OStatic

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.

Why is OOXML a bad standard? What does it mean for open source developers? And what, if anything, can menbers of the open source community do, now that OOXML has been adopted by the ISO?

Is the open source community too clubbish for its own good? Several thought pieces I?ve seen recently got me to thinking that this might be the case, at least in terms of relevance to businesses. Dominic Sartorio makes a good case that open sourcers are increasingly balkanizing, instead of pursuing multilateral approaches that could increase adoption and help the growth of commercial open source efforts. Meanwhile, recent comments from Obsidian Systems? director Anton de Wet suggest that open source needs a whole new breed of business matchmakers to speed adoption from reluctant companies. Is the whole business outreach program in need of an overhaul?

Last week Novell released version 1.9 of the Mono open source .NET framework as well as a new IDE called Monodevelop. The newest version of Mono now supports a number of the advanced features found in Microsoft?s .NET 3.0 framework.

While Mono and Novell, which sponsors the project, have been much maligned by various factions within the open source community, the overall impact Mono could have on Microsoft and the open source community could in fact be large.