After suddenly canceling its earnings release last week because - come to find out - the SEC has been poring over last year's 10-K and this year's Q2 10-Q since this summer, whatever mysterious 'accounting matters' provoked the agency's review just as suddenly got resolved and Novell posted its Q4 results after the market closed Thursday. Novell hinted the SEC's concerns might have had something to do with Novell's admittedly complicated arrangement with Microsoft, which at the end of year one was said to have realized $122 million, 51% of their bogie. Anyway, Novell lost $17.9 million, or five cents a share, on revenues up 5% to $244.9 million, a figure that excludes $6 million in revenue from its Swiss-based breakeven consulting unit, which it agreed to sell during the quarter, costing it three cents a share.

Compiere has unveiled Compiere 3.0, which includes numerous functional and stability innovations to its open source ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) core. Compiere 3.0 also marks the introduction of Compiere Professional Edition, a new offering targeted at larger organizations that require more advanced services and commercial licensing from Compiere.

Visual Numerics announced an OEM agreement with SAP AG. Under the terms of the agreement, the Visual Numerics' IMSL C Numerical Library version 6.0 will be embedded into the SAP NetWeaver platform. The IMSL C Library will be integrated into TREX - a structured and unstructured data processing component of SAP NetWeaver - providing the TREX engine with functions for data analytics such as outlier detection, dependency analysis and forecasting. SAP applications that use the TREX engine will benefit from this new embedded functionality.

Jinfonet Software announced the release of JReport 8.2. JReport 8.2 delivers enhancements in three key areas: Performance improvements for large reports, greater developer flexibility and an enhanced user experience. Working in conjunction with the IBM Innovation Center to develop performance benchmarks, Jinfonet was able to demonstrate performance improvements in on-demand reporting, batch reports, and viewing pre-generated reports.

ILOG announced ILOG JViews 8, the latest version of ILOG?s award-winning Java-based visualization suite that enhances the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and desktop applications for supervision and monitoring. ILOG JViews 8.1 introduces a new presentation layer for the Eclipse platform and dramatic performance improvements for both desktop and Web applications to enhance the user experience of the most demanding applications.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that Japan has chosen Sun to create an open, Web 2.0 architecture that will better leverage IT to deliver better government services to citizens. Japan, Singapore and Norway each join the growing list of governments that have already turned to Sun for efficient, scalable architectures that accurately manage global information flow and help maximize productivity.

Tidal Software announced that Albany International Corp. is deploying Tidal solutions to assist in the rollout and to automate the ongoing operation of its new worldwide implementation of SAP. Albany is consolidating all worldwide data center operations onto a global implementation of SAP?s ERP solution. The consolidated solution is targeted not only at IT cost savings, but also at providing better support of global operations for the company.

Business Objects and SPSS announced the companies have entered into an original equipment manufacturer agreement in which Business Objects will offer its customers the ability to use SPSS predictive analytics data mining technology as part of the market-leading BusinessObjects XI platform. Users of BusinessObjects XI with predictive analytics data mining technology will be able to leverage business predictions to make more informed decisions that can help generate revenue, control expenses, and mitigate risk.

Perforce Software announced that Ixonos Plc, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, has chosen Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management (SCM) System, to manage software development projects for its leading smartphone customers. Ixonos' telecommunications business unit specializes in the development, verification, maintenance and project management of software applications and information systems for licensees of the Symbian OS and smartphone manufacturers.

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a partnership that will make it possible to obtain print and word processor copies of articles from Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society Institute and the Commonwealth of Learning, and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in Germany.

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I?ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here's the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS. While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

As a small start-up, Interface21 has developed a large, loyal community around the Spring Framework and Spring Portfolio projects. Venture capitalists have invested millions in open source companies and large vendors like IBM and BEA have spent millions of dollars attempting to crank up their marketing machines around their open source projects. In general, these efforts have not resulted in successful communities. In this presentation, we will explore the characteristics that all successful open source communities share as well as unsuccessful open source projects and how these characteristics are changing over time.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

SpringSource, formerly known as Interface21, has announced a strategic partnership with Hyperic. Under the terms of the agreement, SpringSource will use Hyperic's flagship open source software, Hyperic HQ, as the foundation of its new systems management offering. The joint offering provides users of the Spring Framework with a single view into the performance and health of their Web-based infrastructure.

Day Software has expanded its presence in the social media and open source markets with the acquisition of the founders and key innovators of Mindquarry, an open source collaborative software platform provider. Alexander Klimetschek, Alexander Saar and Lars Trieloff, experts in social media and collaboration, have joined Day's product development team.

IONA Technologies will use Hyperic's flagship product, Hyperic HQ Enterprise, as the foundation for its new monitoring and management system, FUSE HQ. FUSE HQ is available now as part of IONA's latest version of its FUSE family of open source SOA products. The FUSE family of products is IONA's tested and certified releases of SOA open source projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

IONA Technologies has released a new version of its FUSE family of open source SOA products and updates to the FUSE community. The FUSE products are IONA's tested and certified releases of SOA Open Source projects at the Apache Software Foundation. IONA selects specific releases from each project, which it tests, fully documents, and distributes under the Apache License.

My seven-year-old daughter thinks that there is a knowledge genie that her teacher 'Googles' for answers. While cute, the anecdote also exemplifies how much Google's obsession with simplicity has helped build brand awareness, making their name literally synonymous with search. I can foresee generations X and Y being followed by generation S - one that will rely on search to accomplish almost any task.

Application development organizations lag behind their business and IT peers when it comes to their use of metrics, according to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Borland Software. Despite the pivotal role of IT in enabling business agility and supporting innovation and growth, subjective estimates and postmortem metrics that do little to ensure project success are still the norm for managing the delivery of software.

At one of the world's largest FOSS events, held annually in India, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, announced last week a multi-year award program in support of fostering innovation and advancing open source within open source communities. 'We'll be providing a substantial prize purse and working with the communities involved to develop the approach that works best,' Phipps declared.

Sun, which has not exactly rallied the open source community around it - for all its belated overtures - is now proposing to pay developers prize money to work on OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSparc, NetBeans and OpenOffice. According to Simon Phipps' blog - he's Sun's chief open source officer - Simon's headed to India to announce the new multi-year award program Friday in Bangalore at FOSS.IN.

Sourceforge, the famous open source project site that's driving its owners to the poor house, has set up a fee-less commission-based online marketplace where service and support for open source software can be bought and sold. Called simply enough Sourceforge.net Marketplace, it starts with 600 odd service listings from projects such as OpenBravo, JasperSoft, Zenoss, Compriere, Firebird, Nagios and the Spring Framework. Sourceforge says the framework has been heavily tested in closed and open betas since May.

Red Hat has swept up its messaging, real-time and grid mojo into a little beta pile it's calling Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a distributed computing platform that's optimized to run on top of RHEL, of course, but can work on other platforms as well, it says, either individually or in combination. It's thinking of Java, Solaris and Microsoft's .NET. The final product is scheduled for availability early next year. The 'M' is the messaging from the open source ampq.org project that Red Hat helped start. It thinks it's a disruptive technology and will become the standard messaging platform. At least it's working on it. It claims it's seeing 100x performance improvements over proprietary solutions.

db4objects announced that db4o runs seamlessly on the Android platform, a software stack for mobile devices introduced recently by the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance. The Android stack comes complete with application framework, development environment, tools, debuggers and vital applications for developers to leverage and create applications.

Last month I wrote about vendor-driven architectures (VDA), and I had a few vendors ask me to look on the other side of the fence. In essence, to consider how vendors can better address the needs of the customer, considering the new drivers with SOA. Truth be told, I can't believe the unsophisticated approaches many vendors have when selling their product.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

DreamFace Interactive, a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, provides a new way for Web-savvy business people to create, control, and share their own Web applications, through a concept called WebChannels, which makes it possible to create applications designed for change.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has resolved to formally request the Free Software Software Foundation (FSF) modify the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) so that mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia can use and license existing GFDL content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license.

Software AG announced that Bossini Enterprises has implemented the webMethods ESB from Software AG. With enhanced, company-wide access to real-time and synchronized data, Bossini can now closely monitor and manage business performance and meet business expectations. Furthermore, the use of an ESB as a core element of Bossini's service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy has produced savings in terms of both the cost and time required to onboard new applications and partners.

Alfresco Software, Inc. announced an open source Social Computing Platform for the enterprise. The release integrates Alfresco's popular ECM software with leading Web 2.0 tools and services such as Facebook, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, MediaWiki, TypePad and WordPress.

Likewise Software, formerly Centeris, has released Likewise Open, an open source community project that enables core Active Directory authentication for Linux systems by joining them to Active Directory domains. Likewise Open provides organizations that are struggling with homegrown and do-it-yourself solutions with a proven enterprise solution for authentication.

Zenoss has released a new version of Zenoss Enterprise. The new version adds several enterprise-grade capabilities for network, server and application management including discovery and monitoring of virtual servers, new application monitors including templates for the most popular Java application servers, and new networking management capabilities including predictive thresholds and support for SNMPv3.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

TotalView Technologie announced that OpenGeoSolutions has chosen to use its TotalView Debugger to streamline the development of applications built on the company's OpenSeis processing toolkit. Based in Calgary, AB, Canada, OpenGeoSolutions is becoming known as the leading resource for high-end signal analysis applied to seismic resource determination. Its team of geoscientists relies on OpenGeoSolutions' code base and rapid deployment of new capabilities for the development of technical solutions designed for customers working in the fields of petroleum exploration and production.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

Red Hat said Monday that the public beta of its operating system on the newfangled Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was available. Amazon has taken to peddling resizable time, utility-style, on its own data center to other people and Red Hat arranged for its customers to run their certified apps on the thing under the Red Hat Network management service if they had a mind to. One buys whatever capacity one needs for $19 a month per account plus 21-94 cents an hour depending on the size of the instance plus bandwidth and storage fees.

In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open source movement and development in Web environments. My programming language of choice for these days is PHP, so it stands to reason that I would be looking for an IDE. Like so many other developers I followed the path of looking for the pinnacle of IDEs for PHP. I started with basic text editors, moved into text editors with code colorizations, and then into project-based development environments, and finally to a fully robust IDE. The one that I've been using for a few years now is Zend's Studio Professional.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.

Open source-based software developer Novell has released the new version of Suse Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, the open source enterprise operating system, to cater to the financial market. According to Novell, the new version of Suse includes enterprise open source technologies and features such as CPU shielding, priority inheritance, sleeping spinlocks, interrupt threads, high-resolution timers and OpenFabrics enterprise distribution for commodity high-speed interconnects.