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Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
This is the money being made TODAY in Open Source
There is a lot of money being made in Open Source, although the profitable companies are not always the ones you would expect.
While many companies don’t disclose detailed financial information we have dug around to find numbers for some well-known open source companies and projects to see how they are doing financially.
We start with perhaps the most famous of them all…
Mozilla
Mozilla has the famous Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client. In 2006 the Mozilla Corporation generated $66.8 million in revenue with 85% of the revenue coming from Google for being the default search engine and ads placed on search result pages. Google and Mozilla recently extended the deal to 2011 (just before Google launched Chrome, ironically).
Sources: Wikipedia, TechCrunch.
Canonical
Ubuntu Linux is hugely popular, but it actually isn’t profitable. At least not yet. Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu. It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth who previously founded Thawte, which he sold for about $575 million, some of which he is now using to fund Canonical. Shuttleworth recently went on record saying that Canonical is not yet cash-flow positive but that he is happy to keep funding it for another three to five years.
Source: The Guardian.
Alfresco
Alfresco is an open source alternative for enterprise content management. The company has received a total of $19 million in venture capital. According to the founder and CEO, John Powell, the company is heading towards profitability and an annual run rate of $10 million in revenue. Powell also believes that Alfresco will be able to go public in 2009.
Source: Venturebeat.
Novell
Novell is a software development company that holds open source projects such as openSUSE Linux in addition to their closed software. Novell’s yearly revenue outlook for 2008 is expected to be between $940 and $970 million. Their SUSE Linux Enterprise sales rose 65% to $28 million in the first quarter of 2008.
Source: CNET.
Funambol
Funambol is an open source mobile synchronization server described as “Mobile 2.0” that is offering its product for free to enterprises and instead gets its revenue from service providers. They have received a total of $25 million in funding and are cash-flow positive. Funambol may go public in the future.
Sources: TechCrunch, CNET.
Sun Microsystems
Sun offers both hardware and software but is known for its open source software such as Java, Star Office, OpenSolaris and lately its huge acquisition of MySQL.
It is difficult to isolate what kind of money Sun is making off open source since it is such a large company, but MySQL’s revenue was around $50 million in 2006, and it was not losing money.
Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has said, “Looking forward, we remain confident in open source innovation as the accelerant to our growth strategy through increased adoption of our open source offerings.”
Red Hat
Red Hat is an open source software company with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and software such as JBOSS. In the first quarter of the fiscal year 2009, Red Hat pulled in $156.6 million, an increase of 32% compared to the previous year, and had $491.8 million in deferred revenue.
Source: CNET.
Yahoo
Yahoo is most famous for its search engine and Web 2.0 services such as Flickr, although it holds open source projects such as the groupware software Zimbra which it bought in 2007 for $350 million. Zimbra had about $20 million in bookings before the acquisition.
Source: CNET.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is an open source CRM system which has received $41 million in funding. Their annual revenue for 2007 was about $15 million and they where cash-flow positive.
Sources: TechCrunch, MSPmentor.
Nokia
Nokia wasn’t known as an open source company until they acquired Trolltech, the makers of the Qt graphical user interface framework used in for example KDE. Trolltech went public in 2006 and was bought by Nokia in 2008 for about $104 million. Their revenue was then about €25 million with total losses around €6 million for the last couple of years.
Source: KDE Developers.
Friday, March 20, 2009
The 5 Hardest Games in the Online World
I’ve played a wide variety of games throughout my life so far, ranging from Spyro the (cute little) Dragon and Crash Bandicoot to the more controversial Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt series.
During my search for new games, I encountered some games that were more - special.
Frankly, some of these games made you pull out all of your hair before you were done.
For this article, I’ve searched for the hardest (free) games in the world. Believe me when I say it will be frustrating. It will seem impossible. And if you don’t die and fail a few hundred times before succeeding, you’re just not trying hard enough.
If this seems too much for you, please turn back now. Failure will be an option - nearly a necessity before succeeding. If you can find the courage, follow me into the gaming pit of doom.
5. La Mulana
You’re an adventurer, and armed with nothing but a whip, you choose to invade the tomb of La Mulana. Like always, these tombs are far from empty, and trespassers are not particulary celebrated.
There are many items to be found in the game, many of which will contribute to the story, and some that will grant you additional abilities and weapons.
Remarkable for this 2D platformer, is that the story is non-linear. Yes, the ending will always be the same - if you manage to reach it - but there are tons of different ways to get there.
The game was originally released in Japanese, but an English patch was made available by Ian Kelley of AGTP. So you’ll need to download and install both the original game and the English patch.
4. World’s Hardest Game #2
The fourth place is taken by a flash game - the World’s Hardest Game 2 (talking about paradoxes).
The game looks ridiculously simple, but don’t be fooled; many brave men and women went down because of carelessness.
You play with the red square. Your objective is to grab all the coins and return to one of the green patches. There’s only one obstacle; the little blue balls. Touch those and you’re done for.
Easy, right?
The problem is that these little blue balls constantly move around, which creates a deadly maze that you need to get through.
Instead of showing you the number of lives you’ve got left, the game chooses to mock you with the number of lives you’ve lost so far. Play through all fifty insane levels, and you’ll hold a name of honor.
If you enjoyed playing this game, you should also check out the first game of the series.
3. Japanese Mario Kitten (dl) 
Our bronze medal goes to this Japanese Mario-like game.
The game has a high degree of randomness, which takes the difficulty to a whole new level, so don’t be surprised when you hit invisible bricks or get killed by the clouds from time to time.
Many people claim that because of this, completing it is more a matter of memory than of skill. But whatever the cause, the difficulty of this game is undeniable.
The game can be played out of your browser on this page, or you can download it here.
2. FLaiL 
Being the second hardest game available, FLaiL receives the silver medal.
FLaiL is an acrobatic 2D platformer, in which you need to hike, jump and even fly accross the level to reach a red beam. The difficulty of this game lies not in any randomness, but - as you can see in the screenshot below - in the insanity of the level designs. Even the tutorials are pretty hard, and it doesn’t get any easier.
Play through the 80 available stages by yourself or in co-operation mode. It’s also possible to add a third player, who then occupies himself with dropping bombs to make it even more difficult!
1. I Wanna Be The Guy 
By far the hardest game ever made, I Wanna Be The Guy.
I admit, if you manage to finish this game, you’ll be one hell of a guy.
You’re playing the role of Kid, who’s on the dangerous quest of becoming a guy. The game is frustrating at times, but wonderfully designed and hosts several cool references to old school classics - like the tetris level.
This game manages to combine utterly insane level designs with bits of randomness. You see the screenshot above? Chances are pretty good that a few of those spikes will try to attack you in mid-air.
Similar to Japanese Mario Kitten, remembering the oddities of each level plays at least as big of a role as your skill. However, if you manage to beat this game, you will be amongst the elite few.
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