try it. Here's a run down of the top models.

For many of the regularly caffeinated it was the closing of 600 Starbucks locations; for a large portion of the medical community, the announcement of the sinking crocs ship. As for the tech geeks, it was surely Microsoft’s first-ever drop in annual Windows sales that made them realize: Oh my, the economy really is messed up!

In this case, however, the economy is not the only culprit. Microsoft’s Q4 report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors, and on that list are both Linux and open source solutions.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. One of the students accepted into the program was Naveen Gavini, an undergraduate Computer Engineering and Computer Science student at New Jersey-based Rutgers University.

Naveen's project -- focused on multi-site functionality for the popular Joomla! (news, site) Web CMS -- is on schedule and going well. But what does multi-site support for mean for you? Let's take a look.

The Joomla Web CMS project -- as many of you well know -- is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, among other things, that the Joomla project generally has an ethos of encouraging collaboration, community and free software.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.