British Library Helps Lock Down More Knowledge

It has been a sad spectacle to see the British Library – without doubt once the greatest library in the world, and hence a powerful force for disseminating knowledge as widely as possible - become more and more enmeshed in locking down research in proprietary formats.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Tamás Bíró, Sense/Net

Once hackers have stopped arguing whether it's “free software” or “open source”, and discussing the relative merits of GNOME or KDE, they can always get stuck into the perennial question of whether they ought to develop applications using Mono, tied as it is to Microsoft's .NET framework, or not....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Alfresco: the Samba of Enterprise Content Management

On Open Enterprise blog.

Oh, Tell Me the Truth About...the ODF Bust-Up

The recent decision by the OpenDocument Foundation to shift its energies away from ODF to CDF has naturally provoked a lot of rather exaggerated comment. I wrote a piece for LWN.net (now out from behind the paywall) exploring what exactly was going on, and found out that there are bigger issues than simply document interoperability at play.

It turns out to be all about Microsoft's Sharepoint - software that I am beginning to see as one of the most serious threats to open source today. Read it and be very afraid.

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.