Silverstripe, a company who recently released a open source CMS system, has been asked by TVNZ's Closeup program to explain how they can make a real business around open source. This is an opportunity for the New Zealand Open Source community to get the message out to the broader community.

ComputerWorld claimed this week that SAFI Technologies would be cleansing the island of Niue of open source. Those claims have however been discredited by Tim Johnson, Managing Director of SAFI Technologies.

Open source is undermining shrink wrap software and fundimentally changing the software industry claims Ray Lane, a managing partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The software market is in transition from high profit margins of 70% or more to margins more in line with the hardware market at 20%.

While Microsoft have been successfull at selling software at high margins the entire industry is now experiencing a contraction due to the availability of quality open source solutions which can be used with minimal technical experience.

Lots of coverage of of a large US software company and their $3 software offer. One angle from the BBC Microsoft aims to double PC base and a slightly more cynical view from The Register Microsoft debuts Windows for the Poor. I'll leave you to pick your preference but I will elaborate on a post I made to one of those sites.

I do a bit of work amongst low decile education institutes here in NZ in the technology adaptation area, mainly kindergartens and childcare centres. During the training sessions they would rant a bit about how the NZ govt. deal with Microsoft didn't cover Early Childhood Education and how unfair it was as they had to fork out around $300 to get an academic use copy.

SilverStripe, the company that developed the open source SilverStripe Customer Management System, has been given $50,000 from Google to mentor ten students. The software projects the students will be working on are aimed at making web sites easier to create and maintain. The projects will become part of the standard distribution of the SilverStripe CMS distribution.

I put this type of headline on a par with the Firefox shell commands one of a few years ago. It might sell more copy and one could argue that it is even accurate however the root cause is *still* a Windows specific problem, and no amount of polish is going to make that one shine. Computerworld article is here.

Having said all that, we need to be reminded that Firefox on Linux has had challenges as well but at least the comments in the last paragraph still hold true.

Not that there are many documents to read with it yet as I understand given that a number of organisations are taking Gartner Groups advice to delay deployment of Office 2007. Article is here.

Alternatively you could check out this item, also from Computerworld. I'll leave you to decide the humour level for yourselves but it does at least have native ODF support (and yes, Computerworld articles *are* delivered via Lotus Notes...).

One for the govt.nz types. Nice little case study that covers the problem the German Foreign Office had and the solution they developed. The Open Standards/Open Source route they took has clearly delivered tangible benefits over other solutions on offer.

Catalyst has just launched Open4Business - a site that aims to bring together in one place information on open source software of value to the business sector. We hope the initiative will raise the profile of open source within the sector, as well as provide a ready route to some of the best open source business applications out there.

There was no loving feelings between Microsoft and IBM in a recent open letter published by Microsoft. IBM has been encouraging Governments to reject the Microsoft "Open XML" format currently under consideration by ISO. Microsoft are very upset, and threw a tantrum by releasing an open letter telling the world how fair they have been, and how bad IBM have been.