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.

Just as we have become dependent on oil as an energy resource, we have also become dependent on a single vendor solution for saving our digital history - in the form of our word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. Last year, it was estimated that more than 90 percent of the office productivity suite market was controlled by one vendor, and, historically, because of this dominance, consumers, businesses small and large, and governments have been left with few viable options.

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.

At the AJAXWorld 2008 East Conference, DreamFace Interactive announced the availability of 'Outsider', a major new version of their DreamFace Web 2.0 Framework, for creating Enterprise 2.0 Composite Applications and Mashups. DreamFace builds on the concepts of Web 2.0: Do IT Yourself, Personalization and Sharing and extends them to provide the next generation Web 2.0 experience, targeting the enterprise with a solution to the data integration problem through secure client side integration.

XAware announced that Active Endpoints and Appcelerator have joined the XAware Ecosystem. Together, these three technology vendors offer customers a combination of open, standards-based systems that provide broad, enterprise-class solutions. The XAware Ecosystem gives users combined solutions that are capable of addressing a variety of business problems. For partners, the XAware Ecosystem enables the development of compelling joint solutions and access to a large, new community of users. Components in the XAware Ecosystem remain plug-and-play, so that customers are always able to use the technologies that best fit their specific needs.

Appcelerator announced that it has updated its platform to allow applications built using Appcelerator to be deployed to the free new Google App Engine. Used together, the offerings give developers a fast route to developing, deploying, managing and scaling their applications. Appcelerator is an integrated platform that fuses RIA and service-oriented architecture (SOA). With Appcelerator, developers can assemble rich, interactive web applications without the need for JavaScript or player-based plug-ins.

Apatar announced the release of its new StrikeIron US Address Verification connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. Using StrikeIron?s US Address Verification Web service, the new feature relies on United States Postal Service-certified technology to verify, correct, and enhance any address in the United States with live data. It cleans customer data before it gets into CRM/ERP systems, databases, flat files, and RSS feeds by correcting extracted addresses, adding ZIP+4 data, specifying congressional districts, carrier routes, etc.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

Intalio reckons it's got the first open source Business Process Management System delivered as a service. It's running dedicated servers on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). A subscription for Intalio On Demand starts at $1,500 per dedicated server and includes bandwidth, licenses, maintenance and support. There's a free five-day evaluation.

JasperSoft announced that Cincom Systems has selected the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite to power all Cincom BI applications. Cincom will standardize on JasperSoft as its business intelligence platform across its software offerings, extending the value of BI and reporting to all Cincom customers.

Intalio announced an agreement with NTT Data Intramart to integrate Intalio products into Intra-mart, its Web platform. In conjunction with this integration, NTT Data Intramart will also add two new applications to the Intra-mart Web platform, a Risk and Control Matrix (RCM) and a Form Relation Editor (FRE).

The last quarter was the single best quarter in history for open source companies raising venture capital according to the 451 Group. The amount hit $203.75 million, up from $100.4 million year-over-year and after a really nasty downturn in the fourth quarter of '07. The previous record of $193.7 million was set in 4Q06. The Q1 investment went into 20 start-ups, with the average size deal being worth roughly $12 million.

It looks like Kim Polese's SpikeSource operation has gotten a new lease on life. At least it's gotten another $10 million, this infusion coming from Intel, which is evidently trying to protect its initial investment back in 2005. Anyway the open source software verification company is now going to do software testing and validation for Intel?s Software Partner Program as what Intel calls its Certified Solutions program.

Sun Microsystems and the NetBeans community announced the availability of NetBeans 6.1 integrated development environment (IDE) Beta. NetBeans 6.1 Beta adds a rich set of features for JavaScript technology development, a key component for delivering AJAX web applications and tighter integration of MySQL database functionality.

CodeGear announced the availability of JBuilder 2008, its latest version of the IDE for the Java platform based on the Eclipse open source framework. With JBuilder 2008, CodeGear has added an innovation to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java: a methodology and associated collection of tools known as Application Factories. Application Factories is a new approach to software development and code reuse that addresses one of the challenges faced by Java developers today: navigating the complexity of framework choices, open source, internal code, and deregulated technology standards trying to determine how to use and reuse them together in order to deliver high-quality solutions with ever-increasing time pressures.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

What does Software as a Service (SaaS) have to do with open source? Not much, you might think. SaaS, as you probably know, is a delivery - and business - model for software that has been proving quite disruptive to the traditional software business - just as the open source model has been. The two combined may turn out to be even more so.

JasperSoft, the open source business intelligence venture - which just last week was rattling off a bunch of numbers contending that it's 'the world's most widely deployed BI suite' - said from the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco the other day that it's 'working with Microsoft on a series of initiatives to optimize its suite on Windows Server 2008 and other key Microsoft technologies.'

Intalio announced Intalio|On Demand, an open source Business Process Management System delivered as a service. The convenience of being able to deploy a BPM project lowers the bar for adoption. Business users and IT analysts can get a project up and running much quicker and without the administrative concerns associated with managing the required servers. Intalio|On Demand replicates the Intalio|BPMS On Premise version and includes the connectors for Salesforce.com as well as enterprise applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP.

MuleSource announced the availability for download of Mule RESTpack. More and more developers are now building distributed applications based on the underlying software architecture of the Web, known as representational state transfer (REST). Providing a way to create and deliver Web services, REST is the formalized architecture of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the software specification that enabled the Internet's scalability.

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives.

Anyone who's ever been involved in the beginning of a nonprofit consortium will tell you that the first year is the hardest. The initial high of coming together in the name of a shared cause gives way to the drudgery of meetings, working groups and member politics. The realities of executing against the vision and the inherent challenges of keeping an all-volunteer organization active and engaged set in. For many such consortia, the first year can be the last.

Is Google growing too fast to continue to produce innovative software while maintaining the quality that has become expected of it? I've had some problems with their alerts and sent in comments and, excluding the automated email replies, have received no response nor has the problem been corrected.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) Europe, the European chapter of the non profit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving the interoperability and mainstream adoption of comprehensive open solutions, announced its interim board of directors (BoD) and further details for its plan throughout Europe.

AMD announced a new plug-in that provides the Eclipse community with increased performance management and monitoring of Java software code. Called 'CodeSleuth,' this new plug-in delivers the functionality of AMD's CodeAnalyst Performance Analyzer, a suite of tools that analyze software performance on AMD processors, including Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. To help ensure that the plug-in is readily available to the Java technology community and evolves with the community's needs, AMD is making CodeSleuth open source and available as a no-charge download within the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment(IDE).

The wait is coming to an end. We are working feverishly to get the open source version of BlueDragon into the wild on the 3rd of May 2008 at cf.Objective(), when Vince presents his BOF. Vince will illustrate the first public open source version of BlueDragon. This will including the building of it, the deployment and other items of interest. If you want to be among the first to witness this, then get over there.