Python, the open source programming language that sees itself as an alternative to Java and brags about being used at Google, Industrial Light & Magic and NASA, will be having its PyCon user conference March 14-16 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare Hotel. Python creator Guido van Rossum, now working for Google, is supposed to present the next-generation Python 3000 in the works for two years. See http://us.python.org.

Canonical announced the availability of the Launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other additions to the Ubuntu environment on desktop, server and now mobile platforms.The PPA service is the newest feature of Launchpad, Canonical's hosting service for public software development. Launchpad is becoming a centerpiece of the free software development process, allowing users to report bugs, contribute code, submit translations and generally collaborate in an efficient and transparent fashion.

Programmers naturally gravitate toward the best software packages and components for development. They are increasingly choosing a broad range of enterprise-grade open source packages from Apache and Tomcat to Axis and Eclipse. But imagine for a moment this all-too-common scenario: a programmer at a Global 2000 is faced with a looming deadline and after a little bit of research, picks an open source package that he thinks will meet his technical needs and enable him to get his job done more quickly and effectively.

Concurrent Computer Corporation announced the availability of RedHawk - Cluster Manager software for its line of commercial off-the-shelf X-86 based systems including iHawk - multiprocessor systems and ImaGen - visual servers. The RedHawk Cluster Manager allows users to install and configure Concurrent iHawk systems and ImaGen visual servers as highly-integrated, high-performance computing clusters. RedHawk Cluster Manager includes a user interface to effectively utilize and manage a cluster's full capabilities

Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, Inc announced their plans to develop new and innovatively designed games and applications for Google's free and open source mobile platform, Android. The company anticipates that this emerging platform will soon attract handset manufacturers because of the lower costs for the operating system and expects Android to be successful especially in China due to its Linux base.

SpikeSource, a provider of packaged and maintained open source solutions, announces the availability of its Open-Xchange Appliance powered by SpikeSource, a turnkey solution that bundles Open-Xchange Express Edition software into a comprehensive, enterprise-class email appliance. Based on open source software, the appliance delivers all the functionality of leading proprietary offerings including email, contact, calendar and task management, at a fraction of the cost. The Open-Xchange Appliance is exclusively available through SpikeSource and its reseller partners.

Cognos announced that Jordan?s Furniture has won the Technology User of the Year award given by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. These awards recognize the best and brightest technology innovators and leaders. Awards are also bestowed upon companies that either develop or implement innovative technology solutions. The recognition highlights recent and significant contributions to companies or the broader industry.

Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ 91.5 FM Chicago, WBEQ 90.7 FM Morris, and WBEW 89.5 FM Chesterton) is a community-supported, non-commercial public service broadcasting institution for 7.7 million people throughout Chicago and surrounding regions. Chicago Public Radio produces, acquires, and distributes engaging, thoughtful, and entertaining programs of depth, breadth, diversity, and substance. The organization prides itself on helping listeners learn about issues and ideas that affect the community, the nation, and the world. The institution has more than 120 employees across multiple offices in greater Chicago.

The stakes are high. As an Open Solutions Association (OSA) board member and executive VP of Centric CRM, my number-one fear is that the creativity and dynamism of the past decade could come to nothing if open source application vendors don't stand together and take a collective position. As isolated entities they run the risk of getting picked off, one-by-one, leaving an industry landscape dominated by multibillion-dollar giants like Microsoft and Oracle.

For Software as a Service (SaaS) and Financial Services applications, AJAX-enhanced UIs are a proven way to improve bottom-line performance,' said Paul Giurata, managing partner, Catalyst Resources, who runs a 30-45 day program to help clients successfully AJAX-enable their web-based applications. 'The challenge with AJAX,' he continued, 'is finding the optimum balance between business needs, technology potential, and enhanced user experience.'

You may have heard statements such as Linux is inexpensive, reduces TCO and dependency on vendors, and is easy to maintain, from promoters of Linux in the enterprise. But, for those who still haven't made the jump - this article discusses implementation hurdles, cost of implementation, and a readiness checklist. If you're part of a non-technology company, this article is a must-read.

Two months after IBM decided to try to revive Lotus Symphony as a rival to Office, it says the free Symphony beta 2 has been downloaded by 250,000 registered users, 88% of whom are Microsoft customers. Twelve percent are using the Linux version, IBM says, and 50% of the users are outside the US in France, Brazil, China, Japan, Germany, Spain, Holland and Italy although the software is only available in English. Sensing an opportunity, IBM says it's accelerated development in response to user demand, making the download process for the three programs - the word processor, presentation code and spreadsheet - 100% faster and done in a click - and upping performance on average 50% faster.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm, moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to retain their competitive advantage.

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a new top-level project at eclipse.org. Originally proposed by Sybase in February 2005, DTP has attracted strong community support and is currently managed by a committee comprised of Sybase, IBM and Actuate. It is an open source initiative designed to provide solutions in the data framework and tooling domains.

This is the second part of my two-part series on open source market strategies and implementations. I previously outlined the 10 strategy rules for open source marketing and emphasized building new markets, differentiating, contributing, pricing and innovating, and the customer relationship. As I mentioned in part one, a year ago I wrote 'Howells' 10 Rules for Open Source Marketing.' Here we're looking at where Alfresco is a year later in its marketing approach.

Oracle is open sourcing a Call Interface (OC18) database driver for PHP, describing it as bringing 'breakthrough scalability to PHP applications' and enhancing it as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The driver, it said, supports Oracle Database 11g features like connection pooling and fast application notification so a single x86 server can support tens of thousands of database connections at higher availability.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

OASIS has formed a new technical committee to advance the Service Data Objects specification, which is designed to simplify the way in which service-oriented architecture applications handle data. Using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

Data is the fundamental building block of every business, data in the form of client information, sales information, employee information, and financial information fuels the operation of every business. In today's business environment, which enables data entry from multiple points and through myriad processes, data quality has become an increasing concern for businesses trying to succeed in an ever more competitive atmosphere.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

JunkEmailFilter.com works in the dangerous area of sorting through e-mail to filter out viruses and junk e-mails known as 'spam,' so that its clients receive only the e-mails they want to see. For higher levels of control and security, it uses open source virtualization software, known as OpenVZ.

It is with some sadness that I am writing my last editorial for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. As the founding editor-in-chief of this magazine and a past contributor to its predecessor, I am going to miss it. However, all things must end and this chapter of my writing career, I am happy to say, ends on a high note.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo, that it has significantly extended the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the heterogeneous, enterprise-scale demands of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The WSO2 ESB 1.5 adds the ability to run scheduled tasks, caching and other performance enhancements, message augmentation using standard databases, and a wide variety of file systems and FTP. Also new to Version 1.5 are support for XQuery and a simplified Plain Old Java Object (POJO) model based on the Command pattern.

Oracle has announced Oracle VM, server virtualization software that supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Key Oracle products including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are certified with Oracle VM. Customers have a single point of support for their entire virtualization environments, including the Linux operating system and Oracle products.

The Android Developer Challenge will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android, a complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

I installed Ubuntu on the Toshiba laptop. Ubuntu installed in 15 minutes - 49 for Windows XP and 125 for Windows Vista. Ubuntu's desktop came right up. I opened the pre-installed Firefox browser and found I could browse the Web immediately. Ubuntu installed a network adaptor for the Toshiba laptop. I shake my head at this Windows foolishness!

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has laid down with one of its enemies. It also cut deals with Microsoft and IBM. Red Hat will get a fully compatible open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for its Linux operating system out of the deal. All it has to do now is build it - and that includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - and optimize the runtime for JBoss-on-Linux. Red Hat's IcedTea project - which brings together Fedora, the early access version of Red Hat Linux, and JBoss.org technologies on Linux - gets pushed. It's supposed to supply free alternatives to some of the pieces of the OpenJDK project that are still proprietary.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has taken modular programming principals in to the distributed computing environment. But the functionality provided by such modules are much broader and hence, can be considered as services. When applications are deployed in a distributed computing environment there is a need for set of infrastructure services like, life cycle management, service announcement, service discovery, security, integration, etc. Applications which provides these infrastructure services make up the SOA platform. The most common approach to implement applications using SOA is to make use of web services. Considering the advantages of use of FOSS solutions in application development, its worth evaluating web service based FOSS options in building a SOA platform.

Launching a new Open Source, SaaS offering required Mindbridge to re-evaluate its infrastructure and resulting cost structures. The goals included: Providing stable computing platforms, Rapid server procurement, Leveraging commodity hardware, Leveraging Open Source technologies, Maintaining flexibility as new solutions are required, Integrating proprietary and Open Source solutions harmoniously, Enabling secure and reliable communications with systems regardless of their location on the Internet, Exposing elements of systems management to customers After considerable research, it was determined that the only economical way to accomplish these goals was to utilize virtualization while at the same time integrating various components using web services. This discussion will review the technologies utilized, the problems encountered and the opportunities presented by virtualizing a web infrastructure.

Open source has made signficant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments with a focus on ESB and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization, provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is. IDC, which coined the term, defines 'Virtualization 2.0' as the next step beyond server virtualization replete with faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing and ultimately policy-based automation. Egenera says IDC is speaking its name.