Kickfire and 10gen obtain new rounds of funding. BusyBox developers drop lawsuit against Supermicro. OpenLogic and EnterpriseDB release open source survey findings. (and more)

Kickfire Raises $20 Million in Series B Financing, Kickfire (Press Release)

10gen, New Cloud Computing Firm, Closes $1.5m Series A, 10gen (Press Release)

BusyBox Developers and Supermicro Agree to End GPL Lawsuit, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) (Press Release)

OpenLogic Releases Survey on Enterprise Open Source …

Progress acquires IONA. Red Hat announces quarterly earnings. Optaros raises new round of funding. (and more)

Progress Software Corporation to Acquire IONA Technologies, Progess Software / IONA Technologies (Press Release)

Red Hat Reports First Quarter Results, Red Hat (Press Release)

Optaros Closes $12 Million in Series C Financing Co-Led by .406 Ventures & Globespan Capital Partners, Optaros (Press Release)

Sourcefire, Inc. Responds to Barracuda Networks …

Neocleus obtains new round of funding. Novell releases OpenSUSE 11. Red Hat acquires open source identity code from Identyx. (and more)

Neocleus Raises Over $11M in Series B Financing, Neocleus (Press Release)
openSUSE Project Announces Availability of openSUSE 11.0, Novell (Press Release)

Red Hat Delivers on Linux Automation with Identity Management and Open Source Systems Management Solutions, Red Hat (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Releases New Version of Open Source …

When we write about investors on this blog we are normally referring to angel and VC investors and the funding they provide to open source start-ups. There is a small, but growing, list of VCs that clearly understand the open source development and distribution models and the long-term profit potential of open source software vendors.

Can the same be said of individual and institutional investors buying and selling shares in publicly traded software companies? Not according to the analysis of Oliver Alexy, a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Technische Universität München TUM Business School in Munich, Germany.

Oliver has analyzed the impact that releasing software under open source licenses has on a company’s share price. Details have been published this week in the …

IBM has got back to me with a terse response to some questions I posed following its investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week (sample Q&A: Q. Is the investment a response to Sun?s acquisition of MySQL? A. No). What IBM does not say is in fact as revealing as what it does say, however.

Here’s the official line:

“IBM has become a minority shareholder of EnterpriseDB. This affords us an opportunity to continue to participate in, and gain further insight into, the open source community. This complements other experiences such as with the Linux, Apache and Eclipse communities and previous investments we’ve made in Red Hat and Novell. IBM has been a long-time supporter of Open Source communities, and we continue to see interest among our clients for Linux and other Open Sources solutions. This investment …

While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).

IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given how rare it is for the company to make venture capital-style investments and also given the dynamic between IBM, Sun and Oracle. IBM usually chooses to support startups indirectly through its …