A new survey has found more than two thirds of businesses are looking to invest into open source software in 2010.

Open source software may be looking at a bumper year in 2010, as a new survey showed companies are looking to invest.

The study by Accenture found 69 per cent of 300 large organisations questioned anticipated increased investment into open source software.

Even more impressively, 38 per cent claimed they were looking at migrating mission-critical software over to an open source alternative within the next year.

Other findings in the report suggested half of businesses are were “fully committed” to using open source in their operations, with almost a third – 28 per cent – claiming to be keeping an open mind towards the prospect of using it.

“What we are seeing is the coming of age of open source,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect at Accenture.

“Through both our research and our work with clients, we are seeing an increase in demand for open source based on quality, reliability and speed, not just cost savings. This is a significant change from just two years ago when uptake was driven mainly by cost savings.”

As well as those companies new to open source wanting to invest, the research showed 88 per cent of businesses already using it were planning to up investment in 2010 compared to 2009.

“We can expect to see this trend develop as open source continues to evolve and address even more business critical functions,” Daugherty concluded.

However, not every finding was so positive for the proprietary alternative.

The results of the survey showed 35 per cent of companies thought there were still issues when it came to training developers how to use open source.

There were also claims of a lack of support for the technology from senior management figures, who claimed there were insufficient open source alternatives compared to proprietary software suites.

“The current wave of companies adopting open source are experiencing strong benefits,” added Daugherty, “However, there are still organisations hesitant about the shared community model.”

“As open source software is used in more critical business functions the next step will be for organisations to decide whether to actively contribute back to the community.”

The respondents to the survey came from the UK, Ireland and the US

Read the full article at ITPRo

It’s difficult to envision a computer that’s completely open-source—and I mean completely, right down to the software on its drives, the drivers for its components, and the circuit boards for its construction. However, Linux News has gotten its hands on one such device, Qi Hardware’s “Ben NanoNote,” and it’s one of the few massive hardware projects in existence that runs on completely copyleft hardware.

What does that mean? The hardware on the system is bound by the same common principles as the software running on it—anyone is free to modify the Ben NanoNote’s design or make copies thereof, so long as they release their version of the product under the same Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license as the original.

Qi Hardware already has a wiki in place where aspiring developers and tinkerers can brainstorm up new project ideas and uses for the $99 laptop. However, the Ben NanoNote isn’t designed for mass-market appeal. Part of that can be seen in the product’s specifications, which are hardly top-of-the-line components for a laptop—or even a netbook—nowadays.

The Ben NanoNote runs on a 366-MHz MIPS processor with a mere 32 megabytes of RAM and two gigabytes of internal flash storage. There’s no internal networking functionality on this 3.9-by-2.95-by-0.7-inch product, whose 16.7-million-color, 3-inch screen sports a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. The Ben NanoNote does contain a full QWERTY keyboard, however, and it runs the 2.6.32 version of the OpenWRT Linux kernel. And, yes, it’ll even allow you to play Doom or Quake.

This isn’t the first open-source hardware project from the various members of Qi Hardware. In fact, the company’s roots are in the Openmoko project—a previous attempt to create a suite of fully open-sourced mobile phones (or at least, as open-sourced as legal restrictions for cell phone components would allow).

When the Openmoko’s phone project fizzled out in April of 2009, a team of developers and engineers founded Qi Hardware and shifted their goals from the mobile market to open-source hardware as a whole. The Ben NanoNote is Qi Hardware’s first such hardware design.

Read the full news at Yahoo!News

Since early 2004, it has been the government’s stated policy to use open source software in the public sector wherever possible, as long as it offers the best value for money.

To date, the policy has had little impact. So will the latest tweaks to its open source Action Plan make a difference?

Software is “open source” when the source code is freely available to be viewed, shared or changed – things that you can’t do with more traditional proprietary software. Crucially, open source is also the cheaper option in many cases.

So how good is the government’s record on using open source so far?

Read the full article at Business Review Online

> Following last year’s success, 2i Ltd will be organising the World Plone Day on the 28th of April 2010. Registration at http://wpd.2iltd.com

> The user group also noted two recent adverts and articles on local papers stating that the Government of Malta will be launching an Open Source User Group for Open Source within Government. This will happen at MITA, Gattard Hse on the 30th of April 2010.
Registration by email at oss.mita@gov.mt

Follow more OSS related events.

by Matt Asay

Companies and their affiliated communities often sit uneasily together, awkward partners at the software dance. To balance the two, companies often seek to reduce corporate control of community through open-source licensing, but this strategy may be diluted by the common requirement to require community contributors to sign contribution agreements.

Nothing could be worse for the formation of true, code-contributing communities, according to Brian Aker, former director of architecture at MySQL:

[R]equiring contributor agreements destroyed outside MySQL development to the kernel, and left MySQL in a position where no substantial, or many, contributions ever occurred.

And yet most people would point to MySQL’s community (as Microsoft’s Dan Jones does) as a key reason for its success.

Perhaps they’re talking about different kinds of community?

Of course they are, and both kinds are important. MySQL attracted a broad-based user community, one filled with developers who modified and embedded MySQL to meet a vast array of different needs. Did it have a solid base of outside contributors who wrote the core of the MySQL database. No. But at tens of millions of downloads each year and a final sale price of $1 billion to Sun, few in the MySQL community are likely to complain.

The reality is that very few open-source projects succeed in attracting and marshaling significant outside contributions. Linux, Eclipse, and Mozilla all do, and perhaps for reasons I’ve identified before, but they are the exceptions to the rule.

Even so, it’s surprising just how significant the communities are around an increasing number of enterprise open-source projects, which communities include both users and developers, a significant number of whom actively contribute code to these enterprise applications. Who would imagine a community of millions forming around developing and using software designed to help the world’s largest enterprises solve some of their biggest problems? In other words, helping the Man feed…the Man?

Strange, but true.

Jaspersoft today announced some remarkable community numbers. More interesting, however, is that Jaspersoft isn’t alone in this.

Let’s run the community numbers for a few of the more successful open-source application companies, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Zimbra:

* Zimbra gave me the number of active forum registrations, which is arguably a better metric than raw forum/documentation registrations, which is what I was able to collect from the other companies.

Read the full news from  Cnet News