I didn't have a chance yet to write about this due to some recent travel, but better late than never. About 10 days ago, Nokia acquired the remaining 52% of Symbian that they didn't already own for a cool $410 million. Nokia also announced that they would open source all of the Symbian code. This follows on Nokia's earlier acquisition this year of Trolltech, the open source GUI toolkit developer, for $153 million. For those not familiar with it, Symbian is a platform created jointly between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion ten years ago. (Symbian evolved from the EPOC platform... READ MORE

Via Luis Vila's blog: Stormy Peters has taken a new role at the GNOME foundation. With Stormy gone, who will convince Rod & SpringSource to join the newly announced OpenLogic's Partner Program? ;-) Best wishes to Stormy in her new role. PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don?t necessarily represent IBM?s positions, strategies or opinions."... READ MORE

OpenLogic announced an evolution to their "aggregated open source support" model today. According to the press release: "OpenLogic provides front line enterprise-grade support across the 400 open source packages in its certified library. In 2006, OpenLogic created its Expert Community to provide additional backstop support ? paying lead open source developers for support. Now, with this new partnership program, commercial partners will provide backstop support for their projects and OpenLogic will resell its partners? enterprise support offerings." OpenLogic's CEO Steve Grandchamp is quoted: "This is the next phase of our open source aggregation model where we partner with leading open... READ MORE

News of the Krugle Enterprise appliance product announcement making it to the "Top Stories" list on InfoWorld left me scratching my head. Like many of you, I knew Krugle to be a search engine for code snippets from open source projects. As it turns out, what I had previously thought was "Krugle" is really "Krugle Public". "Krugle Enterprise" is a commercial offering targeted at enterprises. (Who knew??) While Krugle Public is largely targeted at finding code snippets, Krugle Enterprise does this and focuses on defect management and component development across projects, teams and developers. The Krugle Co. website states: "Turn... READ MORE

I missed Red Hat's fiscal 1Q09 release a few weeks ago, so I went back and read the transcript and dug into the numbers a little. As you can see in the table below, total revenue growth has averaged 31 percent/quarter since fiscal 1Q08. Surprisingly though, Sales & Marketing and R&D have grown 32 percent/quarter and 37 percent/quarter over the same period. More evidence to refute the myth that open source doesn't need sales, marketing or R&D investments. It is good to see that R&D is growing faster than Sales & Marketing. However, it's not sustainable for R&D and Sales... READ MORE

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but not a single project from Microsoft's Codeplex made it to the finals of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards (CCAs). When Microsoft was announced as a sponsor, the press release highlighted that the CCAs would welcome any project nomination, including projects hosted at Codeplex. Most of you know that Codeplex is the home for open source projects predominately targeted at Microsoft environments. Maybe the news of the CCA nomination process didn't reach the Codeplex user community as this was the first year that the CCAs were opened to projects regardless of their home? Also, I'm... READ MORE

News from Sacha (and covered by InfoWorld) that JBoss Application Server 5.0 is close to GA kicked off a debate at TSS. Some commented that they were "Suspicious of anything that takes three years to develop," while others questioned if there was anything new in JBoss AS5 that SpringSource and GlassFish (or for that matter Apache Geronimo) hadn't already delivered. Others congratulated JBoss on closing in on JEE5 certification and refactoring their runtime to be more flexible. What caught my attention is the way that Sacha (JBoss CTO) responded to two comments from Douglas Dooley. When Douglas suggested that JBoss... READ MORE

I just finished the third of four week-long residence weeks for school. One more to go and I'll get some semblance of a life back...my wife can't wait. "The Opposable Mind" by Roger Martin was one of the books we had to read as prep for the week. Roger is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Roger is one of the most prominent and prolific supporters of integrative thinking. What is integrative thinking? "Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense... READ MORE

I had an update recently from ex-JBoss dude Shaun Connolly on what's going on at Ringside Networks. Ringside was founded by ex-Jboss, ex-BlueStone middleware business guru Bob Bickel. And if it's interesting enough to get him out of retirement, I figure it's worth paying attention to. The company is still in the early stages, about a dozen employees, mostly coding their brains out, on what they term a "social application server." The comparison of social networking applications with the early days of Java development is an apt one. It makes sense that there should be some kind of basic infrastructure... READ MORE

I was sitting in a train in the middle of rainy Ireland when I received a mail that Nokia has bought Symbian and is releasing it as Open Source. I didn't believe a word of it. But the web was full of news about it, so it was true. This is an amazing turn of events that I didn't anticipate at all. (You may or may not know that in my previous job I was heavily involved with Symbian programming. Ironically, one reason I left just 6 months ago is that I wanted to work in an Open Source environment :-)

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