And yet there are some interesting tidbits in the Fifth Annual Future of Open Source Survey.

So with a grain of salt fully taken, it is worth noting that the 450 respondents — a mix of users and vendors — found that the most attractive thing about open software is lack of vendor lock-in.  For the previous four years, the biggest perceived benefit of open source was lower cost.

The top barrier to adoption cited this year, was the lack of internal technical skills. In the past the biggest hurdle had been worry over legalities and liabilities of using open source software.

That is extremely noteworthy to Michael Skok, general partner with North Bridge.

In the past, companies worried about “legal concerns about licensing and whether open source software conforms to corporate standards,” Skok said.

That may have eased up because long-running SCO litigation has disappeared and probably even more because of a much more open-source-friendly stance by Microsoft. You know, the company whose CEO once likened open source to cancer. Many in the open source community feared that Microsoft might launch patent or copyright litigation over the use of open source software. That concern is lifting.

“Microsoft came to Acquia, recognizing that Drupal was so mainstream they didn’t want to compete with it but would rather have it running on the Microsoft stack. So they are co-marketing with us and drove tens of thousands downloads of Drupal.” Drupal is an open source collection of content management tools for building social networking applications.

Also interesting in the new results is that the most appealing thing about open source is the avoidance of vendor lock-in. That supplants the traditional benefit usually topping the list: Low cost.

Given the unified data center push by vendors like Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard tout the “one throat to choke” mantra, it is interesting that many data center customers don’t show all that much interest in getting all of their hardware/software from one vendor.

The 451 Group helped conduct the survey, as did several vendors including open source stalwarts like the aforementioned Acquia, Blackduck, Cloudera, Eucalpytus, Novell, Red Hat, Jaspersoft and (drum roll please) Microsoft.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

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 And it’s not just any Windows Server. To run the current RHEV management, users must get Windows Server 2008, R2. “You need the latest and greatest,” said an IT manager with a big Linux-oriented systems integration firm. No admins want to work with two sets of tools, said another attendee.

Face it, Linux shops have Linux skills and many want absolutely nothing to do with Windows. Full stop. They barely tolerate the sound of Windows boot-up music emanating from reporters’ laptops.

The odd Windows console requirement is a remnant of Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet, and its KVM virtualization expertise but it’s nearly over. The Windows-less RHEV 3.0 is due later this year.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player. It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.

Then there’s Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which, Red Hat said, will support Java, Python,  PHP and Ruby languages and Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Zend, Django, Java EE and other frameworks.

Isaac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master, said developers just want to develop. Figuring out infrastructure, platform basics, servers, and fundamentals is not how developers should be spending their time. 

“God it’s awful,” Roth told reporters on Wednesday. “I just want to write Angry Birds.”  His claim is that OpenShift Express will ease their pain.

OpenShift Express, a free set of client development tools, is available now. Two other, higher-end versions, OpenShift Flex and OpenShift Power add more capabilities.

2: Last year, Summit attendees were busy weighing Red Hat’s Xen-for-KVM virtualization switch and what issues they might experience in a Xen-to-KVM migration of their own. Flash forward to this year, Red Hat appears to embrace the idea of multiple hypervisors. It must be that whole “openness” thing. VMware doesn’t share that philosophy, according to Red Hat exec VP Paul Cormier who charged that VMware  ”is trying to take the entire world back to the 1980s by locking you into the hardware level with ESX.”

3: Perhaps Red Hat is getting all kumbaya about virtualization because it has no choice. Judging from another Summit session, there’s a heckuva a lot RHEL shops running (gasp!) VMware. Even RHEL shops that would love to go with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) aren’t gonna go there until they no longer have to run RHEV management on a Windows (yes, Windows!) server. That hated Windows requirement will finally go away with the upcoming RHEV 3 release.

4: Judging from the packed session on running high-availability Oracle databases on RHEL, Oracle’s efforts to supplant RHEL with Oracle Unbreakable Linux are falling woefully short.

5: Opinions on Red Hat support remain mixed. Some RHEL customers  privately say companies deploy RHEL because they have to prove they’re running a supported OS. But the problem is, when they actually call for support, the results are wildly inconsistent. Two Summit attendees — who work for different government agencies — said they are very happy with RHEL support, although they both also noted that they never, ever use it. Many techie-heavy Linux shops may be in the same boat. (If a support call is never dialed, does support really happen?)

Here’s more cloud news from Red Hat Summit/JBoss World.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Attachmate is primarily known for its mainframe connectivity and terminal emulation software as well as NetIQ, Windows systems management software acquired in 2006.

Other, unnamed, IP assets will be sold to a consortium including Microsoft Corp. Novell and Microsoft have agreements in place to ease SUSE Linux and Windows interoperability. That deal is worth $450 million.

Attachmate will pay $6.10 per share or about $2.2 billion in cash, about a 28% premium over Novell’s price on March 2, 2010, the last trading day before Elliott Partners announced its unsolicited bid to buy Novell.

The concurrent sale of “certain intellectual property assets” to  CPTN Holdings LLC, is also on deck. CPTN Holdings is a consortium including Microsoft and other “technology companies.” This deal is worth $450 million in cash, Novell said.

Things had been so quiet around Novell recently, that company watchers suspected a deal was in the works.

Early reaction among Linux shops has been surprise at the name of the acquiring party. Speculation had run rampant both inside and outside of Novell that VMware was a top contender. Told that Attachmate was buying Novell, one long-time Linux user yelled: “WHO?”

Barbara Darrow is senior news director of the SearchDataCenter/Virtualization group at TechTarget.
Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com, or follow us on twitter.

Just as the software giant–which built its fortune on pricey (dare I say proprietary?) databases–starts to deep-six OSS fan-favorite OpenSolaris, it also sued Google over  how it implemented Java in Android. That move was immediately blasted as interference with an open source icon.

Oracle’s timing was funky and it didn’t help that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison seems to relish playing Snidely Whiplash to some other vendor’s Nell. Remember him laughing off rumors that Oracle would buy Red Hat? Why do that, he asked, when we can download the software for free? Which, as The 451 analyst Jay Lyman points out, is pretty much what Oracle did with Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

But Google is hardly a paragon of open sourciness. For all its open-source projects–Chrome, Android et al.–Google’s core search business is still a big, super-secret black box.  Sure, it runs on Linux, but how much of that work filters back to “the community?”

So Google has been able to play the victim–something it can rarely do nowadays. And Oracle has not communicated very well that it is Google’s specific use of Java that it is targeting, not the community at large, said Lyman.  “Google is aware of and stands to gain from this positioning…to say that ‘hey, look, Oracle is attacking open source, when in reality, Oracle is squarely attacking Google,” he added. (Lyman has been following the shifting good guys/bad guys of OSS for some time.

The OSS community’s anxiety around Oracle’s treatment of the MySQL franchise comes into play here as well, although Lyman noted that Oracle has worked to expand and improve MySQL.

Michael Cizmar, president of MC+A, a Chicago VAR that works with the Google appliance, agreed that Google plays both sides of the OSS fence.

“They’ve contributed heavily to things like the Chrome project, which they initiated, and Android is an open source project…but they only contribute around things that are not core [to their main business],” he noted.

Thus, there is a feeling that Google has reaped more from open source, particularly Linux, than it has sewn. Still, Lyman and others point out that the fact that Google runs on Linux greatly enhances Linux’ standing among enterprise users. 

Ironically, Oracle also still leads with Linux in many cases. Its Exadata data center appliances run Linux–not OpenSolaris, not Solaris. So, in one key respect–proving that Linux is ready for prime-time, mission-critical applications like databases–Oracle and Google are in violent agreement.

Let us know what you think about this post; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com, or follow us on on Twitter.