Stories about: Open Source Solutions

The high-tech rumor mill churned at high speed Wednesday as industry watchers debated the good, the bad and the ugly about a potential pairing of IBM and Sun, if Big Blue does indeed acquire its long-time rival.

Linux distributor Red Hat invested in open-source business-intelligence vendor JasperSoft on Wednesday as part of a US$12.5 million round of funding for the company.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst expects the enterprise open source software business to emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market.

Open-source applications are available free of charge,, but that doesn't mean they won't cost you in other ways, a point I addressed last week. Without a vendor guaranteeing support and app stability, you may find that you need to invest countless hours learning how to work with all the little nuances involved in getting the open-source application up and running. Research, forums, installs, failures, troubleshooting; the time adds up, and as we all know, time is money.

Every year, more than 5,000 laptops are lost in taxis in London, New York, Chicago and other large cities. According to our research, in 2008 companies' topmost security investment was laptop encryption. Laptop hard drives are getting bigger and now can hold hundreds of thousand to hundreds of millions of sensitive records.

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 per cent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren't necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 per cent said their policies are very effective.

Red Hat released a beta version of a Linux-based hypervisor Wednesday that can be loaded onto servers and desktop computers with a flash drive.

Open source icon Stormy Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters recently discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open source software is more secure than proprietary code.

Open source players will need to swap baggy jeans for suits if they want to secure lucrative enterprise and government contracts, experts say.

OpenGroupware.org is relatively unknown outside the Open Source developer scene, yet it's one of the oldest projects around: This groupware has origins dating back to 1996.