Posts Tagged ‘open source’

Failed New Zealand Deal With Microsoft Good News for Linux?

Microsoft’s recently failed contract renewal with the country of New Zealand is being hailed by blogs and news outlets as a big opportunity for other open source solutions to move in. I’m not quite ready to break out the champagne and streamers. Why would the country walk away from a deal? I don’t understand why the news outlets never mentioned this.. All we have to do is open up the front page of any major news site to see articles about the horrible state of our world’s economy. Of course they walked away from the deal. You don’t get steep licensing discounts from a vendor by jumping all over the first offer. It’s also car shopping 101. But you can just walk away for show. You have to walk away and mean it. Now, I’m not saying that New Zealand is not open to open source alternatives, but so far we haven’t been given evidence that they are moving in the open source direction. I guess only time will tell, but let’s not put the cart before the open source horse.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : May 28th, 2009

SaaS: Providing a Different Kind of Free

For a couple of years now the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Richard Stallman have been speaking out against Software as a Service (SaaS) warning that one gives up some amount of freedom since the software is no longer on one’s machine. The FSF stands up for free as in freedom software, not free as in price, so if the source code is not freely available for reading, modification, and redistribution, then it’s not free by their definition. While that’s true, SaaS does offer another kind of freedom that can’t be as easily dismissed as Stallman says. That’s the freedom from traditional brick-and-mortar IT. Sure, somewhere along the line, there has to be a CPU, RAM, hard drives, and networking gear to run any software, you don’t have to do it yourself and be locked into the hardware you purchase. By using open source software products on SaaS providers’ platforms who offer direct access to the code, one can avoid this lack of freedom as Stallman suggests, but also maintain the freedom from having to maintain one’s own servers. Call me biased, but when deciding whether to run software on-site or choosing to host with a provider, one still has to consider this other form of freedom.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Apr 28th, 2009

Microsoft Implements App Store for Servers

Microsoft has seen the successes of the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch and has created one of their own. Their app store, however, is for server-side web-based software. The store, named Web App Gallery, will allow users to select software to install and then it configures the server and resolves any dependencies for the application to run. Microsoft’s Lauren Cooney explains:

“Essentially, what we have launched with Windows Web Application Gallery is a marketing and distribution pipeline. So if a developer has a great app they want to include in the Web Application Gallery, we will market that worldwide – so they have the reach that they never had before.”

The store currently only contains 10 applications so far and they are all open source applications. It seems that Microsoft has embraced the fact that easing the distribution of open source web applications on their platform will help adoption of the platform.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 24th, 2009

The Evolving Intuit

I’ve been noticing lately a great trend in Intuit that I never would have expected from the company. Sometime last month, Intuit announced support for the iPhone on its online service. I tried out the demo on my iPod Touch and it looks great. Quickbooks has historically been a mostly Windows vendor with very crippled versions of its software that run on Mac. In fact, at work we have one Windows desktop and a Windows virtual machine just because certain features weren’t available for the Mac software. I then read posts on their press releases about potential Linux support. Then, I found a link to thelinux411.com and almost fell off my chair. A website dedicated to Linux owned by Intuit?

So far, Intuit’s support for Linux seems like all smoke and mirrors since I was unable to find a link to information on any actual Quickbooks software that would run on Linux, but things are looking much better. As Robin Miller mentions in his Linux.com article, Intuit would do well on the Linux platform. Microsoft is starting to compete directly with Intuit with their accounting software and Microsoft wouldn’t even stand a chance on Linux. Also, as mentioned in the article, a lot of open source shops such as the company I work for, would switch and probably wouldn’t look for any other software if Quickbooks was able to run on Linux.

I am currently working in a hosting company, but came from a very heavy background so immediately my wheels started turning. One of the biggest things we struggled with when recommending Linux solutions to clients was the lack of support for a lot of software which included Quickbooks to a great extent. Quickbooks would definitely be very welcomed to the Linux platform, but a much better way to bring OS agnosticism to the software would be a SaaS model. Intuit is already part of the way there with their online offerings, but a hosted model could bring them into an even larger market with a lower up-front investment for customers and a broader OS support base.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 26th, 2008