Most businesses that embrace open source are content to consume products rather than giving code back to the community, according to Forrester Research.

If open source wants to get around European procurement rules and tap the government market there can’t be differences between commercial and community versions of their products.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that Zack Urlocker, vice president of products in Sun's database group and previous EVP of products for MySQL AB, has joined Pentaho's Board of Directors. He will apply his proven success in a wide range of areas spanning products, marketing, sales, and partners.

Forrester Research has crafted its own "Five Stages of Open Source Adoption," as published recently in the May 15, 2009, edition of SD Time

Forrester Research suggests that we’re at the front end of a long cycle of open-source infrastructure and application adoption.

Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School has written an interesting paper titled "Putting a Value on Openness: The Effect of Product Source Code Releases on the Market Value of Firms." The research traces the impact of open source on company market valuations from January 1, 1999, to April 30, 2007.

A new research report from AMI Partners reveals some promising trends in the business intelligence market. As BI sales heat up in certain regions, The VAR Guy wonders who will benefit most: Traditional BI software companies, open source alternatives or software as a service (SaaS) options? Here’s The VAR Guy’s best guess.

As IP telephony gains acceptance in the SMB market, it's not likely to be the products of mainstream IP PBX vendors that lead the change. Open source software, some say, may be the mechanism whereby IP telephony vendors bring affordable, reliable, and innovative products into the largely untapped—and highly cost-conscious—small-business arena.

Our first step was to create an inventory of the open source products that we use at my IT shop. We have a few areas within the organization that were early adopters of OSS and have a variety of products in use. When polling the staff for OSS products, I expected to find between 20-30 actively being used.