OStatic

The developers of Django, a Python-based framework for creating and deploying sophisticated Web applications, announced yesterday that they have established the Django Foundation. This foundation, like foundations for Apache and Mozilla, will allow for communal ownership of the Django code, as well as accept donations and pay individuals.

Today, the Eclipse Foundation put out its annual release train, which encompasses technologies from 33 different open source project teams, and work from 44 different organizations. Eclipse is an open source community whose many projects are focused on open development platforms. For several years, the Eclipse Foundation has been increasingly focusing on developers in enterprises. The new release, dubbed Galileo, is definitely focused on expanding the use of Eclipse in enterprises, and features new support for Mac Cocoa 32, and a new PHP toolkit. You can download the projects in the release train here. ?Here are more details, including a free upcoming virtual conference on Galileo that you can attend.

I recently got the opportunity to speak with the crew at Bluenog. Bluenog provides tailored integrated collaborative environments (ICE), content management portals and business intelligence solutions built on open source core technologies, offering a hybrid of open source and commercial features and support services.

With online collaboration becoming standard operating procedure, and the still delicate state of the economy, Bluenog, like other companies supplying and supporting open source software, has seen a heightened interest in its services. In particular, Bluenog has seen a growth in open source adoption (and commercial support services) in the higher education market.

Bluenog currently has three prominent clients in academia -- Wellesley, Columbia and NYU. I had a chance to ask the team at Bluenog about the challenges, special considerations, and the road ahead for open source companies in the higher education sector.

As we posted yesterday, the EclipseCon conference is coming up next week. It will feature many open source movers and shakers, including Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Mike previously held executive positions at Oracle, IBM and WebGain. Under his watch, the Eclipse Foundation has grown to over 185 corporate members worldwide, over 90 open source projects, and over 1,000 Eclipse committers. In advance of the conference, we checked in with Mike on what will be discussed there, and what he sees ahead for open source.

Next week, March 23rd to 26th, EclipseCon takes place in Santa Clara, California. Eclipse is a very large open source community focused on open develpment platforms, and extensible frameworks and tools, overseen by The Eclipse Foundation. The conference is an annual event, and this year's will feature a number of high-profile speakers, including developers and software leads from Microsoft, IBM and other companies and organizations. The first 30 OStatic readers who register for the conference can get a $300 discount (normally $1,795 if bought in advance) by entering the following code upon registration: OSTATECON09. Here's more about what to expect at EclipseCon.

The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is coming up, to be held March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference will include much discussion on the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been? running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighed in on the open cloud, and Novell VP Justin Steinman wrote about open source and mass customization. Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft, also discussed the consumerization of information. In this latest installment in the series, we have a guest post on the future of open source from Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath, which offers a platform for software vendors to create and maintain software appliances and virtual appliances in multiple virtual machine formats.

Early this morning, the Eclipse Foundation announced the Pulsar Initiative, a joint effort to create an open, standard mobile application development platform. The Pulsar Initiative is led by the mobile device manufacturers Motorola, Nokia and Genuitec, while industry leaders such as IBM, RIM, and Sony Ericsson Mobile are among the participating members.

The Pulsar Initiative's first goal is to define a common set of Eclipse-based tools in a packaged distribution, allowing developers to create mobile applications for multiple devices using a single, familiar development environment. This saves developer's time (and sanity) by bringing applications to more devices without needing to be intimately familiar with every handset's software development kit.

There was an interesting write up on Forbes.com this week discussing who contributes most to open source projects -- and why. Even though many open source projects have a commercial or institutional component that contributes some degree of direction (or funding) to software development, and even though many businesses and institutions use open source software regularly, the vast majority of contributions to these projects come from individuals.

Forbes' Dan Woods, after hearing Alfresco's Matt Asay and Eclipse's Ian Skerrett speak of this contributor gap, concluded that there must be something very different about how institutions contribute.

The Marketcetera team is as aware as the rest of us that economic changes are coming fast and furious, and that open source software can have an impact on a company's -- or individual's -- financial future. Honestly, one could say Marketcetera is twice as aware of open source software's financial potential.

Today, Marketcetera released the first full production release of its open source automated trading platform. Aimed at hedge fund managers, traders, brokers and dealers, the system is standardized, open, scalable and modular. This, says Marketcetera CEO Graham Miller, offers users faster deployments, better integration, and the ability to customize everything from the public APIs to data models.

If you've ever sat back and tried to visualize how all the global commitments to various open source projects look--a picture of sharing done on the grand scale--a U.C. Davis web site is now serving these views up in video format. I've been studying software projects for a while now, says the site author, who is identified on Slashdot as a U.C. Davis student. Not the programming, but the people -- the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication. The videos are quite eye-catching and informative. Here's more.