Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

JasperSoft Corporation has announced the general availability of JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite version 2.1, an upgrade that makes the benefits of BI more accessible to more users. Version 2.1 is specifically focused on enhancing usability and end-user functionality, delivering on JasperSoft's commitment to extend the value of business intelligence across the organization.

A South Korean ISV called Digito.com that created Soft Messenger, the first Korean instant messaging program, has filed suit against Microsoft seeking $32.7 million in damages, according to the English language local publication Digital Chosun. The ISV is evidently building its case around the antitrust finding against Microsoft by the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), which ordered Microsoft to market a version of Windows that stripped out both the Media Player and Windows Messenger.

VMS, or rather its modern avatar OpenVMS, is turning 30 and - having been gussied up with open source tools like Apache, XML, Java and JavaBeans - still claims to run 300,000 systems worldwide in the financial community, hospitals, manufacturing and lotteries. HP, its latest owner, can't quite put its finger on the value of the marketplace but is about to come out with OpenVMS 8.3, what it calls an 'Anniversary Release' that runs on VAX, Alpha and more to the point its Itanium-based Integrity servers. The OS is also supposed to get JBoss and MySQL support.

Microsoft, which has decided not to appeal the Court of First Instance's September 17 ruling in favor of the European Commission and its 2004 antitrust order against the company, has also agreed to bend its terms to the open source business model and slash the price of its server communication protocols - just like the Samba Project wanted. If Samba, which has played a leading role in Microsoft's significant losses to the EC, had its druthers it wouldn't pay Microsoft a dime - it thinks that little of the software giant's IP claims - but it can live with the compromise that the EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer struck early Monday morning.

Evidently Novell should be afraid - very afraid - because Canonical with its Ubuntu distribution, Dell's little playmate, the Linux Dell's pre-loading on a few of its PCs, clearly has designs on Novell's place in line behind Red Hat, the Linux leader. On Thursday, the Ubuntu world traded up from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon, the alliterative code name for Ubuntu 7.10, which Canonical is going to use to start pushing into servers, knowing, it says, that it's going to take years.

It is time to unite the community behind the standard, universal format for office suites and distance themselves from Ecma TC45 and DIS 29500. The participation of Gnome in Ecma TC45's apparent subversion of the standards process is a major disservice to FOSS and all in the community who have worked so hard for open platforms and open standards.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has taken modular programming principals into 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 a set of infrastructure services.

Zenoss has released version 2.1 of Zenoss Core, an open source IT management software product on Sourceforge.net. The new version extends both its network management and application management capabilities with network visualization features and native management of Java-based applications.

Openbravo, the company with the open source SME ERP solution, has tied up with rPath to create a software appliance using rPath's rBuilder, Openbravo's first commercial product. An appliance should simplify deploying and maintaining the software in both physical and virtual environments - not to mention making life a bit easier for the Openbravo folks - they'll have a product they can warranty.

Earlier this year, the 451 Group reported that the Big Four systems management vendors (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM) were ripe for a shakeup, and had been for some time. Poised at the top of a healthy, lucrative market, it hardly seems likely that these market leaders could be threatened by newcomers. Nevertheless, they are being challenged and the enterprise IT world is paying attention to the outcome. How real is the threat, and what changes will it eventually bring to the IT infrastructure management software?

CorraTech has started an open source project called OpenSuite under the new GPL 3 license dedicated to the integration of open source applications. It describes it as the 'glue required to make independently developed open source applications act as though they were designed to operate as an integrated suite.'

The GNU Project has released version 0.96(.1) of GNU Classpath, an incomplete free implementation of the core Java class libraries. The main feature of this release is the new experimental GStreamer peer arising from the work of Mario Torre on his Google Summer of Code project. This provides support for the javax.sound API using the GStreamer library, allowing any sound file supported by GStreamer to be played from Java.

Talend has announced the availability of Talend Open Studio version 2.2, as well as the Activity Monitoring Console /Personal Edition, delivering the benefit of a single console for all integration jobs. The release of the new and updated applications comes at the one year anniversary of the first release of Talend Open Studio.

OpenLogic has launched a free web site called OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) where enterprise developers can go to find, research and download open source software that carries OpenLogic's seal of approval assuring them it's safe for enterprise use. The company says searches on Sourceforge return too many choices and warns that standard rating schemes can be vulnerable to 'ballot box stuffing.' OpenLogic limits your search to established packages that are enterprise-ready.

Pentaho Corp. has announced delivery of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.6. The new release provides the general availability of new enhancements including an enterprise BI metadata layer that streamlines use of BI data as well as a thin-client reporting interface enabling business users to create their own ad hoc queries and reports.

'Until now, most of our customers have been hardcore Ajax developers. Now, users can simply drag and drop our components into their applications using Dreamweaver,' said Andre Charland, co-founder of Nitobi, Inc, and regular AJAXWorld Conference & Expo speaker, as he announced today the latest release of Nitobi's Complete UI AJAX framework. 'Supporting Dreamweaver extensions means more developers can use Nitobi components in their applications,' Charland added.

Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 is now available to customers worldwide. Open Enterprise Server 2 features full 64-bit support of software services previously found only on NetWare, along with storage management enhancements and NetWare virtualization. Novell Open Enterprise Server combines proven workgroup services from Novell with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, completing the Open Enterprise Server shift to providing workgroup services entirely on Linux.

The ability that I will have to debug code within Visual Studio 2008 will be unprecedented. Why? Because now instead of having to use third party tools to dissasemble Microsoft libraries so that I can get a deep stack trace and figure out exactly where something blew up so I can find out what information I passed incorrectly, or what edge case I didn't know about - now that source code will appear automatically within Visual Studio 2008, on-demand, when the error occurs. This is fantastic, and has long been one of my pet peeves of writing code on the .NET Framework.

Microsoft says it's going to release the source code for the .NET Framework libraries with the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 release later this year.nThe code will be released under the read-only Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) generally used only for debugging. Not exactly open source but something that indicates the influence of open source on Microsoft's mindset. VS 2008 will have the debugging support.

This article is one of several intended to address Linux runtime application hardening. When we talk about Linux hardening, we typically mean runtime application hardening to improve application reliability, leading to expected and predictable execution despite undesirable operating conditions (such as high memory or network overload). Reliability is different from availability; a system may exhibit near-perfect availability (over five nines availability) but can still be unreliable. For example, a mobile user may experience dropped calls, or long delays while making a call or downloading content from the Web. Such incidents can occur under odd conditions and be sporadic due to poor hardening. For example, a process that is spending time in memory reclaim won't service its queue, which will lead to dropped requests. These sorts of incidents may not show up on availability charts since the incidents are isolated but they will lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Funambol, the mobile open source software company, will begin inviting consumers to join the new myFUNAMBOL portal to access free mobile e-mail, contacts, and calendars on everyday cell phones. myFUNAMBOL also provides the first over-the-air mobile contacts application for the new iPhone, which demonstrates the pace of innovation available with open source.

SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards program, widely considered to be the most prestigious award program in the software industry, is a community-driven process in which the products participating in the program are nominated by the industry's vendors, customers, and users, as well as by the readers of SYS-CON Media's industry-leading i-technology publications.

Scalix, a Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging company, has released Scalix 11.2, with new features to support hosted multi-tenant environments, the latest Linux servers, and enhanced Microsoft Outlook facilities for mobile devices. Scalix 11.2 allows application service providers (ASPs) to host multiple customers on a single Scalix server.

Concurrent's NightStar LX debugging and analysis toolkit is now available for two additional Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and openSUSE 10.2 from Novell. NightStar is an integrated Qt-based GUI tool set for developing and tuning time-critical 32-bit and 64-bit applications on x86 systems. NightStar tools reduce test time, increase productivity and lower development costs.

Interface21 has partnered with Tasktop Technologies, creators of the Eclipse Mylyn project, to develop the Spring Tool Suite. This new Spring-specific tool solution will build on Eclipse and Mylyn to dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java application development and maintenance.

MySQL AB has plans to optimize the MySQL Enterprise Server for the SAP NetWeaver platform. MySQL and SAP AG also announced that the sales and support of the MaxDB database will revert back to SAP, in order to unify the product's development, distribution, and support under one organization.

MySQL AB has announced that the Swedish National Police are implementing an enterprise-wide project for building all future IT systems on an open source software (OSS) infrastructure based upon Linux, MySQL, and JBoss. Several existing systems are currently being migrated and all future projects will be developed on this OSS foundation.

An international development team has announced the first official release of ProjectPier. Based on widely accepted technologies like PHP and MySQL, ProjectPier offers an open source collaboration solution that can be installed on any shared hosting server within minutes.

A company's decision to contribute to open source projects is usually business-driven. This article offers a review of the top reasons that can influence your company to contribute source code to open source or to start new open source projects.

Open source software continues to gain momentum worldwide. Low costs, high quality, and unprecedented flexibility make more and more IT decision makers favor open source over traditional packaged software. Access to bug tracking systems, development team discussions, test approaches - all the background details previously off-limits - help create software that's not only cheaper, but better, and aligned with organizational needs.

From a commercial open source company's point-of-view, open source is ideally the ultimate in 'grass roots' marketing where people learn about the project by word-of-mouth and where they volunteer their time and effort, resulting in a vibrant community that benefits the company in many ways.

The OpenVZ project has announced availability of its operating system (OS) server virtualization software as a modified version of the CentOS 4.4 bootable Live CD so that users can test drive the OpenVZ software without changes to their computer or installing anything on their hard disk.

Those swinging doors that grace the office of the head of marketing at Red Hat have slapped another exiting executive in the fanny. Old-time Unix veteran Tim Yeaton, senior VP of marketing, has been replaced by Michael Chen, seconded over from Red Hat China, where he was general manager, to be VP of corporate marketing. He reports to CEO Matthew Szulik and will work out of Red Hat's headquarters in North Carolina.

OpenAjax Alliance, an organization dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable AJAX-based Web technologies, has revealed new initiatives for secure mashups and mobile AJAX, as well as a new white paper on AJAX security.

OpenLogic Exchange is designed for enterprises that want to use open source software. Today, enterprise developers must comb through massive repositories trying to find the short list of open source products that are viable and appropriate for their enterprise needs. Standard rating schemes used on most sites can be vulnerable to 'ballet box stuffing' by project proponents or competitors.

OpenAjax Alliance has revealed new initiatives for secure mashups and mobile AJAX, as well as a new white paper on AJAX security. As AJAX and mashups continue to gain widespread acceptance under the Web 2.0 umbrella, it is critical for organizations to understand these threats and to avoid them by adhering to some best practices.

A year ago I wrote 'Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing.' At Alfresco we believed that open source was different and needed a different marketing model. Geoffrey Moore was at the root of our thinking when he wrote about 'Darwin and the Demon' and markets being ripe for disruption in the form of marketing and business model disruption. We saw that there was no 'cookie cutter,' standard approach and tried to blend our experience in growing large successful enterprise software companies with some best principles from marketing visionaries such as Geoffrey Moore, who had a massive influence on all of us from Documentum.

IBM has announced 'a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.' In other words, a rival to Microsoft Office. Symphony is available starting yesterday.

In the early days the sheer novelty of open source software being free had a certain allure. But actually using it meant dealing with myriad technical and support issues - more than enough to make the price tag of commercial enterprise software worthwhile. Fortunately, that's changed.