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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New CEOs for Funambol and Openbravo. Funding for 10gen. And more.

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

# Funambol appointed Amit Chawla as its new CEO.

# Openbravo appointed Paolo Juvara as its new CEO and raised a new funding round.

# 10gen raised $6.5m in third-round funding led by Sequoia Capital.

# Microsoft has reportedly invested an undisclosed sum in TurboHercules.

# …

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)

Perspectives on the IBM patent hoo-ha. Karmasphere lands funding. And more.

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

# IBM denied breaking its open source patent promise, claimed TurboHercules a member of organizations founded and funded by Microsoft, other competitors. Perspectives on the IBM patent hoo-ha: Florian Mueller, Simon Phipps, Matt Asay, Jim Zemlin, Eric Raymond.

# Oracle will …

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 …

Updating the MPL. Funding for Lucid and eXo. StatusNet. And more.

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

Updating the MPL
# ZDnet reported that the 10-year-old Mozilla Public License will be updated by the end of 2010, while Mitchell Baker explained the process.

Funding for Lucid and eXo
# Lucid Imagination raised $10m in series B funding from Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures and Walden International.

# eXo Platform raised $6m from Auriga …

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

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“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 …

Eclipse adds OSGi server. VMware-Zimbra deal due today? And more.

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

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# VMware’s SpringSource proposed that its dm Server OSGi-based app server become an Eclipse.org community project, while SAP proposed the Graphiti project.

# All …

Eben Moglen says EC case against Oracle-Sun is flawed. The value of open source. And more.

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

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Eben Moglen told the EC he does not see threat to competition from Oracle-Sun, says EC’s objections are flawed. A statement from the SFLC is …

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

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

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …