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Open source is profitable because professional services is profitable. Open source companies like jBilling, SugarCRM and the like make most of their revenue not from selling licenses, but all kind of services around the software they created that they know well. If you want to deploy jBilling in your company, who do you call? Well, the guys that wrote it would be a good choice.

Add to that companies like IBM, that make a lot of money on consulting and that type of services...

Oracle itself makes a good share of its revenue from support. Try to buy an oracle license without support, you will get called every other day by an Oracle salesman offering support. Try then to upgrade to a newer version of Oracle: you'll have to pay all the years of support you did not pay first.

So Oracle knows very well that software services is profitable, and open source is just a way to distribute software to maximize professional services revenue.

Microsoft staying in China or not will make no difference to the political situation in China. Furthermore, I wish companies would stay away from politics altogether: no contributions to parties, no statements about how good or bad is a local government. Follow the local laws, and leave politics to the country's citizens.

Just because Microsoft writes bad software and it is a monopoly, it does not mean that all it does is evil. I think that Google's move was the result of many issues that just make doing business there too hard. This includes tarnishing the Google brand by exposing itself to criticism of 'collaborating' with a totalitarian regime, but the gmail hacking was also a factor.

Paul Casal
jBilling Open Source Billing

I use Ubuntu for my daily work, mainly because we install what we develop on Linux servers. It is just much easier to have on my desktop the same environment that I'll be facing with customers. I do not care a whole lot about performance, but I am very grateful that is so stable. A windows desktop would not compare.

Another thing I noticed with Vista, is that it keeps the hard drive light on at all times, no matter what I'm doing (or not doing). This can downgrade performance to almost unusable levels at times. With Ubuntu, it make more sense when the hard drive is accessed and the cache is clearly working well.

Having said that, it is funny to see that Ubuntu outperforms Mac in the categories that matter to me.

Cheers,

E. Conde
jBilling.com Open Source Billing

This could be pretty damaging to CentOS. I run an open source project... if the guy that started it and keeps it on course leaves, the project can suffer a lot.

I like CentOS, many of our customers prefer it as a free alternative to RedHat. I hope the lead of CentOS is fine.

Cheers,

E. Conde
Lead Developer
jBilling.com - Open Source Billing

One of the open office's selling points to governments, the use of open standards, will be more difficult to fight against Microsoft. And governments seem to be a good penetrations point into the mass market. I hope this is not too hard for open office. At jbilling, we use it a lot for all our documentation and it's been great.

Cheers,

Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The open source enterprise billing system

I am not sure how a laptop with flash memory would be any cheaper than one with a hard drive. Also, Microsoft is not going to be doing this for free, so the OS would be adding to the cost (unlike one with Linux). Last but not least, flash memory has a limited number of read/writes, and it gets slower as it approaches that limit.

I like the idea of a cheap laptop for the world masses, I just don't see how this fits the requirements.


Cheers,

Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System

I worked a lot with Oracle, and then joined an open source project that started using PostgreSQL. The project is a billing system, so is data intensive. What a great little database PostgreSQL is. And that was back in th 7.x version.
Actually, jBilling http://www.jbilling.com/ now runs in many databases but still PostgreSQL is holding its ground against Oracle and other heavyweights. Those extra features that Oracle says you need and charges you an arm and a leg, are really not needed in most applications.

Cheers,

Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System

I worked a lot with Oracle, and then joined an open source project that started using PostgreSQL. The project is a billing system, so is data intensive. What a great little database PostgreSQL is. And that was back in th 7.x version.
Actually, jBilling http://www.jbilling.com/ now runs in many databases but still PostgreSQL is holding its ground against Oracle and other heavyweights. Those extra features that Oracle says you need and charges you an arm and a leg, are really not needed in most applications.

Cheers,

Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System