3Com banks on OSS

Networking giant 3Com is banking on an open source strategy to differentiate itself from the competition, reports ZDNet.

Speaking at a media briefing in Malaysia on Tuesday, Peter Chai, VP and GM of 3Com Asia-Pacific, said the company's open services networking (OSN) platform will enable its customers to create and build relevant applications on top of its hardware offerings. The OSN infrastructure runs on Linux.

Chai explained: "Developers [can] build third-party applications, or customers [can] develop their own applications to work on top of our products. This is our unique selling point."

Trolltech has released the Qt and Qtopia Core 4.3.1 to commercial customers and the open source community, reports EE Times Asia.

Qt is a standard framework for high-performance cross-platform application development and Qtopia Core is an application framework for single-purpose devices powered by embedded Linux. Both releases are available for evaluation and open source download.

According to Trolltech, Qt and Qtopia Core 4.3.1 include bug fixes and performance optimisations made since the release of version 4.3.0 in May. In addition to professional support, Trolltech commercial licence holders receive regular releases as part of their annual licence.

EnterpriseDB uses open source software development to take on Oracle in the database market, reports ITPro.

The benefits offered by open source software development is the way forward for smaller firms looking to take on established giants, according to the heads of database firm EnterpriseDB.

The company, which sells a product based on the open source PostgreSQL database, is another in a long line of firms using open source products to take on bigger, more established players. A survey last month showed that three-quarters of firms had deployed or intended to deploy open source solutions for core business systems.