Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

A number of years ago, when Hewlett-Packard started deploying a lot of Linux internally, some smart nerds at the company invented a set of tools and gold images, called the Common Operating Environment, to help control deployments of Windows and Linux within its departments and data centers. Last year, the Linux portion of the toolset, called LinuxCOE, which was the result of six years of internal development at HP, was released under an open source license. Last week, that LinuxCOE tool was enhanced with a 4.0 release.

LinuxCOE can manage the installation of over 100 different Linux distributions, and can be made to create custom variants of just about any Linux distro you can name. LinuxCOE is available in binary form through a non-HP site called InstaLinux and the source code for the tool is available at www.linuxcoe.sourceforge.net.

Read more: IT Jungle

While open source adoption will continue to grow, revenues will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software, says analyst company IDC.

In a new study released last week, IDC said the market for open source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage. Adoption of OSS will accelerate over the forecast period of 2007 through 2011, as barriers to adoption get knocked down.

According to IDC, worldwide revenue from standalone open source software reached US$1.8 billion in 2006. This revenue will reach US$5.8 billion in 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2006 to 2011.

However, Matt Lawton, program director of IDC’s open source software business models research program, said the development and deployment of OSS is still in the early stages.

Lawton said: “The market is still quite immature, especially now that we see active open source projects in all layers of the software stack. Although we see healthy growth in revenue from standalone open source software, we must keep in mind that revenue will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software.

“Many distributions of standalone open source software are free, while paid distributions typically are based on pay-as-you-go subscriptions rather than pay-up-front license fees,” he added.

Read more: ZDNet Asia

6/5/2007 12:53:33 PM Capgemini and Novell Inc. (NOVL) announced a broad partnership that will deliver new solutions to enterprise customers using a combination of open source and proprietary software.

Under terms of the agreement, Capgemini will enhance its open source consulting practice with Novell capabilities, specifically centered on the deployment of IT solutions using SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell along with mixed-source applications and management tools.

In addition, Novell open source solutions will be supported via Capgemini’s open source Support Service Center (OSSPartner) offering. Novell plans to provide Level 3 support to Capgemini.

Source: RTTNews