Kaazing Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced an alliance to deliver the scalable and advanced real-time Web 2.0 platform. The integration between Kaazing's real-time Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, Enterprise Comet, and Sun Microsystems' open source Java EE application server, Glassfish, enables customers to create and deploy scalable mission-critical real-time solutions such as trading systems, betting and gambling applications, and interactive sports and news broadcasts, to the Web.

Neocleus announced that it has completed more than 18 months of work to enhance the Xen hypervisor to work on endpoints such as desktops and laptops. Neocleus will contribute these enhancements to the open source community to accelerate the adoption and development of a new generation of enterprise endpoint solutions. To create the hypervisor, Neocleus enhanced the Xen Open Source server-oriented hypervisor and transformed it into an endpoint-oriented hypervisor.

Parallels announced it has signed an agreement with myLittleTools to resell myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005, the web-based management tool designed for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The application enables service providers to manage most database and server objects, such as tables, views, programmability and security objects, through a web browser.

Red Hat announced the release of JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.0, an integrated middleware management platform that simplifies application development, testing, deployment and monitoring. The release of JBoss ON 2.0 represents continued momentum for the Enterprise Acceleration initiative announced earlier this year, which is aimed at fostering adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware by increasing its capabilities for large-scale enterprise use. Available in modular format, JBoss ON 2.0 provides organizations with an end-to-end application management solution to coordinate the many stages of the application lifecycle and improve operational efficiency through a single integrated tool.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community announced the availability of the technology preview release of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 and new Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sun also announced a new GlassFish Partner initiative designed to provide developers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) with access to a large number of frameworks and applications running on the GlassFish application server.

Sun Microsystems and the OpenPortal community announced a new open source initiative with Liferay to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from both companies. Developers will now have access to a new, stable, standards-based Web presentation platform. The Sun and Liferay products resulting from this initiative will bring developers simple, lightweight presentation capabilities for GlassFish, Sun's open source Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server.

The JCP introduced the Annual Awards six years ago to recognize excellence in Java standards development and innovation. Since its launch in 1998 as the open, inclusive process to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits, the Java Community Process program has fostered the evolution of the Java platform in cooperation with the international Java developer community.

Why is an Enterprise RIA Platform different? Simple: it must handle the demands of enterprise class applications. Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that a web application must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records.

Sun Microsystems and the global OpenSolaris community announced the availability of the OpenSolaris Operating System (OS). According to the company, OpenSolaris, based on Sun's Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, offers the combination of innovation, platform stability and support to meet business and development needs. It combines the foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation.

In his opening keynote at the annual CommunityOne open source developer conference, Ian Murdock, vice president for Developer and Community Marketing at Sun Microsystems, will discuss the increasing role communities play in the software industry, how technologies and the companies and communities that create them are increasingly interconnected, and how the power of community can and should play a role in next generation platforms. Additional Sun executives keynoting at the event include Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, and Rich Green, executive vice president of Software.

Talend announced that Pipeline Software has signed a strategic partnership within the Talend Alliance Program. Under the terms of the agreement, the optimized interoperability between Talend's open source data integration technologies and Pipeline Software's Transporter solution will allow customers to integrate data between SAP and other business-critical applications.

VIA is setting up a Linux Portal, still in beta, to get open source driver developed. It will initially focus on graphics drivers for its CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the latest Ubuntu distribution. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, says it will work to get the drivers built into Ubuntu.

'The world is moving to open source innovation, and Sun continues to lead that revolution,' said Jonathan Schwartz yesterday, as Sun reported yesterday its Q3 fiscal 2008 results. 'We continue to invest in the future created by open alternatives to proprietary technologies, best exemplified by the acquisition of MySQL,' Schwartz added.

PrismTech announced that the two open-source middleware communities are merging their CORBA Component Model (CCM) initiatives, underpinning the company's OpenFusion CCM offering. The Distributed Object Computing (DOC) Group and the OW2 Consortium - with support and contribution from PrismTech - are combining their efforts to advance the development and deployment of CCM technology.

Last summer, a group of technical experts from various open source companies came together under the banner of the Open Solutions Alliance, rolled out an enterprise-class application, and demonstrated the power of collaboration with the launch of the Common Customer View project, an interoperability project that integrates data from diverse front-office, back-office, and planning applications.

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called 'Trends in Open Source,' a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it's still only 6% of the global spend.

Veteran Business Intelligence (BI) entrepreneur Ward Yaternick has released his latest business analytics product, nextanalytics 3.0, with industry-disruptive pricing, top-tier product functionality, and easy online distribution. nextanalytics 3.0 emulates MySQL's strategy, offering business analytics capabilities. Yaternick has spent nearly 20 years in the BI industry, including key development roles at Cognos, OLAP@Work, and Business Objects. In 2003, Yaternick founded Ottawa-based nextanalytics with the mandate to deliver innovations in business analytics.

Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions, furthering the promise of Sun's open source Java technology initiative. In addition, the NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is being delivered as part of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release and Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several Sun x86 systems.

Sun Microsystems announced the addition of developer tools and expanded professional service capabilities to help developers better leverage the growing open source communities that are fast changing the economics of the storage IT landscape. Over 3,000 members and 30+ projects within an active and growing OpenSolaris storage community demonstrate a groundswell within the storage industry for developers and enterprise companies to use open source alternatives to expensive proprietary storage offerings.

Aras announced expanded operations throughout Europe, Middle East, and Africa [EMEA] and opened an EMEA headquarters office in Solothurn Switzerland to meet the growing demand for the Aras Innovator enterprise software solutions. As part of the expansion, Aras plans to add sales and support operations and extend the partner network across the region to provide local geographical representation.

In last month's article I wrote about Open Source and Open Standards. This month, having just returned from the QCon conference (http://jaoo.d k/london-2008/conference/ ) in London, during which I discussed the role of community in the JCP, and particularly the role that individual ('non-corporate') developers could play in the organization, I'd like to address some other aspect of openness: transparency of process and community involvement.

SnapLogic, the open source start-up that been fostering the eponymous data integration project for the past year, is going commercial with the widgetry, claiming that the stuff can do what proprietary software from TIBCO and Infomatica can't and make it easy to tap and use the data trapped in practically impenetrable data warehouses. Guess they ought to know - cause one of SnapLogic's founders, Gaurav Dhillon, was the founder and CEO of Informatica before embarking on this new adventure.

Is software development a science or an art? The software industry treats it as a science. It uses processes like MRDs, PRDs, and functional specs to convert customer needs into software that solves their problems. Various roles like product managers, engineering managers, project managers, architects, and programmers work together to drive the process like an efficient machine.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Oracle's announcement to acquire Empirix e-TEST suite solutions is a positive move for all involved. The acquisition helps Oracle round out its Enterprise Manager offering with a comprehensive testing component for pre-deployment applications. The acquisition is a natural fit for the e-TEST suite products which are architected to work with modern applications and deliver testing capabilities to both packaged and custom applications.

With only two weeks to go now before JavaOne, its annual Javaganza for developers, Sun has revealed that Java is at long last to be made 100% open source. 'We're trying to get Java into places it's never been before,' Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, told an interviewer on Tuesday.

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 has filed a friend of the court brief with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals complaining that the patent system is a hindrance to open source and asking it to bar software patents - or at least put a leash on them. The court is supposed to hear the so-called Bilski case - which doesn't have anything to do with software - but the judges are supposed to address the issue of the boundaries of what can be patented.

Ingres announced the appointments of Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres, to the Eclipse Foundation's board of directors, and Deb Woods, vice president of product management at Ingres, to the board of directors of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA). McGrattan and Woods are known figures in the open source community, with the promotion of open source solutions at the heart of what they do each day. The growing adoption of the open source business model worldwide has led to the expansion of open source organizations promoting interoperability such as the OSA and open development platforms like Eclipse.

OpenLogic and friends are going to try to plum the depths of open source adoption in the enterprise by asking the enterprise to take part in a voluntary self-administered Open Source Census. The global multi-year exercise kicked off on Wednesday when the www.osscensus.org went live. The census takers figure the results should surprise just about everybody and that when companies realize how dependent they already are on open source the floodgates will open wider.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of MySQL Workbench, a new visual database design tool that integrates data modeling, physical database design, database creation, change management and documentation capabilities into a single, seamless environment for MySQL developers and DBAs. MySQL Workbench is available for download in two versions: an open source Community Edition and a (US) commercial Standard Edition. Both are available now for Microsoft Windows, with future cross-platform support for Linux and Macintosh OS X under development.

At the first MySQL user conference since it spent a billion dollars acquiring the open source database, Sun said this week that a near-final release candidate of MySQL 5.1 could be downloaded at http://dev. mysql.com/downloads. It's supposed to be generally available in June, two months later than anticipated. It's trying to avoid a bug-ridden premature release like MySQL 5.0.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving interoperability and adoption of comprehensive open solutions, announced the results of its first annual board of director elections. The OSA, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in February, filled three vacant board positions by electing Deb Woods, vice president of product marketing at Ingres; Josep Mitjà, chief operating officer at Openbravo; and Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager for the Open Source Business at Unisys. They join existing board members Michael Harvey, EVP and CMO at Concursive, and Dominic Sartorio, OSA President and Senior Director of Product Management at SpikeSource.

WaveMaker announced the appointment of Roger Sippl to the Board of Directors. With over 30 years of experience in building and managing enterprise software companies, Sippl will help guide WaveMaker as it continues to expand its AJAX open source Web application development platform. The company also closed $4.5 million in funding this month which will help fuel the continued growth of the company's developer community.

MuleSource announced that TM Software has joined the MuleSource Partner Program. Touting a 20-year history of technology innovation, Iceland-based TM Software supports more than 1,200 customers worldwide. TM Software specializes in providing solutions for the healthcare, energy, retail and wholesale, public sector, financial services and transportation markets. The firm completed a project with Icelandair, an air carrier in Iceland, enabling online check-in services from home up to 22 hours before a flight.

Exadel announced Exadel dVision, the company's Rich Internet Application for on-demand access to enterprise data stored across multiple data sources, has been certified for MySQL Enterprise 5.0. As a MySQL Enterprise Certified Partner, Exadel's new enhanced support for the MySQL open source database software provides full integration between dVision and MySQL Enterprise.

Apatar announced the CDYNE Phone Verification connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector determines the validity of any U.S. or Canadian phone number using CDYNE Web services, all without coding. Now Apatar enables any business user to verify and filter customer phone numbers extracted from databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), files (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, CSV/TXT files), applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM), and the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3, RSS feeds).

Microsoft posted 14,000 pages of what it called 'preliminary versions' of technical documentation covering the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The move is Microsoft's latest step since some bright Microsoftee realized the company could move the control point off trade secrets and back to patents and perhaps save itself some aggravation with the European Commission, while impressing its US regulator with its newfound openness.

Novell is the company stuck in an open source malaise, not Sun Microsystems, at least according to Simon Phipps, chief open source officer for Sun. While talking with IT Business Edge, Phipps responded to comments Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian made regarding the future of Sun and OpenSolaris during a recent Linux Foundation podcast. Phipps said that Hovsepian quoted inaccurate download numbers for OpenSolaris while criticizing Sun's open source strategy.