OStatic

Apache is without a doubt one of the most influential open source platforms available, and the Apache web server has continued to maintain dominant market share in recent years. Other Apache projects are also flourishing. From November 2nd to 6th, at the Oakland Marriott City Center in Oakland, California, The Apache Software Foundation is hosting ApacheCon US 2009. The event will feature educational sessions, a hackathon, a solid roster of speakers, and more.

The conference is partly in celebration of the 10th anniversary of The Apache Software Foundation, and is one of several annual events that the foundation runs around the world.OStatic is a media partner with the foundation for the event, and readers can get a 10 percent discount to the conference. Here is how to do so, and more details.

Q&A: Visa dips a toe into the Hadoop pool. The company's head of technology strategy weighs in on how it is using Hadoop's powerful data crunching capabilities.

London Stock Exchange platform acquisition ignites open source war of words. Its Microsoft-based tech infrastructure is being replaced by open source tools.

How GNOME and KDE spend their money. Here's a comparison of their quarterly reports.

Does Oracle matter to open source? Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects that people use every day.

BonitaSoft gets funding. The provider of open source Business Process Management (BPM) software announced a first round of funding of $3 million from Ventech and Auriga Partners.

InfoWorld's annual Bossies awards recognize top free and open source software projects, and the third annual list of 40 winners is out now. This year's list of winners, unlike last year's, focuses strictly on enterprise software, application dev tools, network management software, platforms and middleware.

Mobile applications had a good showing among the award winners this year. PhoneGap, an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript, got a nod. Fast-rising open source projects were also honored, including the WebKit browser rendering engine, and Hadoop and Hive--tools for processing data collections in the terabyte and petabyte range. OpenStreetMap, an open source version of popular mapping services like Google Maps and MapQuest, was one of the more interesting Bossie winners. Here are the winners, with links to the pages for these projects that we maintain here at OStatic, where you can find out much more about them and search for alternatives.

We've written before several times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and we've also written about Cloudera, a well-funded company that is focusing on providing support and services for Hadoop, in addition to offering its own Hadoop distribution.

Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here. A look at the companies and institutions organizing and participating in the event shows just how far Hadoop has come, and how it has extended well beyond just search applications.

Back when Microsoft was actively pursuing an acquisition of Yahoo!, only to withdraw its bid, many observers felt that the withdrawal was good news for Yahoo!'s many open source and open initiatives. But we made the point back then that the game might just have begun. From Yahoo!'s open strategy for developers, to its Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), to the company's reliance on Hadoop for advanced fast queries, Yahoo! has always been a strong supporter of open standards. Yahoo!'s entire site runs on FreeBSD--a free operating system descended from AT&T Unix.

Microsoft still isn't acquiring Yahoo!, but it has struck a far-reaching search deal with the company. What are the implications for Yahoo!'s many open source and open standards initiatives?

Missing: Dell Ubuntu desktop PCs. The VAR Guy explores whether Dell has stopped selling Ubuntu desktop computers.

Open source Hive: Large-scale, distributed data processing made easy. Hive is a data analysis and query front end for Hadoop that makes Hadoop data files look like SQL tables.

Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after violating GPL. Did it act simply to head off any potentially embarrassing legal disputes over violations?

SpringSource and MindTouch seek to redefine the application server. Spurred by economic pressures on IT departments, new breeds of app servers are taking shape.

The tech jobs that the cloud will eliminate. IT pros face new competition for their jobs from cloud services. Which jobs go, and which become more valuable?

Hadoop and MapReduce are cheap and scalable for clustered queries, but they're slower than relational databases. Yale researchers have an improvement.

The Ubuntu Linux app store: fact or fiction? The emerging app store, which offers Ubuntu Linux and Debian applications, wasn?t built by Canonical.

Linux slips into Microsoft's warm, deadly embrace. How Microsoft will use the GPL to mount a serious backdoor assault on the core of the Linux platform.

Is Microsoft's GPL2 support really a big deal? It's recently released code is only for Linux Virtual Machines on Windows, not physical Linux servers and Linux desktops.

Red Hat is wrong to insist Microsoft disavow litigation. Did IBM, HP, Oracle, or even Red Hat ever declare that they will never, ever sue open source developers over patent infringements?

Palm's Linux secret makes the Pre. Palm Pre is no thriller as a smartphone, but the SDK reveals the most open mobile platform on the market.