At the annual meeting of the Carbon Disclosure Project--a non-profit investor organization devoted to greater transparency in greenhouse gas emission statistics--Sun released a set of open-source software tools that companies can use to track carbon emissions.
Many software companies are already prospering by developing open source software and services.
So have smaller and less expected outfits, including Adobe and companies leveraging predictive open source software.
The OpenStack Foundation and the Open Compute Project is a community of 150 companies committed to building cloud architecture based upon open source software and open hardware standards.
At 14, Jack Dorsey became fascinated with dispatch routing and wrote open source software that is still used by many taxi companies today.
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Meanwhile, the folks behind open-source software are growing more upset as they see companies aligning themselves with Microsoft to give their customers a free pass against that possibility.
The open source movement is campaigning hard to persuade even the largest software companies, like Microsoft, to open up their programs and let everyone look for errors or security problems.
Many companies marketing software today position themselves as open source.
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Big software companies have every reason not to go open-source.
"Hyperscale companies architect their infrastructure with bare bones servers and open source software that scales-out cost-effectively in the hundreds and thousands, " said David Floyer, Wikibon Chief Technology Officer.
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All this has led many companies to develop a much more pragmatic approach to open-source software.
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The MySQL deal, which is slated to close in the first half of 2008, is a sign that Sun is pushing into more open-source software applications and could even enter the Linux market, the terrain of companies like Red Hat.
Sure there are plenty of companies that are trying to make money by adding value to open source software.
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These companies are either adding support services to an existing open source project or creating software and using open source as a marketing technique.
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SourceXchange's mission is to help computer hackers who contribute to open-source software, such as the popular operating system Linux, to link up with computer companies.
Google has taken a principled and somewhat lonely stand in favor of open video standards, with most other technology companies pushing for the proprietary H.264 standard, which would enrich patent holders but harm open source software.
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