OStatic

This week brought the news that IBM and Canonical have partnered on a suite of very inexpensive desktop applications aimed at netbooks for businesses in Africa. The suite of software runs on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, and, as CNet's Lance Whitney notes, offers open-standards-based e-mail, word processing, a spreadsheet application, communication tools, and social-networking features. There will also be features allowing users to collaborate in the cloud.

If you look at the pricing model for this offering in conjunction with the low prices of netbooks, this sounds like a very viable way to offer users good functionality while avoiding the much greater expense of Windows-based systems equipped with proprietary applications. In fact, as I've been reading the details of the plan, I wonder why the folks behind the beleagured One Laptop for Child initiative didn't see this coming.

Moblin version 2.0 video - finally, a real mobile UI for netbooks. Check out the video here for a look at Intel's Moblin OS, optimized for Atom chips.

If Oracle commits to Solaris, will IBM buy Red Hat? Oracle may offer customers attractive terms to stay on Solaris, affecting migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Can open source refuse to do business? If an open source developer doesn't like someone, can he or she obstruct usage of applications?

Internet.com launches online freelance marketplace. It's free to join, post projects, bid on projects, and seek freelance gigs.

Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic launch a new open source consortium. It will focus on large-scale data aggregation, and ease mining of medical records.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says he doesn't get the point of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. After expressing surprise and saying he doesn't understand the deal on Monday, he's now more specific: I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company, Reuters reports him saying while speaking to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. We don't want to buy any hardware companies.

Isn't it a bit reductionist to call Sun a hardware company? Sun has a huge portfolio of compelling software, not the least of which is MySQL. On that front, IBM is also revealing how it will counter Oracle and MySQL in the database wars.

I can safely say when I covered the speculation that IBM and Sun were wrapping up the finer points of the acquisition Friday, I figured that if there was anything left to say come Monday, it would deal with idiosyncracies of the agreed-upon terms. Even though the announcement is imminent reports were not officially sanctioned by IBM or Sun, there was no reason to believe the sources were dishonest about the information they gave. It still doesn't seem there was dishonesty, or that these sources made wildly off-base assumptions about what was to come. It seemed as though IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems was set to proceed, until late Saturday evening, when IBM and Sun broke off negotiations, according to Bloomberg.

There had been much debate about how an IBM acquisition would affect Sun's open source efforts. As those questions move even further into the hypothetical realm, far more troubling questions loom about Sun's next potential buyer -- or its choice to weather the storm on its own.

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems is imminent. The official announcement and terms of the acquisition will most likely be made public on Monday, but a late in the day announcement hasn't been ruled out. It's estimated that the purchase will cost IBM nearly $7 billion.

There's been much speculation and discussion both here at OStatic and elsewhere about what this means for Sun and its open source projects.