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.

Ulitzer.com, which will be launched in 2008, with 5,500 authors and more than 550,000 original articles, is looking for enterprise software architect(s), programmer(s), and Web app developer(s). The site will offer original content in more than 2,000 topics ranging from AJAX to Zebra. Ulitzer claims that by 2010, three out of 10 books on any subject will be published at Ulitzer.com, and Time Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, and the rest of today's magazines and journals will be replaced by Ulitzer in the next five years. Ulitzer is looking for talent who will work on the conversion of its proprietary CMS to a new, open source, LAMP-based system. Ulitzer Website advertises that if you have one of the following qualification points in your resume, to apply for one of the open job positions. All applications will remain confidential. Ulitzer annouced that they identified Drupal Content Management Platform as their platform of choice and they are looking for Drupal developers experienced in delivering large scale applications on this platform.

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.

Python, the open source programming language that sees itself as an alternative to Java and brags about being used at Google, Industrial Light & Magic and NASA, will be having its PyCon user conference March 14-16 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare Hotel. Python creator Guido van Rossum, now working for Google, is supposed to present the next-generation Python 3000 in the works for two years. See http://us.python.org.

Canonical announced the availability of the Launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other additions to the Ubuntu environment on desktop, server and now mobile platforms.The PPA service is the newest feature of Launchpad, Canonical's hosting service for public software development. Launchpad is becoming a centerpiece of the free software development process, allowing users to report bugs, contribute code, submit translations and generally collaborate in an efficient and transparent fashion.

Programmers naturally gravitate toward the best software packages and components for development. They are increasingly choosing a broad range of enterprise-grade open source packages from Apache and Tomcat to Axis and Eclipse. But imagine for a moment this all-too-common scenario: a programmer at a Global 2000 is faced with a looming deadline and after a little bit of research, picks an open source package that he thinks will meet his technical needs and enable him to get his job done more quickly and effectively.

Concurrent Computer Corporation announced the availability of RedHawk - Cluster Manager software for its line of commercial off-the-shelf X-86 based systems including iHawk - multiprocessor systems and ImaGen - visual servers. The RedHawk Cluster Manager allows users to install and configure Concurrent iHawk systems and ImaGen visual servers as highly-integrated, high-performance computing clusters. RedHawk Cluster Manager includes a user interface to effectively utilize and manage a cluster's full capabilities

Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, Inc announced their plans to develop new and innovatively designed games and applications for Google's free and open source mobile platform, Android. The company anticipates that this emerging platform will soon attract handset manufacturers because of the lower costs for the operating system and expects Android to be successful especially in China due to its Linux base.

SpikeSource, a provider of packaged and maintained open source solutions, announces the availability of its Open-Xchange Appliance powered by SpikeSource, a turnkey solution that bundles Open-Xchange Express Edition software into a comprehensive, enterprise-class email appliance. Based on open source software, the appliance delivers all the functionality of leading proprietary offerings including email, contact, calendar and task management, at a fraction of the cost. The Open-Xchange Appliance is exclusively available through SpikeSource and its reseller partners.

Cognos announced that Jordan?s Furniture has won the Technology User of the Year award given by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. These awards recognize the best and brightest technology innovators and leaders. Awards are also bestowed upon companies that either develop or implement innovative technology solutions. The recognition highlights recent and significant contributions to companies or the broader industry.

Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ 91.5 FM Chicago, WBEQ 90.7 FM Morris, and WBEW 89.5 FM Chesterton) is a community-supported, non-commercial public service broadcasting institution for 7.7 million people throughout Chicago and surrounding regions. Chicago Public Radio produces, acquires, and distributes engaging, thoughtful, and entertaining programs of depth, breadth, diversity, and substance. The organization prides itself on helping listeners learn about issues and ideas that affect the community, the nation, and the world. The institution has more than 120 employees across multiple offices in greater Chicago.

The stakes are high. As an Open Solutions Association (OSA) board member and executive VP of Centric CRM, my number-one fear is that the creativity and dynamism of the past decade could come to nothing if open source application vendors don't stand together and take a collective position. As isolated entities they run the risk of getting picked off, one-by-one, leaving an industry landscape dominated by multibillion-dollar giants like Microsoft and Oracle.

For Software as a Service (SaaS) and Financial Services applications, AJAX-enhanced UIs are a proven way to improve bottom-line performance,' said Paul Giurata, managing partner, Catalyst Resources, who runs a 30-45 day program to help clients successfully AJAX-enable their web-based applications. 'The challenge with AJAX,' he continued, 'is finding the optimum balance between business needs, technology potential, and enhanced user experience.'

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

You may have heard statements such as Linux is inexpensive, reduces TCO and dependency on vendors, and is easy to maintain, from promoters of Linux in the enterprise. But, for those who still haven't made the jump - this article discusses implementation hurdles, cost of implementation, and a readiness checklist. If you're part of a non-technology company, this article is a must-read.

Two months after IBM decided to try to revive Lotus Symphony as a rival to Office, it says the free Symphony beta 2 has been downloaded by 250,000 registered users, 88% of whom are Microsoft customers. Twelve percent are using the Linux version, IBM says, and 50% of the users are outside the US in France, Brazil, China, Japan, Germany, Spain, Holland and Italy although the software is only available in English. Sensing an opportunity, IBM says it's accelerated development in response to user demand, making the download process for the three programs - the word processor, presentation code and spreadsheet - 100% faster and done in a click - and upping performance on average 50% faster.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm, moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to retain their competitive advantage.

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a new top-level project at eclipse.org. Originally proposed by Sybase in February 2005, DTP has attracted strong community support and is currently managed by a committee comprised of Sybase, IBM and Actuate. It is an open source initiative designed to provide solutions in the data framework and tooling domains.

This is the second part of my two-part series on open source market strategies and implementations. I previously outlined the 10 strategy rules for open source marketing and emphasized building new markets, differentiating, contributing, pricing and innovating, and the customer relationship. As I mentioned in part one, a year ago I wrote 'Howells' 10 Rules for Open Source Marketing.' Here we're looking at where Alfresco is a year later in its marketing approach.

Oracle is open sourcing a Call Interface (OC18) database driver for PHP, describing it as bringing 'breakthrough scalability to PHP applications' and enhancing it as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The driver, it said, supports Oracle Database 11g features like connection pooling and fast application notification so a single x86 server can support tens of thousands of database connections at higher availability.