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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Elephants on parade
# Cloudera launched v3 of its Distribution for Hadoop and released v1 of Cloudera Enterprise.

# Karmasphere released new Professional and Analyst Editions of its Hadoop development and deployment studio.

# Talend announced that its Integration Suite now offers native support for Hadoop.

# Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, Yahoo’s workflow engine for Hadoop.

# Datameer announced a strategic partnership with Zementis for predictive analytics on Hadoop.

# The Register reported that Twitter is set to open source its MySQL-to-Hadoop tool.

# MicroStrategy announced support for Apache Hadoop as a data source for MicroStrategy 9.

# Appistry announced Hadoop-based strategic alliances Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga.

# GOTO Metrics released Data Analytics Platform, a Hadoop-based business intelligence platform.

Best of the rest
# The Software Freedom Law Center responded to the Supreme Court’s decision on Bilski v. Kappos, while Mark Radcliffe provided his thoughts.

# David Wiley discussed openness, radicalism, and tolerance (and the lack of it).

# Jorg Janke discussed how Compiere overstepped the balance between proprietary and open product components.

# Simon Phipps argued that open core is bad for software freedom.

# Nick Halsey joined SugarCRM as chief marketing officer.

# DotNetNuke more than doubled its subscription customers in 1H10 to nearly 800, expects 400% FY revenue growth.

# Nuxeo announced its new Nuxeo Case Management Framework.

# Mike Masnick discussed why the lack of billion dollar pure play open source software companies is a good thing.

# The Apache Software Foundation announced Apache Tomcat Version 7.0.

# Glyn Moody asked whether Oracle has been a disaster for Sun’s open source.

# Infoworld discussed eight business strategies for profiting from open source software.

# Computerworld reported that Red Hat CEO sees VMware as biggest competitor.

# IBM published an essay on the role Linux plays in its smarter planet initiative.

# Groklaw asked, What did Microsoft know about SCO’s plan to attack Linux, and when did it know it?

# Mozilla won the American Business Award for the most innovative company of the year.

By most accounts, including that of fellow open source ERP player xTuple CEO Ned Lilly, who offers an interesting and accurate depiction of Compiere’s changes, acknowledge the movement away from community that occurred over the last few years at Compiere. As discussed in our own recent report on the deal, we are also somewhat skeptical over the fate of what is left of Compiere’s open source community, even though Consona plans to continue offering both paid and free versions. At the same time, we are also wondering whether it will matter much — to Consona, to Compiere or even to its customers?

So how does this jibe, or not, with our views on how M&A deals and valuations involving open source software vendors tend to highlight the value of open source communities?

Community has served to drive up the price in deals stretching back for years (Citrix-XenSource for $500m, August 2007; Nokia-Trolltech at $153m, January 2008; Sun-MySQL for $1 billion, January 2008; VMware-SpringSource $420m, August 2009), but the reality in the case of Consona-Compiere (price not disclosed) is that community, or lack of a vibrant open source software community, may have actually driven the price down.

We must also consider the significance of cloud computing here. Cloud capabilities and possibilities in the enterprise version of Compiere’s platform may have trumped community in this case, but the deal still serves to remind open source software companies, as well as their existing and potential partners and acquirers, that community counts.