OpenLogic Enterprise 4.6 contains many additions to the OpenLogic Certified Library, has a fast new automated installation process, and offers more enterprise control for updating security patches and versions of open source software.

6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a provider of automating software development metrics, has announced that its solution has been selected by GlobalLogic, a Vienna, VA-based global product development services firm with development centers in the U.S., India, and Eastern Europe.

IONA Technologies, a provider of distributed service-oriented architecture infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, has announced a range of new offerings designed to deliver the enterprise-quality products, services and support programs, and opportunities for community participation required to incorporate open source technology into strategic SOA deployments.

'Sun is releasing this code to the community to accelerate innovation around clustered solutions, in a world moving quickly to scale-out architectures. When applied to Solaris or other technologies, the Solaris clustering code is a great base to support clustered and HA systems innovation throughout the community,' said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. 'The Open HA Cluster code allows open source developers to use the same Solaris HA infrastructure that powers enterprises' most mission critical applications with their open source and network facing applications and services.'

The OpenJDK project has released an early access source code snapshot of implementations of the Java Module System (JSR 277) and Improved Modularity Support (JSR 294). JSR 277 addresses modularity from a deployment unit perspective, addressing distribution format, versioning, dependencies, repositories, runtime, and support tools necessary for modules. JSR 294 addresses modularity from a development perspective, introducing a new language construct, called 'superpackages,' for information hiding.

Transitive Corporation, a provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, has released Version 1.2 of QuickTransit for Solar is/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64 solution.

Codice Software has released Plastic SCM 1.5, the new version of its SCM product. This new release is a step ahead in the product's evolution and introduces many important new features and enhancements.

MuleSource, a provider of open source infrastructure and integration software, has announced that Estafet Open, the specialist agency supplier of IT consultants to the European market, has joined the recently launched MuleSource Partner Alliance program.

Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems, will join the current efforts to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML.

JBoss Portal has had user personalization of individual portlets since the JBoss Portal 2.0. In JBoss Portal 2.6, we?ve improved the granularity of personalization and ability to further personalize the user experience. Personal user dashboards bring personalized themes, layouts and portlet content, increasing the productivity of specific roles and people within a business process or collaboration effort.

Zend Framework, a class library available for PHP 5 Web application development, has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible.

'We applaud all of today's winners and finalists on their achievement in winning our Readers' Choice Award,' said Roger Strukhoff, Editorial Director and Group Publisher of SYS-CON Media. 'Our readers live and breathe the uniquely compelling vision and potential of the Linux OS in particular and open source software in general, both as an integral contributor to enterprise IT today and its collaborative potential for continued innovation on a global basis.'

Terracotta, a provider of infrastructure software for enterprise Java high availability and scalability, has announced support for IBM's WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition. With this addition, Terracotta 2.4 can now be used to deliver scalability and availability for the vast majority of Java application architectures.

Panelists included SOA World Magazine editor-in-chief Sean Rhody (CSC), Open Source Specialist and SYS-CON's Industry Blogger Debbie Moynihan (IONA), Nexaweb's founder and CTO and SYS-CON's Industry Blogger Coach Wei, ColdFusion Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Simon Horwith (AboutWeb), and SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East speaker Jason Bloomberg (ZapThink). The panel was moderated by SYS-CON.TV founder and host Roger Strukhoff.

Ruby on Gears is a content plus framework built in 100% Ruby on top of the popular Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Gears provides a turn-key user & administration environment suitable for CRM, Project Management, Document Management, Corporate Intranets, Expert Systems, Vertical Search Engines, Social Information Networks, Corporate Blogging, Public websites and as core code for custom development projects.

Sun is donating storage technologies to the OpenSolaris community so it can create cheap storage solutions that, it says, will run on anybody's commodity hardware - IBM's, Dell's, HP's or its own. It's trying to position OpenSolaris as 'the industry's most comprehensive multi-vendor storage operating system.' Maybe the donations will help Sun make sense of its $4.1 billion round-peg-in -a-square-hole StorageTek acquisition.

Db4objects, the open source object database, has tied up with Prosyst, which reportedly owns 50% of the commercial OSGi market, meaning db4objects gets a crack at a swat of automotive, mobile carrier, house alarm and such like implementations. Db4object gives widgets persistence, which means users are less likely to lose data. It's adapted ProSyst's native Java object database to OSGi specifications and released an OSGi-specific distribution. ProSyst, in turn, has adopted db4o as the standard object persistence package in its mBedded Server Professional Edition and as an optional package in its Equinox Edition.

The Jedi mind trick is a Force power that can influence the actions of weak-minded sentient beings. Vendors will often try to apply the Jedi mind trick in selling silver-bullet software solutions that solve global warming and stop celebrity feuding while enabling service-based architecture development. Let's quickly put on our aluminum foil caps and repel the Jedi mind trick by turning to open source solutions. Service-based architectures are being touted as the next step in reaching programming nirvana. With these marching orders it's often difficult to build a framework that allows for simple service creation.

These days, executives realize that there are 'new school' ways of acquiring a company with a software asset. For all of the immeasurable benefits it has brought to the development community, open source technology has added a complex variable to relevant parties calculating the M&A equation. Open source code and the general reuse of open source and proprietary software components in software development have further complicated the process of acquiring a software asset.

'I have yet to see any actual reasons for licensing under the GPLv3, ' Linus said. But 'if Sun really is going to release OpenSolaris under GPLv3, that may be a good reason. I don't think the GPLv3 is as good a license as v2, but on the other hand, I'm pragmatic, and if we can avoid having two kernels with two different licenses and the friction that causes, I at least see the reason for GPLv3. As it is, I don't really see a reason at all. I personally doubt it will happen, but hey, I didn't really expect them to open source Java either so it's not like I'm infallible in my predictions.'

From Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog entry: 'Linus, First, I'm glad you give credit to Sun for the contributions we've made to the open source world, and Linux specifically - we take the commitment seriously. It's why we freed OpenOffice, elements of Gnome, Mozilla, delivered Java, and a long list of other contributions that show up in almost every distro. Individuals will always define communities, but Sun as a company has done its part to grow the market - for others as much as ourselves.'

For those who aren't familiar with Ingres, let me outline where Ingres came from and what the technology is all about. The Ingres technology has been around for quite some time. It dates back to the early '70s at UC Berkeley, and was a project started by Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, and a number of other very talented folks at Cal Berkeley. They are essentially perceived as the fathers of relational database technology. In the '80s, Ingres went from being an open source project, available under the Berkeley license to anybody who had the money for a source code tape, to a commercial entity, a company called Relational Technology, Inc.

Dr. Ibrahim Haddad is Director of Embedded & Open Source Technology at Motorola. Prior to Motorola, Dr. Haddad managed the Carrier Grade Linux and Mobile Linux Initiatives at the Open Source Development Lab (now the Linux Foundation) which included promoting the development and adoption of Linux and Open Source software in the communications industry. Prior to joining OSDL, Dr. Haddad was a Senior Researcher at the 'Research and Innovation' department of Ericsson?s corporate unit of research where he was involved with the server system architecture for 3G wireless IP networks and contributed to Ericsson's open platform efforts. He is the co-author of two books on Red Hat Linux and Fedora, a contributing editor of the Linux Journal, Linux Planet and Enterprise Open Source Magazine, and a featured speaker and panelist at industry conferences. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Lebanese American University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

The Group will discuss open source trends in systems management. Panel participants will discuss both the benefits and precautions to take when investigating open source management software.

Nora Denzel recently retired from HP as the senior vice president and general manager of HP's over one-billion dollar software division. At HP, Denzel led one of the most dramatic turn-arounds in the software industry by reinvigorating HP's OpenView and OpenCall software product lines through both internal product development and the successful integration of over eight acquisitions. During her tenure as HP's software chief, software sales more than doubled the bottom line improved by over 72%. She has been named as one of the top 20 'Storage Movers and Shakers' by Storage, Inc. magazine and one of the most powerful people in networking by Network World magazine.

Today's Web service providers must understand Quality of Service, filtering techniques and implement QOS and access list filters on their networks. A proper QOS and filtering design helps to avoid network bottlenecks caused by worm and virus infections, sudden spikes in traffic, broadband users, file sharing, and other network conditions. Service providers can use QOS and filtering techniques to align network usage with business policies and requirements, all while still serving customers and supporting their own back office needs. This presentation covers the key concepts of quality of service and access-list filtering using open source tools. The presentation includes an explanation of filtering using Linux's iptables tool and standard queuing methods as defined in the Differentiated Services RFC as well as applications of these methods through generic case studies.

Flex Developer Bootcamp is an intensive, one-day hands-on training program that will teach Web developers and designers how to build Rich Internet Application using Flex. The one-day bootcamp will take place on June 24, 2007, at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), many companies have enjoyed a blossoming of open source software. By harnessing the collective wisdom, experiences, expertise, and requirements, the model has ensured that needs have been rapidly met while the open source code has provided the wanted flexibility and low cost. Everything made possible through the Internet, which has enabled easy zero-cost distribution and improved global collaboration. By leveraging large user communities the software products have grown fast and made it possible for open source companies to challenge major proprietary vendors.

ITerating, a free Wiki-based software guide covering open source, commercial, and hosted software, has added a Feature Matrix that allows users to dynamically create customized, side-by-side feature comparisons of software solutions within seconds. Users can use the feature matrices to evaluate software solutions and make more informed product selection decisions. As an online guide, ITerating allows users to search across all software types, find detailed product information, read user reviews, and create and share comparative matrices ? all from one site.

Red Hat and Symantec have wheeled out what they call secure server bundles for SMBs, either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Red Hat Application Stack combined with Symantec Critical System Protection for both pre-configured and custom-configured behavior-based host protection and against application threats running in the server.

The server that runs this site is running Windows 2000 and Apache for Windows. My CMS is the OPML editor. I use a desktop tool to communicate with the editor on the server via XML-RPC. When I save the document locally, it sends a copy to the server, where it renders it in HTML and writes a file in a folder that Apache serves from. There are two applications running on the server, one writes into the folder and the other serves from the folder. The first is the OPML Editor, the second is Apache. (There actually are other apps on the server, but I don't think they're part of the problem I'm describing.)

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anton Chuvakin, Director of Product Management at LogLogic. We had an interesting discussion about log management and the open source project he's involved in that collects Windows event logs. Here's an overview of our chat.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, has been kind enough to answer some questions for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. Rather than rattle off the usual ones about the name, about why Swing wasn't used, or how much influence IBM still has, Mike has fielded questions on some more current and topical subjects, as well as given us his insights onto the future. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Mike.

When the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) launched in February, there was a lot of interest. But some of that interest has been industry head-scratching, wondering about the results and the intentions of the OSA (ww w.opensolutionsalliance.o rg). Noted open source business blogger Matt Asay was among the skeptics in his post 'Yet Another Alliance (OSA)' ( http://weblog.infoworld.c om/openresource/archives/ 2007/02/yet_another_all.h tml). He asks three pertinent questions, mostly about the OSA's purpose.

SYS-CON Events has created a hands-on, immersive learning experience for all Web developers who want to know the how, what, and why of the tools and concepts behind AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the popular user-interface approach to creating Rich Internet Applications. AJAXWorld University AJAX Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build high-quality AJAX applications from beginning to end.

The FSF left in the tentative grandfather clause that Novell needed to use GPLv3 software upgrades, revs or programs in its SUSE Linux operating systems so no immediate risk of a fork there. And Novell says that it will move to GPLv3 code as necessary. However, that doesn't mean that its controversial relationship with Microsoft, which it needs - like really needs - for the money, and the promised interoperability that goes with it - is safe.

'Companies today are running a mixture of Linux and Windows systems,' said Andreas Typaldos, Chief Executive Officer of Xandros. 'Cross-platform data centers are a reality. To meet evolving customer needs, vendors need to recognize the value of sharing intellectual property, developing more interoperable solutions and providing management tools that are familiar and easy to use.'

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

Coach Wei's blog on Web 2.0, strategic value of IT, enterprise software, application development and startups. I had the chance to meet Coach Wei today while we were videotaping a SYS-CON.TV Panel in New York City.

According to study by the Burton Group, the next disruptive technology in the enterprise business solutions will come from the Google Enterprise Applications portal (Burton Group: The Disrupter: Google Enterprise Apps by Guy Creese, Senior Analyst, Collaboration and Content Strategies, March 19, 2007).