Microsoft makes a patent promise. JBoss is certifiable. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft announced that it will be applying its Community Promise to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications, reducing patent concerns related to Mono.

# Red Hat achieved EAL 2+ security certification for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

# A European Commission white paper on standards stirred some controversy with regards to open source. …

Governments. Governance. Customers wins. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Governments
The Examiner provided a two part interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards, open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was reported that Vienna to …

Spring forward. Freeloaders, leeches and hermits. Intel buys Wind River. And more.

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A Spring in its step
SpringSource boasted of rapid revenue growth while CEO Rod Johnson claimed that Red Hat’s Open Choice initiative is defensive response to SpringSource, a suggestion that was denied by Rich Sharples.

Freeloaders, leeches and hermits
I already provided my views earlier this week on Infoworld’s report about open source ‘leeches’ and corporate contributions. The debate continued as Dave Rosenberg …

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

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Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.”

The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that MySQL executives began citing it themselves.

It is also a comparison that explains how the two products could potentially co-exist within a single company, as they seem likely to do following the announcement that Sun has agreed to be acquired by Oracle.

Much of the MySQL-related coverage of the impending acquisition has focused on the likelihood of Oracle killing-off the …

The big news to kick off this week was Oracle’s announced acquisition of Sun Microsystems. There is already a lot of discussion of the integration challenges, how Oracle is getting into hardware (or as Matt Asay describes it, having an ‘iPod moment’) and of course, the implications for open source software. What stands out to me is the fact that the world’s biggest proprietary database player — one of few software giants that still sells and supports primarily proprietary software — will own the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL. It is unclear how significantly MySQL figures into the deal, but given Sun spent $1b acquiring it and further invested in its enterprise readiness and use, …

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

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IBM to acquire Sun?
No prizes for guessing the big story this week as the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for $6.5bn, according to “people familiar with the matter”. Raising the game, the New York Times reported that the purchase price was nearer $7bn citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations”.

The media exploded with …

Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

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Cloudera makes it official
We previously reported the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects back in October. The company made its official debut in not-so polite open source society with the launch of its distribution for Hadoop and …

Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired.

The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source vendors most likely to go public in the next couple of years.

Looking at the list of contenders again it is easy to imagine that they could all be snapped up before they make it public thanks to the fact that 1) open source vendors are very attractive investments 2) it is difficult for open source vendors to build the momentum to do so.

I spoke recently with …

Matt Asay is excited about Red Hat’s Spacewalk project to release the code behind its Red Hat Network Satellite product under an open source license (as he should be, he’s been waiting over a year for it). As well as anticipation, Matt’s excitement can also be attributed to the potential for Spacewalk to become the default management platform for open source software.

As he writes:

“What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.

What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.

…