Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless.
The Simple Economics of Open Source:
The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over [...]

Posted April 5, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: economics, free software, open source, oss, peer reviewed. Be the first one.

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS
In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That [...]

Posted March 15, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: distribution, F/OSS, free software, GPL, Larry Augustin, marketing, open source, oss. One Comment.

Does open source free your budget up for the best talent?
I asked her if the choice to go with open source is helping her to keep costs in check, here’s what [Dabble CEO Mary Hodder] said:

What happens with open source is you actually spend the same amount of money, but you don’t have lock-in and [...]

Posted January 31, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: cost shifting, Dabble, Mary Hodder, open source, oss, sustainability, sxsw, talent. One Comment.

A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.
The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up [...]

Posted June 7, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: amp, amps, apache, lamp, mysql, open source, oss, php, solaris, sun, t2000. 5 Comments.

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

Joomla, a derivative of Mambo 
Collage appears to have good content reuse features 
OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients 
Drupal: open source and turning heads

cms, content management system, joomla, collage, [...]

Posted December 19, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: cms, collage, commercial, content management system, drupal, joomla, omniupdate, open source, oss, web, web management. 3 Comments.

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, [...]

Posted September 25, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Technology. Tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community, community needs, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, software, zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite. 2 Comments.