# HP announced the private beta program of its OpenStack-based HP Cloud Services.

# Linus Torvalds made Linux 3.1 available on Github, albeit temporarily.

# The National Security Agency proposed a new database, Accumulo, to the Apache Foundation for incubation.

# Nominations for the Document Foundation board elections are now open.

# Fouriertransform invested $3m in automotive infotainment application developer Pelagicore AB.

# LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are drifting apart.

# Luis Villa explained license compatibility in the context of MPL 2.0.

# The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia.

# HP announced the private beta program of its OpenStack-based HP Cloud Services.

# Linus Torvalds made Linux 3.1 available on Github, albeit temporarily.

# The National Security Agency proposed a new database, Accumulo, to the Apache Foundation for incubation.

# Nominations for the Document Foundation board elections are now open.

# Fouriertransform invested $3m in automotive infotainment application developer Pelagicore AB.

# LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are drifting apart.

# Luis Villa explained license compatibility in the context of MPL 2.0.

# The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia.

Alan Bell sees correlation with the previous fork of Joomla from Mambo and has illustrated the potential impact that forking a project can have with a Google Trends chart, where Mambo is the blue line, and Joomla is the red line:

A similar chart for Debian (blue) and Ubuntu (red) is also instructive:

Or what about Nagios (blue) and Icinga (red):

Hmm. Maybe not the best example. After all, as we reported, the Icinga fork had some commercial motivations attached to it, and it’s not exactly the highest profile fork.

What about something a bit more comparable, like MySQL (blue) and MariaDB (red):

Oh.

Which is not to say that LibreOffice will not be a success, but when it comes to forking, creating the fork is clearly just the start. It takes time, and a lot of effort, to generate the momentum for a fork to be truly successful. There is bound to be an initial spike in developer and user interest. Turning that into a meaningful and productive community will be the hard part.

We had speculated on the fate of Sun open source software under Oracle and while we acknowledged Oracle’s participation in, contribution and commitment to and opportunity from open source software, we questioned its appreciation of open source software communities beyond code and customers. It appears the OpenSolaris community and thus the OS itself, which we believe is key to advancing development of the more popular, proprietary cousin Solaris — are not a priority for Oracle.

The same cannot be said for all open source from Sun, and there’s a lot of it, now at Oracle. Amid the struggles of the OpenSolaris community, one of the other open source keystones from Sun, MySQL, seems to be doing well, despite persisting claims Oracle purchased Sun and MySQL simply to keep it from competing with Oracle database products. According to a Jaspersoft survey of customers/developers, there is a lack of awareness or concern of Oracle’s involvement in MySQL (59 percent were not aware Oracle reorganized and established a separate MySQL business unit apart from Oracle’s traditional RDBMS business …). Another 43% of Jaspersoft’s respondents said MySQL development and innovation would improve under Oracle.

The Jaspersoft survey found even more love for Java under Oracle, with 80 percent of respondents indicating they believe the Java process will improve or stay the same under Oracle. The related GlassFish application server also appears to be healthy with both community and commercial versions recently released.

The OpenOffice community appears also to be continuing forward supported and unfettered by Oracle (perhaps because it was typically fettered by Sun?), but it may also me failing to fully seize the opportunity.

It has also been interesting to see how Sun’s cloud computing technology has helped give Oracle new love for the term and the market.

There are a number of key open source projects and pieces from Sun, those listed above as well as many others, that may be on the line right now (or may have already been branded ’stay’ or ’stop’). We will be watching to see how Sun’s open source continues to shine or to set at Oracle.

Worth noting is that before the OSS Master Plan started, there were zero companies supporting OSS registered with the Ministry of Finance. Now more than half of the 4,000 companies do (53% is the quoted number). For more information, read the latest newsletter from MAMPU’s OSCC. Key takeaways:

1. Saved RM188.39 million on software licenses over six years
2. Successful OSS adoption in 691 government agencies by the end of 2009 (till April 1 2010, the number looks like it has increased to 699 agencies).
3. In total, 95% of agencies are adopting some form of OSS solution, 87% are using it for back-end infrastructure (here its clear there’s Linux, MySQL in use), and 66% are using OSS on the desktop! (via OpenOffice.org and Firefox)*

* – Software use extrapolated from the actual OSS Master plan, and what was in the report in January 2009. I’m sure Joomla! is also used quite heavily, but never recall seeing it as the choice for CMS in the plan.

Related posts:

1. Open Source saves Malaysian Government RM40 million
2. Open Source saves Malaysian Government RM40 million
3. Open Source saves Malaysian Government RM40 million

People start actually building it (French Article)

Then add to that list that there's also people out there that think that running MySQL over NFS is providing them High Availability, or that using DNS Round Robin will provide them a scalable setup,

So yes .. apparently there is indeed a parallel universe out there.

And no .. I don't want to see Webmin in any Appliance .. that is a joke..., or rather a rant ..

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Oracle has updated their page on Oracle and Sun and it now includes a PDF entitled "Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ".  Check it out for comments on many topics covering Sun's Hardware (SPARC, Storage, x86) and Software offerings, including NetBeans, OpenOffice, MySQL, OpenSource, VirtualBox and GlassFish.