OStatic

Google has given Oregon State University's Open Source Lab $300,000, following a previous gift the company gave of $450,000. The gifts have come under the wing of the Campaign for OSU--an effort to raise funds for the university's research and other projects. Can companies like Google and Microsoft benefit themselves from this kind of gift-giving?

Although several open source virtualization applications exist, and some proprietary players are taking a bruising, it's still common for businesses deploying virtualization to face vendor lock-down and inability to move their application workloads between environments. However, Citrix, which owns XenSource and is behind the Xen project, has just announced a novel spin on the problem, to arrive as a preview in September. Project Kensho will distribute open tools for deploying virtualized application workloads. Applications will be runnable under the Open Virtual Machine (OVF) format, and IT managers and others will be able to run them across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMWare ESX virtual environments.

Lately, we've written quite a bit about virtualization, including Red Hat's entry into the race, and virtual data center strategies.? Today, on our sister site GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham has an interview with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. Crosby was the former CTO of open source virtualization company XenSource (which Citrix acquired). He discusses Xen, Microsoft, VMware, cloud computing, and more. Check it out.

Last week, following a report in VentureBeat, we wrote about the rumor that Microsoft was set to acquire natural language search company Powerset for $100 million. Turns out the rumor was true, although the terms of the deal are not disclosed. Powerset gets its semantic search muscle from the open source, cluster-based technology Hadoop. As we've discussed before, Hadoop also powers much of Yahoo's search. It looks like Microsoft's LiveSearch is going to be embracing powerful open source clustered search. This could represent a new chapter in natural language search. Find more analysis on GigaOm.