01.26.11
Proprietary Leadership Over Free/Libre and Open Source Projects
Summary: A look at industry moves which involve Novell management and Black Duck management (located in the same city)
NOVELL failed badly with poor leadership from IBM and some other proprietary software companies. Over at Google, a more Free software-friendly leadership is being installed while Novell’s former CEO Eric Schmidt is said to have been nudged out (there is no consensus on what actually happened). Here is a new article on the subject and the part about Schmidt’s more recent background:
Schmidt is the former CEO of Novell and the former chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems.
Some people foolishly propagate the false claim that Schmidt had something to do with an open source strategy at Novell. Examples of this were given in the IRC channels earlier this week. The matter of fact is, it took Novell several years to turn into the toxic asset which now includes Mono and the company was never truly an “open source” player. Here in the news we see Novell’s CTO promoting Fog Computing rather than “open source” or even “mixed source” as Novell likes to call it. Another man with Novell history, Jeff Porcaro, is said to be moving into Central Logic to become a vice president. Good luck with that. But the more fascinating news we found just this afternoon — it’s about the CEO of Black Duck, who joins the board of a proprietary software company that ‘openwashes’ itself using BIRT (similar strategy to Black Duck’s although Black Duck appears to be purely proprietary). From the press release:
Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT | PowerRating), The people behind BIRT(R) and the leading open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor, today announced that Timothy Yeaton, an open source software and technology leader with over 30 years of management expertise has joined the Company’s Board of Directors.
Increasingly we see open source projects and companies falling into the hands of managers that advocate — by action — proprietary software and even software patents. This trend is worrying. █
