Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Yesterday's blog entry by Joe Brockmeier about why he found the comments reported to have been made by Sun officials to be petty politics has drawn a response from Sun's Simon Phipps as well as a clarification to a blog I wrote on the issue from Open Source Diva Danese Cooper (formerly of Sun, now with Intel). It has also flushed out some clarity over a connection that exists between IBM's Lotus Workplace and OpenOffice.
It's been almost 15 years since Microsoft jilted IBM's OS/2 at the altar, kicking Big Blue while it was already down (financially), and exacerbating the old school company's global state of disarray -- one that outsider (IBM's first ever) Lou Gerstner managed to turn around after he was brought on board in 1993.
James Coplien said some rather dramatic things at last week's ACCU conference, among them the following: There's a pressure that unless you're one of the first three players in the market you don't have a chance," said Coplien. "Quality is suffering for time--people pay money for the first, not the best.
ZDNet blogger Joe Brockmeier has issued a stinging commentary that takes Sun to task for not practicing what it preaches. In his blog, Brockmeier takes issue with the way certain Sun officials are saying that IBM should contribute developer hours to OpenOffice (based on usage) while Sun doesn't necessarily contribute to all of the open source projects it relies on.
Based on the Talkbacks to a recent news story about a "highly critical" security flaw in RealNetworks' RealPlayer media player software, the aged-old question of whether software vendors can be held accountable for insecure or buggy software is once again rearing its two heads. I say two because the answer is both yes and no.
The escalating rivalry between SAP and Oracle underlies much of the news coming out of the German software maker's customer conference in Copenhagen this week. The most significant item: the business software giant is teaming with Microsoft to develop and market software that will link SAP's business management systems more closely with Microsoft's Office suite.
Charles Cooper explained in a commentary piece last week why Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn operating system is so important for Microsoft to get right. There's a lot of these kinds of articles now, as the technology press in the runup to major software releases serves the same function as the tense music that you heard when David Hasselhoff tried to defuse a bomb in Knight Rider.
In this blog, David Berlind's voice has often joined the chorus of rage against the patent machine. Will that chorus take heart in this week's developments?
Here's a wrinkle that many devotees of open source either don't know about or don't talk about: Open source projects can get acquired by commercial software companies. To demonstrate that point, one of the more popular open source projects on sourceforge.
Tony Byrne of CMS Watch sent me a note about a fun series of posts over at the xml-dev mailing list using Monty Python to poke fun at the Semantic Web, RESTful Web Services, and Web Services specifications. Its worth reading the comments in between the quips as well.