The Open Source Battle Front

November 2006 will be remembered as the month when proprietary software companies opened a battle front in the inevitable war between open source and proprietary technologies. Here are some major signifcant events that have occurred:

• Oracle announced that it will compete with Red Hat Linux directly in the Linux IT services sector.


• Microsoft announced and signed a deal with Novell for licensing and working with the Linux community.


• Microsoft also has signed a deal with Zend the open source PHP vendor.


• Sun made Java open source under the GPL on 11/14/2006.

These are just the major announcements. There are many more than this however, the big proprietary companies are significant since they command so much market share and industry influence.

So what is the agenda under the agenda? It is an acknowledgement and action by the big proprietary vendors that they have decided to compete directly with open source companies that threaten their proprietary software business model. I thought this batte front was going to happen in 2007/2008 and it caught me off guard as to how soon the chosen battle fronts were made by the proprietary software companies (i.e. Oracle, Microsoft).

At any rate, the next few months and 2007 will definitely be a year of adventure, changes, and interesting developments in the open source world. What is interesting is how Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IBM, and other pro-open source companies have stayed out of the fireworks so far this month. It looks like they are all managing to proceed with their open source strategies, whatever they are, and moving forward changing the world.

As a supporter of open source I think big changes are in store for all us in 2007 and beyond.