Sun closed on its acquisition of MySQL today, calling the billion-dollar purchase the 'most important acquisition in Sun's history' - oh, heck, make that the 'modern software industry' - with Sun preening that it completed the deal in less than six weeks convinced that it is now a proven open source leader ready to hustle platforms into the 'Network Economy.'

The European Commission this morning slapped Microsoft with a massive $1.33 billion fine (899 million euros) for charging too much for the communications protocols it was ordered to share with competitors in March of 2004. It is the largest single fine ever levied by the EC and the second time that it has dunned Microsoft for not complying with its original antitrust order.

Jcx.Software announced the availability of VS.Php 2.4 for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. This is the new edition to the VS.Php family of products. VS.Php users that are planning to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 should upgrade to this edition. VS.Php 2.4 continues to be providing unique value to PHP developers. This release includes support for both XDebug and DBG debugging engines.

Although organizations are not realizing the full potential benefits of open source due to the way open source projects are currently managed, this does not mean that there are no benefits from developing in open source. Once you get past the 'free developer' presumption and carefully look at the larger picture, it becomes clear that open source, even in its limited participatory forms today, brings real value.

PivotStor announced a tape library that combines LTO-4 tape's reliability with SAS interface connectivity speed and the demonstrated economy of half-height drives. The result is a full line of tape libraries that integrate more capacity, more data density, more bandwidth and greater performance into one unit: all of which means faster data protection at a lower price.

Caucho presents a new API and infrastructure for Enterprise Comet applications which takes care of issues such as thread and session management, while using an interface familiar to Java developers who have used JavaEE Servlets. Demos will be presented which use this framework and GWT to streaming data in a financial application. Benchmarks will also be presented which show the server load and network impact of large numbers of clients. This Comet API, part of Caucho's Resin Enterprise Application Server, is available today for download and evaluation.

Jeff Haynie will introduce the audience to Appcelerator's open-source RIA platform. Attendees will learn how Appcelerator has been able to help developers create AJAX-based RIAs in less than 1/3 of the time, with up to 90 percent less code, and with no Javascript or third-party toolkits. Key takeaways from the session will include: Developing fully-functional, client-only prototypes without writing a line of server codeCreating service-oriented UIs that can simultaneously access services in any language without code changes and Decoupling client and server components for accelerated development, simplified maintenance and rapid iterations. Haynie will also discuss the current technology options for rapid RIA development and how developers can leverage pre-built AJAX widgets, Web Expression Language, and other open standards-based languages to create RIAs with more functionality and less code.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), marked its one-year anniversary with three new members, a global focus, and advances toward seamless interoperability between commercial open-source applications. 'The commercial open-source industry is no longer in an early-adopter phase,' said Dominic Sartorio, OSA president and senior director of product management at SpikeSource, an open-source services company. 'Now that we've entered the mainstream phase of adoption, it's even more important that open solutions have the fit, form and function that an enterprise organization expects.'

Enterprise networks are growing increasingly complex. Over the past five years, the increased focus on unified security, network optimization, and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices, and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed connectivity networks and logical overlay networks - all running over the same physical links - have made it all but impossible for network teams to maintain consistent security, access, audit and change control using manual processes and device-specific management tools.

The Mozilla Foundation has set up a new Mozilla Messaging Inc subsidiary to develop Thunderbird 3, the next generation of the previously resource-starved free open source e-mail application, a sister application of the successful Mozilla Firefox web browser. The operation has its own CEO, David Ascher of ActiveState, who thinks 'e-mail is broken,' its own board including MySQL CEO Marten Mickos - soon to be working for Sun - Ascher and Mozilla Messaging general manager Christopher Beard, its own core engineering team and start-up funds of around $3 million.

McObject has added support for the KD-Tree, a database index with uses in spatial and pattern-matching applications, to its Perst open source, object-oriented embedded database system. For developers working with Perst, the KD-Tree expands coding efficiency and helps make Java and .NET data objects easier to use in certain types of application.

XAware announced the general availability of XAware 5, the open source data integration solution for creating and managing composite data services for SOA and Web 2.0 applications. XAware's proven data integration software, now in its fifth generation, makes it easy to access and integrate data to and from any source. XAware enhances the productivity of other development tools and frameworks by building composite data services. These services provide real-time access to information and the ability to abstract, transform, aggregate and mashup data. Developers use these XAware capabilities to create a services-based data virtualization layer, which delivers a single view of data that can be consumed or served up easily.

IONA Technologies announced that Passenger has selected IONA to support its deployment of Apache ActiveMQ, the Open Source JMS-compliant messaging and integration platform. Passenger will deploy IONA's FUSE Message Broker, which is IONA's version of ActiveMQ, to deliver service-oriented integration for Passenger's customer collaboration platform.

OASIS announced that its members have approved the XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS XLIFF Technical Committee, the new standard defines a vocabulary for storing localizable data and carrying it from one step of the localization process to another.

Over the last several years, integration technology has been growing by leaps and bounds. The XML/REST/Web Services/SOA revolution has driven engineers and software firms to create an abundance of protocols, adaptors, transports, containers, standards, best practices...you name it. The bits and bytes that are now available are undeniably sophisticated, diverse, and capable of almost anything, but many of the packages are built from the technology up and leave the job of how to use the capabilities effectively as an exercise for the reader.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Sun is open sourcing SPOT, its Java-based Small Programmable Object Technology research project under the GPLv2 license. It said the contribution, made in search of Java-based wireless sensor and embedded apps, will include so-called eBones hardware architecture plans, the Squawk Java Virtual Machine and system software including libraries, drivers and networking stack.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

FalconStor announced the deployment of a Fibre Channel FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), powered by the FalconStor IPStor storage virtualisation platform, at the Office National Interprofessionel des Grandes Cultures (ONIGC). The FalconStor NSS solution, installed by FalconStor partner Astelis, ensures that anticipated storage growth over the next five years can be accommodated, providing ONIGC not only the necessary immediate data protection snapshot services, but additionally a clear path to deploying a disk-to-disk backup solution at a later date.

Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero, says the company is seeing rapid growth on a number of fronts. The firm, which says it is complementary to the big four systems management companies (IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, and BMC) because they don't focus enough on web infrastructure management, recently increased its European presence with new community managers in Germany and Spain.

I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

Lattice Semiconductor expanded its commitment to open source embedded system design by releasing an implementation of the uClinux Operating System (OS) targeted for its LatticeMico32 embedded soft core processor. The new OS support allows developers to implement control systems in a design flow that builds on Lattice's open source embedded solutions approach. It also complements the enhanced capabilities of the LatticeMico32 microprocessor core announced with the release of Lattice's ispLEVER version 7.0 SP2.

JSON is not the only way to serialize objects for Web 2.0 applications, but it's the most abundant and heavily used throughout the Appclerator framework. Doing this is actually really easy to do with Appcelerator IModelObjects. Our IModelObjects can easily be used along with Hibernate for persistance, but let's leave that for later for now.

Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl.

So it's kicking off an 'Enterprise Acceleration' initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing. It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration. JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.

Active Endpoints announced the availability of Milestone 1 of ActiveBPEL Community Edition 5.0 Server. ActiveBPEL 5.0 represents the release of an open-source implementation of both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task. These specifications allow human interactions to be included in services-based applications. By incorporating human tasks in composite applications, WS-Human Task and BPEL4People expand project teams' flexibility and efficiency in delivering standards-based solutions.

Specsavers has completed a three-month project to scale its OpenLDAP directory services across six countries, as it gears up for further global expansion. Specsavers wanted a global solution for user lookup, authentication and access control with distributed administration capabilities. The existing proprietary LDAP-based solution was not deemed sufficiently scalable. It was decided that Open Source alternatives were mature enough to provide a more cost-effective and stable long term platform. With support from Sirius Corporation, the European Open Source service group, Specsaver's IT department made the transition to an Open Source network architecture.

Palamida announced that it has joined the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance as an inaugural member. Through the program, Palamida will integrate their vulnerability reporting capabilities with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), enabling customers to extend the scope of their application security strategy to include open source components while mitigating risk. According to IDC, 86% of open source software projects are in some form of production deployment and usage while 70% are of critical or high importance to the organization.

'It's a continuation of the work that I've been doing the past 20 years,' affirmed Larry Augustin, one of the most respected figures in open source and the creator of SourceForge.net, the world's largest open source software development community, as it was announced this week that he had joined JBoss Founder and former CEO Marc Fleury on the advisory board of Appcelerator.

'We're dedicated to building the largest open-source community dedicated to RIAs, breaking down the barriers between traditional preferred languages, programming models and solutions,' says the co-founder & CEO of Appcelerator, Jeff Haynie. To date Appcelerator has seen the strongest amount of interest from Java and PHP developers, he notes, but the company has continued to see steady growth across Ruby, Python, Perl and .NET programmers as well.

Vyatta announced that Liquid Computing has joined the Vyatta Ready Partner Program. Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ has passed interoperability testing with Vyatta software and is now approved as Vyatta Ready. The combination of technologies provides data center customers with a high-performance networking and computing infrastructure with better manageability and lower costs than other legacy solutions.

Talend announced the availability of Talend Open Studio version 2.3, the company's flagship open source data integration solution. The updated software, including over 30 new components, now connects to more databases and business applications, and enables real-time support by allowing users to trigger the execution of jobs based upon data conditions. In addition, Talend Open Studio, which has been downloaded over 150,000 times since its release in late 2006, now supports the generation of PNG graphs, execution of groovy scripts and includes the ability to seamlessly load Java classes and use them.

OpenSpan announced that five of the top 100 largest banking and diversified financial providers in the Forbes Global 2000 have chosen the OpenSpan Platform to rapidly integrate, automate and extend applications across the enterprise desktop. The banks and other financial services organizations are turning to OpenSpan to improve customer service, reduce risk and achieve measurable impact to their bottom lines - all with a technology that complements their current IT strategies.

WSO2 announced the debut of the WSO2 Registry, the industry's first registry to combine service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance with Web 2.0 collaboration. The open source WSO2 Registry features a structured registry and repository; Web-based interface; and Web 2.0 community features such as tags, rating and comments. Together, these capabilities enable users to store, catalog, index and manage enterprise metadata in a simple, scalable and easy-to-use wiki-style model-making the WSO2 Registry equally accessible for business users, developers and administrators.

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.

Unicon Systems, developers and manufacturers of CCOTS mobile devices and scalable Systems-on-Display (SoD) technology for mobile and wireless applications, announced that embedded industry veteran Bill Weinberg would be joining their advisory board.

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed. I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed. It looks like it's narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion. I guess it's really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.

MySQL's Mårten Mickos has been speaking out on the deep background to his company's decision, instead of pursuing an IPO, to allowing Sun to acquire it. 'We feel like we have joined a giant startup,' Mickos gushes, before singling out Jonathan Schwartz's 'brilliant' CEO charisma as one of the chief tipping-points: 'Who wouldn't want to work for him?'

SugarCRM announced SugarCRM stack installers that provide simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition, the latest version of SugarCRM's popular commercial open source CRM application for both the Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms. SugarCRM stack installers provide maximum ease of use and convenience by installing all the necessary components to run SugarCRM properly in a Solaris and OpenSolaris environment. The stack installer provides an intuitive, easy to deploy interface that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP as well as Sugar Community Edition quickly and easily.

KnowledgeTree and Sybase SBS Software announced that they have signed a master distributor agreement to strengthen the relationship between the companies for actively promoting open source document management software solutions in Spain and Portugal. The agreement calls for Sybase SBS Software to jointly develop a network of new reseller partners, and to help expand sales of KnowledgeTree products on the Iberian Peninsula.