MontaVista Software announced a new release of its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0 compliant Linux distribution for networking customers, adding support for 4G wireless networks including LTE and WiMAX. MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 5.1 also integrates OpenSAF High Availability (HA) capabilities and is the first to offer virtual routing and forwarding, says MontaVista.

One of the key elements that helps to enable open source software applications to gain broader enterprise usage is the availability of commercial support options. In the case of the open source MongoDB NoSQL database, that commercial support is now coming from project backer 10gen.

In simple terms, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents the way an organisation keeps track with its existing and potential future customers. CRM software offers the means to support these processes. This type of software stores information about customers. But its functionality far extends that of say a traditional database.

Debate continues on whether open core business models are a winning strategy with a capital "w" or not, and whether customers care. I want to take a different approach to the discussion here.

The idea is that you make the center of your product open source, but put the rest under a paid license. This is supposed to make your venture capital backers happy. You gain the benefits of open source but customers aren't "stealing" the software.

One of the great things about the double-barrel open source software and fee-based subscription support strategy that commercial Linuxes have is that there is very little economic pressure on Linux shops to upgrade from one version of the platform to another as their Linux vendor (or vendors) tweak, change, upgrade, and improve their distros.

Fedora (previously called Fedora Core) is an RPM-based, general purpose Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

In 2003, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com visited the Linux support landscape with a list of Linux support weaknesses. A lot has happened over the past four years, as is evident in the success of Red Hat and Novell's subscription-based support models and the meteoric rise of commercial-grade Ubuntu support, to name a few.

Forrester Research advises its clients who are considering open source tools to examine the so-called ecosystem around a particular product -- the pool of developers, forums, paid support and commercial versions -- to determine if there's enough support available. It notes that if an open source project has, say, 700 developers and a good ecosystem, then it's a better risk than a proprietary product from 20-person startup.