OSS Watch has been awarded a place on G-Cloud, the UK Government cloud procurement initiative, and will be making a range of services available through the CloudStore. The UK Government has been working to make the purchasing of public sector ICT as simple and transparent as possible. All services listed on the CloudStore are part … Read more
Last week I gave a talk on open source as part of a Microsoft Azure for Education day at UCL in London. I was sharing the stage with Stephen Lamb from Microsoft, who gave a great overview of the various open source projects that Microsoft are engaged in, including Node.js and PHP for Windows. But … Read more
Last week Open Source, Open Standards 2013 took place in London, an event focussed on the public sector. Naturally these being two topics we’re very keen on here at OSS Watch I went along too. Overall the key message to take away from the event was just how central to public sector IT strategy these two themes … Read more
In a previous post I discussed two different models for open source services; the “secret source” model, which is based on providing a differentiated offering on top of an open source stack, and a copyleft model using licenses that address the “ASP loophole” such as AGPL. Another way of looking at these two models is … Read more
In the final of my trio of posts deconstructing the “cloud”, I’m going to be looking at Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. SaaS is the next layer of the “cloud” stack that sits atop Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (when it’s been built using such a platform), and/or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Software-as-a-Service is usually presented to the user as a web … Read more
For many organisations, the key dilemma they face in procurement is not between closed source vs closed source software, but between deploying software and using online services – whether its infrastructure, platform, or shared services. However, open source plays a part in all these kinds services, but it can do so in two distinctly different … Read more
In my last post I started dissecting the term “cloud”, looking at Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and what it means in terms of Open Source Software. This time I’ll be moving to the next layer of the cloud stack to look at Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS. PaaS provides a way of provisioning development environments and tools on top … Read more
You can’t do anything with software at the moment, Open Source or otherwise, without the word “cloud” being thrown about. If you’re looking at options for software you might want to use, it can be hard to see through the hype of this term, and understand what product you’re actually talking about. This article is … Read more