ReadWriteWeb

Scott Fulton's earlier post, What's This I Hear About Proprietary Open Source?, raised some interesting points about most people's idea of open sourced software. How open is open enough? If a project is closed to the public, can it really be called an open source project?

We asked and you answered and we culled your responses from the original post on ReadWriteWeb, Twitter and Facebook and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Correct me if I'm wrong, folks: The whole concept of open source software implies a certain business relationship between all of its participants. By definition, not by presumption, all parties in the development process agree that all of their intellectual products are both sharable and shared with the rest of the world.

Nothing that is used in an open source product should be proprietary, or for the exclusive benefit of any one party for any length of time. And no part of an open source product will have been taken from someone else who did not intend to share it, or who did not license it to be shared.

A Web publisher's choice of content management system could determine its relative visibility to its audience, especially those who frequent social networks. In last December's Water & Stone CMS market share report surveying some 4,200 sites using open source CMS, Drupal - the open source CMS platform for Linux and Windows - claimed a 13.6% share of the CMS market versus Joomla with about one-third and WordPress with one-fourth. But of the Facebook posts that lead readers to these sites, WordPress generated two-thirds of those posts.

There needs to be more developer activity around Drupal if it's to gain sorely needed momentum. So in an effort to grow the Drupal ecosystem, principal commercial contributor Acquia today announced it will launch an Acquia Apps Market around Drupal applications and tools in Q4.

This week Pentaho rolled out an update for Pentaho 4 that expands its open core business intelligence platform's native support for big data sources. Pentaho now supports Apache Hadoop, HPCC Systems, EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza, MongoDB and more.

A London-based research firm called VisionMobile has released a new method of tracking "openness" among mobile platforms called the Open Governance Index. According to its metrics, Android is the least "open" of all the supposedly open source mobile platforms, with a 23% openness rating. Eclipse, an open development platform comprise of extensible networks and tools, was rated the most open at 84%.

The irony of Eclipse being the most open development framework is that many Android app developers code with the platform in combination with Google's Android Developer Tools (ADT) Plugin. It is not uncommon in the open-source community to use multiple tools for multiple frameworks (downstream production) to accomplish something that is, ostensibly, not that open. For instance, as much as Android is not "open," it uses open source projects like WebKit and the Linux kernel to perform many of its key functions.

In an interview with ITworld Doug Cutting, creator of Apache Hadoop and Apache Lucene explains how he got into open source. "The company went bankrupt and all the software was swallowed into some intellectual property black hole," Cutting told ITworld. "Open Source seemed to offer the option to have the software that I'd written, this particular one, Lucene, live on and have the opportunity for people to use it."

ETH Zurich open-sourced an experimental operating system called BarrelFish, which it built in conjunction with Microsoft Research. The purpose of BarrelFish is to explore the best ways to structure OSes for multicore systems.

BarrelFish is a completely new OS "built from scratch," so it doesn't depend on any proprietary Microsoft components. The source code is available under an MIT license.

We have written before about MindTouch.com, the open source alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce discussion and collaboration tool.

Yesterday former Google Wave engineer Dhanji R. Prasanna wrote on his blog about why he is leaving the company. It's an interesting look at Google's company culture, but there's also an interesting technical nugget in there. "Google's vaunted scalable software infrastructure is obsolete," Prasanna wrote. He emphasizes that the hardware infrastructure is still state of the art, "But the software stack on top of it is 10 years old, aging and designed for building search engines and crawlers."

Prasanna says software like BigTable and MapReduce are "ancient, creaking dinosaurs" compared to open source alternatives like Apache Hadoop.

Nodejitsu, the original Node.js platform-as-a-service, has open-sourced several of its tools, some of which are used in its own production stack. These could be useful to those running their own Node.js servers or private clouds. Some of the tools are very simple, like forever, which ensures that a script runs continuously. Others are more involved, such as the application server haibu and the cloud deployment tool jitsu.

You can find all sort Node.js goodness at Nodejitsu's GitHub.