SAP: Open Source's Friend or Foe?
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.
Posts
4 comments:
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)....
did you follow the link to this?
http://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:
“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.
Post a Comment