OStatic

On the heels of our prediction, open source Java is quickly heading into Linux distros. Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat have announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support Server and Desktop editions.....Microsoft is using open source to extend systems management to Linux.....Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, discusses his company's move to 100 percent open source software development.....Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth weighs in on MicroHoo.....

The big tech conference this week is Web 2.0, going on now in San Francisco. There is a lot of meaningful news coming out of the conference, much of it directly impacting open source and some of it peripherally impacting it. Bungee Labs is looking to open source to expand its hosting options, Microsoft's Live Mesh announcement is getting lots of attention, Forrester Research is predicting big things for Web 2.0 technologies, and more.

We've rounded up the news here, and we'll keep it coming from the conference this week.

eWeek has a good interview with Ubuntu guru and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, who claims Microsoft is fracturing the open source community.....

Asus' Eee PC is the most popular laptop featuring an open source OS. The company will share its development experience at the Taiwan Open Source Summit.....

Microsoft and Novell are expanding their open source initiatives into China.....

The head of Sun Microsystems' database division says MySQL will remain an open source product.....

Microsoft's Sam Ramji, previously the director of the company's open source lab, has been promoted and will now be running the company's worldwide open source and Linux team. Ramji is respected by many in the OSS community for introducing more openness at Microsoft.....ZDNet has an amusing piece on The Open Source Commandments.....Could an open source mashup help national health agencies and governments interoperate for better healthcare? A specialist is on the case.....To what extent does Al Jazeera depend on open source?.....

On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the company?s MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlook?s stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.