Yet another evidence of the value of OpenSource as a collaboration mechanism. Today was the launch for the Symbian Foundation, founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) and Open Source the resulting platform (full Press Release). The group will be using the EPL 1.0 license... and they already have a Wikipedia page. Added: This story is now being carried by mainstream news: BusinessWeek, InformationWeek, NYTimes.

TheRegister reports on an Oracle License Increase on their major products, including AppServer and Databases; Barron's has a Similar Report, and so does SearchITChannel.com. The reports also suggest that the entry-level WebLogic Express is no more. It seems to me that the GlassFish Enterprise Server and MySQL Enterprise Server just became even better deals than before. If interested, check out our Informal Adoption Stories, the Switch Program, and the GlassFish For Business.

NB. The title refers to a scene from Galaxy Quest (check the Script). Complaints about my sense of humor to /dev/null :-).

The code freeze for Java CAPS 6 was this last wednesday, and Fred Marked the Occasion. JavaCAPS 6 uses GlassFish (v2), adds JBI support and incorporates OpenESB elements. JavaCAPS 6 is the latest in a road towards an Enterprise Quality, Easy-to-Use, OpenSource Integration platform. Check Eric's great History Recap.

The road does not end, though, there are more OpenESB components getting ready and there is Fuji and more beyond that. See my Introduction to these projects and Jason's Detailed Description between JavaCAPS and OpenESB.

Microsoft Office will support ODF, MS to join OASIS TC! Check out: • MS Press Release • BetaNews • SD Times • ConsortiumInfo Analysis

I went by the MySQL Users Conference on Tuesday and it looked good, plenty of energy and attendance. Check PlanetMySQL for reports, the bloggers are doing a good reporting job; SlashDot is not, though - see below. A quick pass through highlights:

• SlashDot: The Sky is Falling. • Mårten: No, It's not. • SmugMug: Ditto; Hyperic: Ditto • RoadMap by Zach. • KickFire Appliance • MySQL WorkBench is out • Maria Architecture • Falcon Architecture • Photos by Kaj; Videos from Zach.

Dalibor is joining Sun to work as a Java F/OSS Ambassado, helping projects like the OpenJDK. This is excellent news! Welcome aboard, Dalibor! Check out Dalibor's Announcement and Comments and Barton's Welcome.

This made me smile: Hudson got a free CVS to SVN conversion from CollabNet because they were using it themselves! I think that's quite nice from CollabNet. Check out Kohsuke's note for the mail thread and details.

Hudson 1.200 shipped on Mar 22, 2008 (blog, Announcement). The earliest record for a Hudson release I can find is Hudson 1.11, dated Sep 22, 2005 (Announcement). That's 190 releases in 912 days, less than 5 days per release! I think that qualifies as Agile Development!. Happy 200th release, Hudson!

The MySQL acquisition is quickly changing the perception of Sun's commitment to Open Source. Earlier today I pointed to new efforts in the Health and the Education industries, here are two more stories:

• The University of Tokyo and Sun start Research on HPC and Web-based Languages
• Sun and Chinese Government announce OpenSPARC Collaboration.

Assessing all this, LinuxInsider says: Deals Cast Sun in Role of Open Source Standard Bearer.

I'm not surprised the deal is changing people's perceptions; but I am a bit surprised at how fast and how deeply it changes them. This is going to a be a very interesting year for us.

Afga, ICW and Sun have launched the Open eHealth initiative to leverage Open Source in the Health industry. Open eHealth's goal is to create a community-driven software development platform to speed up the digitization of the healthcare industry, with emphasis on delivering interoperable, standards-based solutions.

The service components will extend existing open source projects such as OpenESB, Glassfish, OpenSSO and Mural. More details in the Press Release and at the Open eHealth WebSite.

The big shift in the IT industry created by Open Source is accelerating. I have a biased perspective, but I strongly believe that Sun's strengths, size, and position will allow it to capitalize on and speed up the transition to this brave new world. I've a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore....

I'll make this my last comment on the MySQL Deal until I can write about concrete steps. Most of the reports are very positive, including this one from The Register: Meet the world's premier open source vendor - Sun. The most negative one is from John Dvorak: The Sun-MySQL deal stinks. I don't follow John D but I know he has a wide readership, so it is disappointing that he is so off the mark. And it is not just on this deal; how can he ignore, for example, the value of Kaelia, Alfara and WaveSet? At least the comments to his post are overwhelmingly positive of the deal. Anyhow, moving on...

PS - I borrowed the image at left from Mårten's presentation at Orlando. Hope you like it as much as I did...

Added: Redmonk has a very Comprehensive Analysis; check it out.

Very good news! GlassFish v2 is now in Debian. The best part? I don't recognize any of the package maintainers; Open Source at its best!

Thanks to Barton and Ken for the tip! Happy Holidays!

SoyLatte, the OpenJDK (Java 6) port to Mac OS X seems to be an amazing technical job that is of interest for people looking for a Libre and/or Java 6 implementation on the Mac.

Roberto is reporting that GlassFish (not your typical HelloWorld application) runs just fine on SoyLatte on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). The GlassFish Update Center may require X11 just like NetBeans. Meanwhile Jerome reports on running IntelliJ on SoyLatte.

After so many years working with lawyers whose job was to make sure we didn't say the wrong thing, I smile every time I see a post by Mike :-). Anyhow, directly from the lawyer's keyboard, the latest Sun Contribution Agreement (v1.5) is out. The new SCA is still under 1 page. And there are no changes in the legal implications, it is just... more readable! Amazing! Check it out here. The plan is to switch to the new SCA in all our communities, but, if you signed the old one, no need to sign the new one and resubmit.

Yesterday's big announcement was that Dell was going to distribute Solaris on some PowerEdge servers. check out Jonathan's blog and Barton's History line. As JimG points out, this is a good validation of the benefits of widespread adoption of a technology. For additional info, check Sun's Press Release and this eWeek article.

Now, what I want is to see more hardware and software companies OEMing the GlassFish AppServer! We already have Ubuntu, drop me an email if you are interested :-)