Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

MuleSource announced general availability of Mule Galaxy Enterprise, a new production-ready solution for storing and managing SOA artifacts offering new enterprise-class features such as clustering for high availability, an extensible query engine, and more. Mule Galaxy Enterprise, the open source SOA governance platform with integrated registry and repository, builds on the success of the Mule Galaxy Community Edition, released in January 2008.

Oracle announced new releases of Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition. The new releases and enhancements signify Oracle's commitment to continued innovation across the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, while maintaining the open source dual license business model.

Open source applications provider Red Hat has introduced three applications targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. It has introduced embedded Linux Hypervisor for hosting virtualized Linux and Windows environments, which provide virtualization with improved security, high performance, and a wide range of hardware.

Red Hat announced advancements that extend the Company's Linux Automation strategy by providing expanded capabilities and incorporating broadened community involvement for secure management of both users and systems across virtual and physical enterprise infrastructures.

Red Hat saw earnings rise 6.6% to $17.3 million, or eight cents a share in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31 on revenue up 32% year-over-year and 11% sequentially to $156.6 million. EPS was dead flat year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $130.7 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially. Training and services were up 64% to $25.9 million.

Nokia wants to buy the 52% of the Symbian operating system that it doesn't already own to open source it and set it free. It's a defense against advances into the fragmented mobile space that Nokia and Symbian dominate - particularly - from the looks of case - against Google's nascent open source Android initiative and the freebie Linux-based LiMo Foundation - but then there's also Apple's proprietary iPhone, Microsoft's equally proprietary, royalty-charging Windows Mobile and the ever-present Blackberry and Palm.

Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison.

Quest Software announced the latest release of its Java profiler, JProbe 8.0, which is now offered as a plug-in to the Eclipse Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The release of this capability aligns with the increased adoption of the open source development. Launching JProbe in an Eclipse environment enables users to adopt continuous performance testing best practices.

Apatar announced the CDYNE Death Index connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector verifies the Social Security number against the U.S. Social Security Death Index database and returns whether the customer is departed, eliminating the possibility to use a deceased person's identification or deliver goods to individuals who do not exist. Using the CDYNE Death Index Web service, Apatar checks the legitimacy of social security numbers extracted from corporate applications (such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM) or databases (MySQL, Microsoft Access, Oracle, etc.) and allows for this data to be filtered or cleansed.

HP has open sourced the Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) that it got from DEC by way of Compaq. It's sent the 16-year-old Alpha-based source code, representing what it calls 400 R&D years, over to Sourceforge under the GPLv2 license as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system. It says it will provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources.

Protecode announced the general availability of its software development tool for governance and Intellectual Property (IP) management. The latest release enables commercial software developers and open source creators to accelerate managed adoption of open source code in a simple, painless process. Additionally, the software is now available to the Eclipse community for anyone working on an active Eclipse project. Protecode automatically generates records of software content, identifies and reports associated pedigree and licensing information by checking its properties and compliance against an organization's policies, establishing IP ownership and creating a software Bill of Materials (BOM).

Red Hat announced three strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. These initiatives will enable customers to deploy virtualization across their IT infrastructure by offering features and cost benefits that go beyond competitive solutions. With this portfolio growth, Red Hat solutions provide the market with comprehensive virtualization capabilities.

Genuitec announced the availability of MyEclipse 6.5 Blue Edition; a next-generation ALM and open source-friendly IDE for WebSphere. Of note, users will be drawn to multiple technologies not currently supported by IBM's RAD, such as Maven4MyEclipse (a professional implementation of Maven2), popular open source mainstays such as Spring, Hibernate, JPA, the Matisse Swing GUI Designer and more. In 6.5, users will also have the ability to run multiple WebSphere server instances, migrate WSAD/RAD projects to MyEclipse Blue Edition and enjoy WebSphere 6.0 portal server support. These advanced features offer organizations maximum flexibility to manage the entire application life-cycle with the infrastructure they already have.

AccuRev announced that Mediasurface standardized on AccuRev for process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM). As a result, development teams in the United Kingdom and Bangalore, India now work as a set of integrated teams for managing Feature Driven Development, its agile approach to manage the software release process.

Sun has released a new real-time, shared-nothing, carrier-grade version of MySQL called MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 certified for use in telecom environments, such as subscriber data management systems (hlr, hss) and service delivery platforms.

WSO2 has today announced the availability of the open source WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Version 1.7 to support enterprises' heterogeneous, high-volume service-oriented architecture (SOA) demands. The WSO2 ESB 1.7 offers new enhancements to stability and availability - resulting in scalability and error-free connections for high-volume SOA environments, even on standard hardware.

Red Hat is open sourcing Project Spacewalk, the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base under the GPLv2 license. RHN Satellite is the stuff behind the Red Hat Network and lets customers manage RHEL updates inside their firewall. It does systems provisioning, updates and monitoring across physical and virtual servers.

It only took 15 years but Wine, the open source Windows rewrite, so to speak, that lets Linux run Windows applications natively, has reached its first stable release, Wine 1.0. Compatibility isn't perfect, the Wine folk say, and not everything will run (particularly newer apps) but thousands of programs appear to be working just fine. There's a list of tested program that's heavy on games. Both Wine source and binaries will be available.

GPLv3, the great General Public License rewrite, is now a year-old and used by 2,345 open source projects including Ubuntu, SugarCRM and Samba. Adoption has reportedly been growing at about 20% a month over the past six months. According to some figures sent around by Black Duck, approximately 58% of all open source projects today are covered by GPLv2 and 11% by LGPLv2.

Jaspersoft announced the availability of its new Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite v3 Professional Edition. Jaspersoft v3 marks a major milestone for open source business intelligence software by providing rich enterprise-class functionality delivered through state-of-the-art interactive Web 2.0 interfaces.

Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, who has now taken on the role of open standards evangelist, gave a speech at OpenForum Europe the other day recommending that business and government adopt 'open standards.' 'Open standards' in Neelie's mouth is code for 'open source' or at least 'not Microsoft.'

Open source has made significant 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.

Xandros announced the release of the all new Xandros BridgeWays Management Console for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The BridgeWays Management Console, available as a free download from the Xandros web site, brings powerful graphical management of Red Hat servers to system administrators who may have Windows Server skill sets, but no prior Linux experience. Linux administrators will also find that this all-in-one remote management console relieves them from resorting to command line options or using multiple tools to administer their Red Hat servers. Multiple servers and services are integrated into a single 'Managed Community' that can be remotely administered from either a Red Hat server, or from any Windows XP or Vista desktop.

Citrix is losing its sales boss John Burris to one of the open source contingent's few publicly traded companies, the struggling Sourcefire, creator of Snort, the security software, whose $15 IPO price has pretty been shaved in half since its debut in March of 2007.

Red Hat is beta testing its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It's a way to tickle enterprise adoption of its Java application server. EC2 offers developers, enterprises and startups a web-scale compute infrastructure with virtually unlimited capacity and pay-as-you-go pricing. And of course clouds right now are very chi-chi.

Likewise Software announced that it has been named as category award-winning finalist in the second annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. Red Hat selected six finalists in the second annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat solutions by customers, partners and the open source community. One Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected from the six finalists during the Red Hat Summit, taking place June 18-20, 2008 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Mass.

SNORT creator Sourcefire, one of the few publicly owned open source companies, has rejected an unsolicited $7.50-a-share offer, a total of roughly $187.4 million cash, from privately held Barracuda Networks, claiming it undervalues the enterprise security company despite the 13% premium. Sourcefire, worth 18 bucks a share shortly after it went public last March, recently found a new CEO.

Open source software is a disruptive technology it's about changing the status quo. Open source is rock and roll while proprietary software is easy listening. That's why I always admired JBoss' Marc Fleury. Marc was and is a bad boy, a rebel, and he played the part to a successful $350 million dollar acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat. Beyond that he was a professional who built a company that was professional and respected grew his customer base and created an iconic software brand. All things that are consistent with open source software, he also seemed to have a good time doing it.

Open source innovator and Snort creator, Sourcefire, announced the availability of OfficeCat, a free security tool that enables users to easily identify potentially threatening Microsoft Office files. Unlike products that detect attempts to exploit known Microsoft vulnerabilities, OfficeCat can determine if a file contains hostile content before it is opened.

Why is the 'collaborative source' development approach uniquely suited and required to drive innovation in the mobile-communications software stack? What are the early fruits of its impact? Out of the principles of open source and the particular market and legal constraints of the telecom world, a best-of-two-worlds approach is being forged: the collaborative source development model that is spawning overdue innovation in mobile.

Red Hat said Wednesday that it had settled patent litigation brought against it two years ago by Firestar Software Inc in what was possibly the very first patent infringement suit ever brought against an open source company. It also turns out that Red Hat was sued by an outfit called DataTern Inc just this past April on another patent. Bank of America, Visa, Wachovia and Delta Air Lines were also named.

ComScore has upped Google's US search share. It was 59.8% in March and now for April it's 61.6%. It gave Yahoo 20.4% and Microsoft 9.1%. HP and Foxconn International, a unit of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the big contract manufacturer, are building a $50 million factory outside St Petersburg where they will produce a half-million PCs a year for the Russian market starting next year. It could become a hub for the Baltic states and Scandinavia. Hon Hai, meanwhile, is going to start making laptops.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Although the SaaS development platform has gotten a lot of attention, it has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform-as-a-Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps anywhere, as long as it's with us) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you've got Apex!?). I think the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider.

EnterpriseDB co-founder and CEO Andy Astor has stepped aside so Ed Boyajian, brought in from Red Hat, can take the four-year-old company to the proverbial next level, they said. Boyajian has been running Red Hat's North American sales under one title or another for the last six years and he's at EnterpriseDB to repeat the experience Red Hat Enterprise Linux has had during that time.

Wind River says it's collaborating with Intel and will develop an open, extensible Moblin-based Linux platform for Atom-bearing MIDs. Both open source and commercial versions should be available next year. The commercial Wind River Linux Platform for Mobile Internet Devices is supposed to be a full-featured, commercial-grade Linux platform that includes a Linux distribution, middleware and mobile applications that deliver rich Internet and media experiences.

Nothing's cooler than writing a bad-ass site or application and watching it gain popularity and a significant user base. By the same token, nothing's more frustrating than watching your app fall on its face when its running under high load. If you're like me, you know how disheartening this can be, as it usually means that it's time for a hard dose of reality: your code probably isn't as awesome as you thought it was.

Zmanda, the open source backup and recovery folks, says it's integrated NetApp's Snapshot technology with its own Recovery Manager for MySQL. It's supposed to translate into continuous data protection for mission-critical MySQL databases. With Snapshot, administrators can create point-in-time copies of file systems for granular recovery.

Appliances. The very word is emblematic of stability and strength. Think of the appliances in your kitchen. Unless you're particularly unlucky, 99.9% of the time your refrigerator, stove and dishwasher just work. You don't have to give it a second thought. When we talk about software appliances, we're talking about a similar stability.