Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

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Paranoid Android. Canonical and Gnome. A new OSI. And more.

Paranoid Android
If you are interested in the potential violation of the GPL by the Android kernel you have probably already immersed yourself in the numerous blog posts published on the topic. If not, start with Sean Hogle’s analysis or Bradley M Kuhn’s overview of the original allegations and work backwards from there, not forgetting a detour for the obligatory Microsoft connection. Linus Torvalds said claim “seems totally bogus”. In the meantime, Microsoft …

Funding for Eucalytus and Moodlerooms. SkySQL offers support for MySQL. And more.

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

# Eucalyptus Systems raised $20m in a second round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates.

# Moodlerooms reportedly raised $7.15m in equity funding.

# SkySQL announced its intention to provide support & services for the MySQL ecosystem.

# StatusNet launched the open source StatusNet Desktop Client.

# Rhomobile …

The White House contributes to OSS. Growth for Pentaho and MuleSoft. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The White House released some of the custom code it has developed for whitehouse.gov as open source.

# Pentaho reported 229% bookings growth and 177% Enterprise Edition customer growth in Q2.

# MuleSoft grew bookings by 140% in Q1.

# The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is now available, without Xen.

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Topics for this podcast:

*The latest in VC funding for open source
*VMware’s SpringSource buys cloud messenger Rabbit
*Open source monitoring vendors’ key cloud partnershps
*Oracle moves ahead, back on MySQL, OpenSolaris

iTunes or direct download (25:38, 7MB)

One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the …

Elliot offers $2bn for Novell. OSI refutes IIPA’s view on open source. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell confirmed a $2bn purchase offer from Elliot Associates. Interesting perspectives on Elliot’s offer for Novell from Linuxquestions, Andy Updegrove, and Matt Asay.

# The OSI categorically rejected the …

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS. The UK’s updated OSS strategy. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS
# Oracle’s MySQL strategy slide.

# eWeek reported that database thought leaders are divided on Oracle MySQL.

# Savio Rodrigues and Computerworld on Oracle’s plans for MySQL, other open source assets.

# Zack Urlocker is leaving Oracle/Sun/MySQL.

EC approves Oracle-Sun. Google patents MapReduce. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

EC approves Oracle-Sun
The European Commission cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Larry Ellison is set to unveil Oracle’s Sun strategy on January 27th, Monty Widenius said he will go to the Court of First Instance to appeal the decision.

# Pro-open source political party formed in Hungary.

# Google …

Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind …