Sun Microsystems

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7 Notable Legal Developments in Open Source in 2016

In 2012 the jury in the first Oracle v. Google trial found that Google's inclusion of Java core library APIs in Android infringed Oracle's copyright. The district court overturned the verdict, holding that the APIs as such were not copyrightable (either as individual method declarations or their "structure, sequence and organization" [SSO]). The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, applying 9th Circuit law, reversed, holding that the "declaring code and the [SSO] of the 37 Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, and in 2016 a closely watched second trial was held on Google's defense of fair use. In May 2016 the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Google...

9 Healthcare Innovations Driven By Open Data

Joel Gurin | Information Week | November 18, 2014

...IBM and the Cleveland Clinic announced that Watson was turning to more serious pursuits and had "enrolled" in medical school. It's been a productive partnership: Last month, they launched a new Watson program using genomic data to find the best options for cancer patients...

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An in-depth guide to turning a product into an open source project

One occasionally runs into a company trying to build an open source project out of an existing product. This is a nuanced problem. This is not a company that owns a project published under an open source license trying to also ship a product of the same name (e.g. Docker, MySQL), but the situation shares many of the same problems. Neither is this a company building products out of open source projects to which they contribute but don't control (e.g. Red Hat's RHEL). This is a company with an existing product revenue stream trying to create a project out of the product...

ForgeRock Grabs $15M to push Access & Identity Management Software

Jordan Novet | GigaOM | April 8, 2013

Formed after the Oracle bought Sun, ForgeRock has emerged as a contender in the access and identity management space, and it seeks more consumer-facing deployments. Read More »

How New OSS Communities And Code Bases Are Developed From Old Ones

Jesse Hood | OpenLogic | July 24, 2013

Open source software developers modify significant amounts of source code for a variety of different reasons.  Depending on the amount of modification, the number of developers doing the fragmentation (sometimes called a “fork” in the code), the status of these developers in the community, and the intention of the development community, the results could be just a few lines of updated code, or it could be a complete fork of the code base that takes the open source project in an entirely new direction. Read More »

MySQL at the Core of Commercial Open Source

Matthew Aslett | The 451 Group | September 26, 2011

Oracle last week quietly announced the addition of new extended capabilities in MySQL Enterprise Edition, confirming the adoption of the open core licensing strategy, as we reported last November. Read More »

OmniOS Wants To Fill The OpenSolaris Void

Adrian Bridgwater | Dr. Dobb's | November 14, 2012

Open source software operating system has improved ZFS support and new tools Read More »

Open Source Databases Keep Chipping Away At Oracle’s Empire

Klint Finley | WIRED | January 7, 2015

The three fastest growing databases of 2014 were all open source, according to a new report from DB-Engines, a site that tracks popularity in the rapidly changing database marketplace...

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Open-Source Development: The History Of OpenOffice Shows Why Licensing Matters

Richard Hillesley | TechRepublic | October 2, 2012

Governance and licensing aren’t glamorous but getting them right is vital to open-source software’s long-term health. Read More »

Oracle Doesn't Want Java EE Any More

Paul Krill | InfoWorld | August 17, 2017

Oracle wants to end its leadership in the development of enterprise Java and is looking for an open source foundation to take on the role. The company said today that the upcoming Java EE (Enterprise Edition) 8 presents an opportunity to rethink how the platform is developed. Although development is done via open source with community participation, the current Oracle-led process is not seen agile, flexible, or open enough. ”We believe that moving Java EE technologies to an open source foundation may be the right next step, to adopt more agile processes, implement more flexible licensing and change the governance process,” Oracle said in a statement...

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Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software

Matt Asay | ReadWrite | August 13, 2013

While most companies fight copycats, Red Hat embraces its top clone, CentOS. Here's how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware. Read More »

We Cannot Do Modern Science Unless It's Open

Open is about sharing and collaboration. It's the idea that "we" is more powerful, more rewarding and fulfilling than "I". I can't promise jobs, but I do know that open is becoming very big. Governments and funders are pushing the open agenda, even though academics are generally uninterested or seriously self-interested... Read More »

What Can You do with Open Data?

Play a word association game and the word "open" will almost surely be followed by "source." And open source is certainly an important force for preserving user freedoms and access to computing. However, code isn't the only form of openness that's important. Open data has been discussed for at least a decade. At the OSCON conference in 2007, Tim O'Reilly kicked off a bit of a ruckus when he suggested that open data might actually be more important than open code. Open data in this context mostly referred to the ability to export the user-created "Web 2.0" data, which was becoming important at that time. Tim Bray, then at Sun Microsystems, highlighted the issue when he wrote...

What the History of Open Source Teaches Us About Strategic Advantage

The free software movement started like many other movements: A group of bright, spirited people felt controlled by a greater power and rose up and took matters into their own hands. It's not that different from the American Revolution. The colonists were tired of being controlled by Great Britain, so they declared their independence and started building their own system of government and military, and creating their own cultures. The revolutionaries' methods were disorganized and improvised, but they ultimately proved to be effective. Same goes for the software revolutionaries...

What to Do When People Start Hacking Your Open Source Culture

I've previously written about the fact the Apache Software Foundation offers an exemplar of large-scale open source governance. Even with those supreme qualities, things can still go wrong. Apache offers some of the best protections for open source contributors but its mature rules can be manipulated by skilled politicians and/or determined agendas. What can we learn from their experience?...