OStatic

Last week, we covered the news of a new $6 million round of venture capital funding for Boxee which is behind the very popular Boxee open source media center application. Open source applications for managing videos, music, television content, movies and the like have been maturing, and the VC community is definitely waking up to Boxee's potential. The company's latest round of funding was led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Now VideoNuze has a very interesting interview with Boxee investors Bijan Sabet and Neil Sequeira.?

As news and analysis about the future of MySQL under Oracle made the rounds this week, the annual MySQL Conference and Expo also took place in Silicon Valley. New versions of MySQL arrived and were announced, and we asked Karen Tegan Padir, Sun's VP of MySQL and Software Infrastructure, several questions about where MySQL and open source are headed. While Oracle's plans may be different from Sun's, and the acquisition wasn't up for discussion, Karen shed some light on what's important in the new versions, and how Sun wants to keep MySQL's direction simple.

Launched in 2005, Alfresco Software provides a leading open source enterprise content management (ECM) system, known for its modularity and scalability. The company was founded by John Newton, co-founder of document management company Documentum, and John Powell, who was the former COO of Business Objects. Alfresco has achieved remarkable growth as a commercial open source firm, has many partners, employs roughly 110 people, and is a member of the Open Source Channel Alliance. John Newton, CTO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Alfresco, was kind enough to take some questions from us on Alfresco's software, its strategy? as a commercial open source company, and the state and future of open source. Here are his thoughts, below the fold.

Everyone here at OStatic is very honored to be recognized by PC Magazine (now exclusively on the web as PCMag.com) as one of its editors' choices of Top 100 Blogs in its annual roundup. Our sister blogs WebWorkerDaily and NewTeeVee were also named, and congratulations to their excellent editorial teams. Blogs depend more heavily on participation from the reader community than many other kinds of publishing entities, and we want to extend our most sincere thanks to the readers of OStatic for reading, participating, and even correcting us when needed. OStatic will deliver several new and exciting kinds of editorial content in 2009. Please stay tuned! PC Magazine's writeup follows, below the fold.

Hello, and welcome to OStatic, where we are ecstatic about open source! I'm Sam Dean, and I'm the editor of the OStatic blog. We are very glad you're here.

OStatic's mission is to be the most comprehensive web destination for information and insight on open source software and services. This blog features a team of writers who have been using and writing about open source tools for years. You'll find them to be especially good at guiding you to the very best applications.