OStatic

Theory of competition fails in open source, elshewhere. Markets tend to crystallize around a few dominant players.

Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision. Florian Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, says the delay is good.

Droid could bring Motorola back from dead. The Android-based smartphone could revive the company.

Nokia N900: First look. What the Maemo-based phone/tablet is like from the perspective of a Linux geek.

Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over who's open source? It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or any other moniker, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in A Remarkable Reversal - his critique of Richard Stallman's joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.

For the first time, there seems to be a growing concensus that an OSI-compliant license alone is not enough to define one's position on the openness spectrum. As Phipps notes, community governance, trademark and copyright ownership and administration, the percentage of core function in the commons... need to be taken together to get the full view.

Eucalyptus cloud platform updated. It now features multi-cluster support and enhanced concurrency management for improved scaling on almost any infrastructure.

Linux to own 32 percent of the netbook market? ABI Research predicts that Linux will get there, particularly because of sales in less developed countries.

What would make you trust Microsoft? Without the competition of open source, would Microsoft?s trend toward bureaucracy have ever been slowed?

Amazon's move mocks EU's fear of Oracle. Oracle hasn't even started with MySQL yet, and it already faces significant competition from forks like Amazon's.

Why Funambol acquired Zapatec. Fabrizio Capobianco explains how the move extends Funambol's mobile tech strategy.

In a recent post called Another Day, Another Reason to Fret Over MySQL's Fate, I noted that the European Commission's drawn out review of Oracle's proposed Sun Microsystems merger is doing a disservice to Sun, MySQL, MySQL users and open source in general. That post also mentioned the fact that Oracle has been very mum about its intent for MySQL--and that intent is what the European Commission is focused on as it delays or possibly seeks to obstruct the merger. This is the sum total of what Oracle has had to say publicly about MySQL: MySQL will be an addition to Oracle's existing suite of database products. Wow, very informative.

Now, ZDNet and Barron's are reporting that Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison has a little more to say about the delay of the merger. He's not happy, and rightfully so.

Q&A: Visa dips a toe into the Hadoop pool. The company's head of technology strategy weighs in on how it is using Hadoop's powerful data crunching capabilities.

London Stock Exchange platform acquisition ignites open source war of words. Its Microsoft-based tech infrastructure is being replaced by open source tools.

How GNOME and KDE spend their money. Here's a comparison of their quarterly reports.

Does Oracle matter to open source? Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects that people use every day.

BonitaSoft gets funding. The provider of open source Business Process Management (BPM) software announced a first round of funding of $3 million from Ventech and Auriga Partners.

Users nervous about Oracle's acquisition of MySQL. Concerns also linger over the fate of other Sun technologies such as Solaris and Java.

Eucalyptus CTO discusses open source clouds. He discusses Eucalyptus' first commercial product--an open source private cloud platform that supports Amazon AWS APIs and leverages VMware.

Alpha 680 Android netbook review. One of the first Android netbooks has some rough edges, but shows promise.

Mozilla prepares for SeaMonkey 2.0 release. THe second beta of its Internet app suite arrives, final version coming next month.

Linux webserver botnet pushes malware. A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet.

Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.