Open Source > BusinessEssentials

Open-source software developers are seeing a lot of interest in their products in Europe -- but it's North American companies that are opening their checkbooks, said speakers at Paris Capitale du Libre, a conference organized by the Federation of Open Source Software Industry.

Sun Microsystems is slashing its workforce on a scale typically reserved for automakers, announcing Friday that it plans to lay off up to 6,000 employees -- a restructuring that comes on top of earlier cutbacks made over the past year.

How can something given away for free end up being the world's largest industry of its type? Well, according to open source content management vendor Alfresco CEO John Powell the value of open source is not what it generates, but what it saves, and that's worth billions.

U.S. jurisdictions using electronic voting systems this November would do well to implement routine post-election auditing and press for open-source software to help ensure fair votes in the future, said e-voting experts at the Technology Review EmTech conference on Thursday.

Sydney-based open source research firm Waugh Partners has published a version of its Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report as a freely-distributable PDF file under a Creative Commons licence.

Belgian developer Dries Buytaert is on the verge of putting open source CMS (content management system) Drupal officially into business.

Workloads running on Linux servers are shifting to become more business oriented, including databases and line-of-business applications, and the operating system appears headed for measurable growth over the next three years, according to a white paper released Tuesday by IDC.

In what may be the country's first comprehensive survey of the open source industry, the Australian Open Source Industry Census has revealed IT professionals working with free software earn more than the national average.