The Open Source Advocate

I have noticed a trend developing in the business models of successful open source companies. These companies are implementing a business model that is based on dual licensing their software. This press release provides an excellent summary of what dual licensing means. The guiding principle behind dual licensing is "quid pro quo," or a fair exchange. Under this model, vendors offer their products under both an open source license and a commercial license. This allows open source projects to use the software at no cost, which contributes to widespread use and testing of the software and the fast growth of a large installed user base. Companies redistributing the software as part of commercial products can also get the benefits of the open source software by purchasing a commercial license, which releases them from requirements to publish their source code. Commercially-licensed customers generate revenue for the open source vendors, which contributes to the rapid developmen...

For the two previous versions of Ubuntu, I have tested seven news websites to find out if I could watch their video feeds using Ubuntu. You can read the results for 6.10 and 7.04 . Now that Ubuntu 7.10 is out, it is time for me to test these websites again. ABC News Sound: NO Video: NO BBC News Sound: NO (Worse!) Video: NO (Worse!) CBS News Sound: YES (Improvement!) Video: YES (Improvement!) CNBC Sound: NO Video: NO CNN Sound: YES Video: YES FOX News Sound: YES Video: NO MSNBC Sound: YES Video: YES As you can see, we had one site that improved (CBS News) and one site that has actually gotten worse (BBC News). Congratulations to CBS news for joining the 21-century. I am not sure what to say about BBC News. Apparently, the BBC is now using a new video player called the " BBC iPlayer ", which only supports Microsoft Windows operating systems. Because of this, there was a lot of controversy about the highly restricted player, including this petition . I still consider i...

Introduction Have you ever wanted to attend a webinar but quickly discovered that the web-conference service doesn't even support your operating system? This has happened to me several times and it irks me greatly! I always make sure to tell the company that they should switch their web-conferencing service to one that supports multiple platforms including Linux. It is somewhat hypocritical when an open source company offers a webinar about their open source product, but they don't allow customers with open source operating systems like Linux to attend. I ran into this ridiculous issue when trying to attend a Zimbra webinar. I told them that it was wrong for them to have such great multi-platform support in their product and at the same time only allow Windows users to participate in their webinars. We'll see if they take that advice to heart. Fortunately for us, there are companies that offer cross-platform support for web-conferencing. Even better, there are a small...