IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China. The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

Nexaweb announced it has contributed new software to the Dojo Foundation that will further advance the use of open source AJAX within a company's critical business applications. The software, dubbed 'dojo.E,' will allow users to more easily create enterprise Web applications based on the Dojo Toolkit, one of the industry's most advanced sets of open source AJAX tools.

Red Hat announced that Cybercity has chosen to use the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform for system integration and middleware. The JBoss solution is expected to reduce Cybercity's total cost of ownership (TCO). In selecting an SOA solution, Cybercity initially evaluated Oracle Fusion, BEA WebLogic and JBoss solutions. The organization ultimately selected the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform over an existing BEA WebLogic platform and its pre-installed COTS closed source system for the provisioning of Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) customers. In the future the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will serve as a link between systems such as the CRM/Customer support client, backend BSS/Billing system, external partners, ISP platforms and the actual network itself.

SourceLabs announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment. SourceLabs' automated tools and support services for Java and Linux developers, corporate IT professionals, and solution providers are an effective, on demand new way to more effectively support open source software development and operations. SourceLabs Self-Support tools dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java and Linux application development and maintenance by bringing together in one bundle all the components developers need to create and deploy web applications using the Eclipse Foundation's open source development framework.

Red Hat announced that Channel Insider has named Red Hat Enterprise Linux the top server operating system in its 2008 Product of the Year awards. Winners exemplify attributes of high importance to the channel including value, support and profit potential. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a platform for open source computing, coupling the innovation of open source technology and the stability of a true enterprise-class platform.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Palamida announced that Sterling Commerce has selected Palamida as its solution to manage and secure its use of open source software. By including Palamida solutions in the engineering lifecycle process, Sterling Commerce is taking an important step to reduce the business risks associated with undocumented code.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Intalio reckons it's got the first open source Business Process Management System delivered as a service. It's running dedicated servers on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). A subscription for Intalio On Demand starts at $1,500 per dedicated server and includes bandwidth, licenses, maintenance and support. There's a free five-day evaluation.

Steve Jobs may not think much of Flash but Qualcomm apparently feels differently and has been collaborating with Adobe on a mobile platform that integrates Flash with its Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) client software and, voilà, the BREW Mobile Platform, which the pair says will create a 'new standard for mass-market handset platforms.'

Facebook, the social networking site that Microsoft owns a pricey sliver of, says it's going to open source its year-old Facebook Platform so it's easier for developers to build applications on it. It's reportedly calling the effort fbOpen and the move puts it on a collision course with the Google OpenSocial initiative that MySpace, Yahoo and now AOL back so third-party applications can access the sites' data.

VIA's got a so-called OpenBook Mini-Note Reference Design and has open sourced the CAD files for the 2.2lb clamshell case design to push adoption of its 1GHz-1.6GHz C7 x86 chips and companion chipsets by reducing development costs and speeding time-to-market. It?s using the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license for the panel blueprints.

Torry Harris Business Solutions has announced collaborations with universities in the U.S., Europe, and Canada, giving a new thrust to business R&D through collaborative research, business support, and consultancy. Specific areas of collaboration include service-oriented architecture (SOA) and agile development methodologies.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Open source has made significant 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.

Funambol introduced a new version of its open source BlackBerry push email and personal information management (PIM) sync software. Funambol's BlackBerry software consists of two components. The push email component enables BlackBerries to work with consumer email services such as Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Hotmail and Gmail, as well as any POP or IMAP server. The PIM sync component enables BlackBerry users to wirelessly sync PIM data with a Funambol server, which in turn can sync with a wide range of backend email and PIM systems as well as email clients such as Outlook. The free open source Funambol BlackBerry software performs push email and over-the-air (OTA) sync of contacts, calendars, tasks and notes with consumer email systems as well as groupware systems beyond Exchange, Domino and GroupWise that are supported by BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Just as we have become dependent on oil as an energy resource, we have also become dependent on a single vendor solution for saving our digital history - in the form of our word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. Last year, it was estimated that more than 90 percent of the office productivity suite market was controlled by one vendor, and, historically, because of this dominance, consumers, businesses small and large, and governments have been left with few viable options.

SnapLogic announced the availability of the SnapLogic 2.0 open source data integration framework as a free VMware virtual appliance. SnapLogic enables enterprises to securely distribute core IT data to business users and to create enterprise mashups and rich Internet applications (RIAs) from a wide variety of data sources. The SnapLogic virtual appliance enables VMware users to deploy SnapLogic 2.0, pre-configured and ready to run, in minutes, simplifying installation, eliminating interoperability worries, and enabling trouble-free upgrades. The SnapLogic virtual appliance is available for both SnapLogic Community Edition and SnapLogic Professional Edition. The appliance runs on VMware Player, VMware Workstation, and VMware Server for Windows and Linux, and VMware Fusion for the Mac.

Apatar announced connectivity to IBM DB2, a family of relational database management system products from IBM that are widely used in enterprise applications, corporate ERP systems, and mainframes. The new connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset allows reading and writing of data from/to DB2 tables and improves the quality of data during migration or integration, all without custom coding. With this release, Apatar enables both developers and users to easily link DB2 information between third-party applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM), other databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL), flat files (CSV/TXT), and the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3, RSS feeds).

'This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo,' noted Michael Arrington today as he predicted that 'Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project.' Arrington continues: 'Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.'

Hybrid applications made up of proprietary, open source and third-party components are the result of today's fast-paced and complex software development landscape. Applications developed within the last five years - whether internal or external - are at least 50% open source software (OSS) and third-party components.

Despite hisses and boos from the open source side of the house One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is now officially soldered at the hip to Microsoft. Its novel XO laptop is supposed to go to trials in a half-dozen developing countries next month fitted with XP and a student version of Office and it expects to have a dual-boot Windows-Red Hat version ready by October.

Wind River and Intel are putting their heads together to create an extensible open source Linux platform for the automotive industry - an infotainment (gad, that horrid word) platform for Intel's newfangled Atom chip. It's part of a major new product strategy for Wind River, which is going to open source the specification and code from the platform at Moblin.org in hopes of creating Open Infotainment Platforms that everybody uses and that attract a vibrant ecosystem.

Two-year-old open source ERP house Openbravo has just picked up a second-round check for $12 million signed by Amadeus Capital, the publicly traded GIMV and Adara Venture Partners. The money is supposed to take the Pamplona-based concern international, increase its staff, and improve its web-based products. Openbravo plays mostly in the small and mid-markets, where ERP adoption is still low, ostensibly ignored by proprietary ISVs.

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives.

Open-Xchange and Parallels are integrating Open-Xchange open source email and collaboration software with Parallels technology to deliver a cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative to commercial email and collaboration products at a competitive price. The products, which will be fully integrated with Parallels Automation solutions, will be offered to end-users via hosting and service providers.

Fedora 9 is out. Red Hat says its community-driven operating system features the first non-destructive live USB with persistence - which Red Hat thinks is a first of a kind anywhere - and marks the first major KDE 4-based distribution. Other highlights include improvements and enhancements for OpenJDK6, a completely open source implementation of Java SDK Standard Edition; GNOME 2.22; NetworkManager, which supports mobile broadband, multiple connections and connection editing and sharing; PackageKit, the default cross-distribution software package manager; the Anaconda installer; and Firefox 3 Beta 5 browser.

Skype has thrown in the towel on its appeal of the German court conviction last year that it violated the GPL by not furnishing GPL2-covered source code with a Linux-based SMC Networks VoIP phone. The case was brought by Harald Welte of the gpl-violations.org watchdog operation.

Small business owners looking for an affordable alternative to the Microsoft Exchange e-mail platform can look forward to a hosted, cost-effective and feature-rich e-mail and collaboration service, from Network Solutions and Open-Xchange. Open-Xchange and Network Solutions have partnered to deliver a hosted e-mail service to small- and medium-sized businesses. In the near future, Network Solutions will offer Open-Xchange's advanced web-based personal information management (PIM) client as an option to its customers. Based on Open-Xchange's award-winning Smart Collaboration technology, the agreement will provide Network Solutions' customers with highly-integrated and feature-rich e-mail, calendaring, contact and task management, through an easy-to-use interface.

Ingres announced an open source version of Ingres OpenROAD, the company's platform for rapid application development. The open source version of Ingres OpenROAD is now available as a free download via the Ingres community website at http ://community.ingres.com. By open-sourcing Ingres OpenROAD, more users will be able to try the product and build rapid application prototypes.

Dimdim announced a new release of its web meeting software specifically for the open source community. The new version, called Dimdim Open Source Community Edition Version 3.5, nicknamed 'Eagle,' is completely free and available for download. Dimdim 'Eagle' is a unified communications platform created for and by the open source community. To date, this community has downloaded Dimdim's free open source web meeting software over 230,000 times.

Ingres announced that it has stepped up its involvement in the open source community to drive validation and adoption of open source. Among the company's open source initiatives are the Ingres Janitors Project, Open Source Boot Camp and the Global Ingres University Alliance.

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the 'next IBM' and why Google is not the 'next Microsoft' - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors, like Zoho, to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled last week. As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore s Law on these computing eras.

Ulitzer.com, which will be launched in 2008, with 5,500 authors and more than 550,000 original articles, is looking for enterprise software architect(s), programmer(s), and Web app developer(s). The site will offer original content in more than 2,000 topics ranging from AJAX to Zebra. Ulitzer claims that by 2010, three out of 10 books on any subject will be published at Ulitzer.com, and Time Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, and the rest of today's magazines and journals will be replaced by Ulitzer in the next five years. Ulitzer is looking for talent who will work on the conversion of its proprietary CMS to a new, open source, LAMP-based system. Ulitzer Website advertises that if you have one of the following qualification points in your resume, to apply for one of the open job positions. All applications will remain confidential. Ulitzer annouced that they identified Drupal Content Management Platform as their platform of choice and they are looking for Drupal developers experienced in delivering large scale applications on this platform.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Any large Java source base can have insidious and subtle bugs. Every experienced Java programmer knows that finding and fixing these bugs can be difficult and costly. Fortunately, there are a large number of free open source Java tools available that can be used to find and fix defects early in the development life cycle. In this article, we'll look at a few examples of specific uncommon[1] or unusual defects that can happen in code and see how different Java static analysis tools detect them.

OpenOffice.org is publicly beta testing OpenOffice 3.0, which is not recommended for production use. General release is expected in September. Aside from cosmetics, it will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format 1.2 and is capable of opening Office 2007 and 2008 for Mac OS X files.

Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

MySQL has backed off a plan to charge for some encryption and compression backup widgetry in the next version of the database - and, heavens, NOT OPEN SOURCE THE STUFF, an idea it trotted a few weeks ago and predictably caught hell for. Sun, which bought MySQL for a billion dollars, a good reason to try to make some of the money back, took the rap.

db4objects has announced that its db4o object database is now optimized for Microsoft's LINQ. With the new support, developers can choose an object-oriented optimized engine without changing the API or compromising performance. db4object's db4o database offers a persistence solution to store objects of any complexity natively with a single line of code.