Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

OASIS has formed a new technical committee to advance the Service Data Objects specification, which is designed to simplify the way in which service-oriented architecture applications handle data. Using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

Data is the fundamental building block of every business, data in the form of client information, sales information, employee information, and financial information fuels the operation of every business. In today's business environment, which enables data entry from multiple points and through myriad processes, data quality has become an increasing concern for businesses trying to succeed in an ever more competitive atmosphere.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

JunkEmailFilter.com works in the dangerous area of sorting through e-mail to filter out viruses and junk e-mails known as 'spam,' so that its clients receive only the e-mails they want to see. For higher levels of control and security, it uses open source virtualization software, known as OpenVZ.

It is with some sadness that I am writing my last editorial for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. As the founding editor-in-chief of this magazine and a past contributor to its predecessor, I am going to miss it. However, all things must end and this chapter of my writing career, I am happy to say, ends on a high note.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo, that it has significantly extended the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the heterogeneous, enterprise-scale demands of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The WSO2 ESB 1.5 adds the ability to run scheduled tasks, caching and other performance enhancements, message augmentation using standard databases, and a wide variety of file systems and FTP. Also new to Version 1.5 are support for XQuery and a simplified Plain Old Java Object (POJO) model based on the Command pattern.

Oracle has announced Oracle VM, server virtualization software that supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Key Oracle products including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are certified with Oracle VM. Customers have a single point of support for their entire virtualization environments, including the Linux operating system and Oracle products.

The Android Developer Challenge will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android, a complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

I installed Ubuntu on the Toshiba laptop. Ubuntu installed in 15 minutes - 49 for Windows XP and 125 for Windows Vista. Ubuntu's desktop came right up. I opened the pre-installed Firefox browser and found I could browse the Web immediately. Ubuntu installed a network adaptor for the Toshiba laptop. I shake my head at this Windows foolishness!

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has laid down with one of its enemies. It also cut deals with Microsoft and IBM. Red Hat will get a fully compatible open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for its Linux operating system out of the deal. All it has to do now is build it - and that includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - and optimize the runtime for JBoss-on-Linux. Red Hat's IcedTea project - which brings together Fedora, the early access version of Red Hat Linux, and JBoss.org technologies on Linux - gets pushed. It's supposed to supply free alternatives to some of the pieces of the OpenJDK project that are still proprietary.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has taken modular programming principals in to 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 set of infrastructure services like, life cycle management, service announcement, service discovery, security, integration, etc. Applications which provides these infrastructure services make up the SOA platform. The most common approach to implement applications using SOA is to make use of web services. Considering the advantages of use of FOSS solutions in application development, its worth evaluating web service based FOSS options in building a SOA platform.

Launching a new Open Source, SaaS offering required Mindbridge to re-evaluate its infrastructure and resulting cost structures. The goals included: Providing stable computing platforms, Rapid server procurement, Leveraging commodity hardware, Leveraging Open Source technologies, Maintaining flexibility as new solutions are required, Integrating proprietary and Open Source solutions harmoniously, Enabling secure and reliable communications with systems regardless of their location on the Internet, Exposing elements of systems management to customers After considerable research, it was determined that the only economical way to accomplish these goals was to utilize virtualization while at the same time integrating various components using web services. This discussion will review the technologies utilized, the problems encountered and the opportunities presented by virtualizing a web infrastructure.

Open source has made signficant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments with a focus on ESB and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization, provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is. IDC, which coined the term, defines 'Virtualization 2.0' as the next step beyond server virtualization replete with faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing and ultimately policy-based automation. Egenera says IDC is speaking its name.

WSO2 is an open source middleware company founded by pioneers in Web services and of members of the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. The company delivers a new, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for Web services and SOA and built on Apache Axis2. WSO2's first products are the WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which are built on the WSO2 Web Services Framework. The company maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka. For more information about WSO2, visit http://wso2.com/

Although I am somewhat of a new user of containers virtualization technology, I thought I'd write a short article giving an overview about using containers virtualization instead of dedicated physical servers for people thinking about trying virtualization technology - especially 'containers,' or operating system virtualization technology. Here, I will address misconceptions that I had about containers and talk about how my perspective on this type of virtualization technology is changing.

XAware has announced the creation of an open source project and the availability of XAware 5, open source data integration software that increases the productivity of development teams. XAware transcends existing data integration offerings with its ability to 'service-enable' data for reusable real-time connection to applications and business processes.

JumpBox has released its JumpBox line of server applications for Virtual Iron Software's server virtualization platform. The new appliances allow users to deploy open source, server-based applications on Virtual Iron environments in shorter time than it would normally take them. JumpBoxes for Virtual Iron are available for download.

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

Openbravo, the open source SMB ERP house, has acquired Librepos (née Tina POS), the open source point-of-sale application vendor on the theory that the retail market is very vulnerable to open source disruption. Terms were not disclosed. Librepos' main developer Adrian Romero is joining Openbravo as software architect. Openbravo expects to offer a combined ERP-POS solution to integrate sales numbers, order entries and cash flow. And Librepos' community will be merged with Openbravo's. Openbravo's ERP has been downloaded 350,000 times on Sourceforge; Librepos, now Openbravo POS and expected to survive as an open source project, was downloaded 100,000 times since January 2005, they said.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been discussed as an important architectural style for the last few years. Organizations have started to develop service-oriented solutions and many are now leveraging services in their production environments. SOA introduces new technical complexities and challenges and makes testing a critical component of the development lifecycle.

'Through these strategic agreements, Red Hat commits to contribute to the Java platform and distribute a compatible, open source Java software implementation,' said Sacha Labourey, CTO of JBoss, a division of Red Hat, as RH today announced an agreement with Sun to advance open source JavaTM software.

Dojo provides UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive Web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for AJAX, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules.

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a long-time Linux sys admin role puts me in a great position to assess Ubuntu. Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I've long hoped it would go - easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too but more on that later. It has some elegance to it - bet you never heard that about a Linux desktop before.

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

As Microsoft's recent $240M investment in Facebook gives FB all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions, some are concerned that one corporation should control so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. Even before OpenSocial launched today, one individual had decided to outline an open source software architecture to address these concerns. He has published a technical overview of his ideas for an open source infrastructure for social networking, calling it 'Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software.'

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

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 Openbrave folks - they'll have a product they can warranty.

The packs consist of reusable functions combined to create cross-application workflows so users can navigate between apps, add new functions and make productivity improvements. To start, CorraTech will pre-package and pre-integrate Zimbra e-mail, Centric CRM and KnowledgeTree document management. It will then add Openbravo ERP. It is also anticipating adding SugarCRM. Ditto Intalio's BPMS.