For an outfit that calls itself “the world's largest business software company”, the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world. With 51,500 employees, a turnover of 11.5 billion euros ($16 billion) last year, and operating profits of 2.7 billion euros ($3.8 billion), SAP is clearly one of the heavyweights in the computer world. Given that huge clout, SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend or its foe....
On Linux Journal.
ehm... this post seems to be lacking in anything even close to relevance. Ok, sap has huge profits and many employees and we don't know whether or not this is a good thing.... Useless info, but hey, rule no1 of blogging: blog often (i guess)....
ReplyDeletedid you follow the link to this?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sap-open-sources-friend-or-foe
Hehe... SAP unwittingly became FOSS's best ever friend at the time of the CII Directive, when - as now - the EPO, Council of Ministers et al were bent on deceiving the MEPs (and were succeeeding). SAP took out a big pro-swpat advert in some magazine IIRC and this is from Florian Mueller's account, No Lobbyists As Such:
ReplyDelete“Once Zypries had left, Günther Schmalz, SAP's European intellectual property director, made his opening statement. The proposed legislation was acceptable to SAP: "We believe that this text allows us to obtain patents on the software that we develop." Since SAP is a pure software company, that statement alone disproved the minister's official position that the directive was not about software patents.”
thanks for that background info.
ReplyDelete