OStatic

I can safely say when I covered the speculation that IBM and Sun were wrapping up the finer points of the acquisition Friday, I figured that if there was anything left to say come Monday, it would deal with idiosyncracies of the agreed-upon terms. Even though the announcement is imminent reports were not officially sanctioned by IBM or Sun, there was no reason to believe the sources were dishonest about the information they gave. It still doesn't seem there was dishonesty, or that these sources made wildly off-base assumptions about what was to come. It seemed as though IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems was set to proceed, until late Saturday evening, when IBM and Sun broke off negotiations, according to Bloomberg.

There had been much debate about how an IBM acquisition would affect Sun's open source efforts. As those questions move even further into the hypothetical realm, far more troubling questions loom about Sun's next potential buyer -- or its choice to weather the storm on its own.

Startups Funambol and Laszlo Systems have announced that Funambol's open source mobile messaging software will integrate with Laszlo's web-based communications suite, including e-mail, contacts, and calendar.....

Sun Microsystems is promising regular updates to its new OpenSolaris operating system, and costs for support are expected this week.....

Powerset, a contextual, semantic search engine that relies on open source Hadoop cluster technology for processing, has launched new search services.....

Digium's CEO discusses his company's open source balancing act in the VoIP arena.....

As Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference kicks off this week, along with its CommunityOne open source conference, Sun and the OpenSolaris community have jointly announced the availability of the OpenSolaris operating system. It's a fully open source open, community-driven operating system, based on Sun's Solaris kernel. You can download it free now. There is more news out of Sun today, too, including a hookup between Amazon and the OpenSolaris community, focused on cloud computing applications. Can this OS compete with Linux rivals?