OStatic

Today, the Linux Foundation released its updated study of mainline kernel development. The report examines the slight variations in release frequency, the lines of code submitted, deleted and modified since the April 2008 study, new trends in subsystem patch signoff, and the remarkable diversity (and, perhaps, adversity outside the realm of kernel development) of the companies contributing to the kernel.

While the study is obviously pertinent to those working in kernel development, it covers so many aspects of the development process that everyone working with open source software -- developers, community managers, and even non-IT managerial roles -- can find something directly related to their positions.

It's also (perhaps surprisingly) engaging reading for those interested in the Linux kernel but a little foggy on how the kernel relates to the rest of the operating environment or how changes are approved and applied to the kernel tree.

Alan Cox, long-time kernel developer at Red Hat, announced last week that he would be leaving Red Hat in January for Intel, where he can concentrate more on areas of low-level development.

As you'd imagine from such a statement, this doesn't end Cox's involvement with the Linux kernel or open source development.

Red Hat issued a call for papers this week for its upcoming conferences, Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. The co-located events are scheduled to take place September 1-4, 2009 in Chicago, IL.

Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat says combining events will give presenters a distinct opportunity to share innovative topics with both the infrastructure and middleware communities.

The Software Freedom Law Center and Red Hat's CEO rag on the patent system. Nobody can write software without risking a lawsuit.

Ingres goes after Sun's customers. The company is promoting a migration path from the MySQL database.

Apple's iPhone now has one-third the market share of desktop Linux. NetApplications measured how much Linux and the iPhone are used to access the Internet.

FOSS sexism claims stir up the pot. Bruce Byfield's recent article on the topic has people talking.

ARMing desktop Linux. ARM-based netbooks are on their way and they can't run Windows.

While the economy is showing only slight signs of recovery, Red Hat continues to turn in stellar financial performance. Yesterday, the company announced its second quarter results, which were quite strong, and this morning Red Hat's stock is up 13 percent. Red Hat's revenues for the quarter were $184 million, a 12 percent increase over last year's comparable quarter. Earnings came in at $28.9 million for the quarter, up from $21.1 million a year earlier.

One of the really notable things about Red Hat's report is that, as has been true for many quarters in a row, all 25 of its biggest accounts renewed, at subscription prices that were 20 percent higher. Red Hat continues to demonstrate that providing support and services for open source software is a winning business model, and that has to give confidence to small startups focused on the same model, including Cloudera and Acquia.

OpenID is the biggest government boost yet for open source. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a pilot program focused on it.

Red Hat challenges Ubuntu with KVM support. After placing its bets for years on Xen, the company has moved toward official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.

Oracle makes promises to Sun customers, but mum on MySQL. The company has much to say to Sun customers in a front-page ad it placed in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

he Linux kernel version 2.6.31 has been released. Desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support are among the new additions. Check out more from Linus Torvalds.

Kings of open source monitoring. OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring.

While Novell's report yesterday that its quarterly Linux revenue soared 22 percent year-over-year was a positive note, and one that was expected, the real upshot of the company's earnings report was that every other part of its business sank. Overall, its revenues slipped to $216 million for the quarter, compared to $245 million for the comparable quarter last year. Despite the company's drum pounding about the promise and growth of its Linux business, Novell is a public company that needs revenues to come from more than one aspect of its business.?

As Matt Asay notes, Red Hat's financial performance has been much rosier during the recession, but there are also questions arising about why Red Hat's revenue growth is slowing. Both companies need more than just Linux business to grow over the long run, and there are good reasons to believe that Red Hat may be the one of the two that pulls a rabbit--or a series of them--out of its red hat.?

New consortium to define software quality. CISQ will standardize metrics and license software quality evaluation service providers.

Little can save Google and Nokia from mobile failure. Are they disruptive enough to beat Apple in smartphones?

Red Hat spins JBoss 2.x off As HornetQ. It's a project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, very high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system.

Openshot: A new Linux video editor. A developer preview is available now, version 0.9.22.

Nvidia pushes out new Linux driver updates. For those sticking with the official driver releases there is the 185.18.36 release, while for those willing to try a beta driver there is the 190.25 build.