OStatic

Infobright announced last week that a version of its data warehouse product is now being released under an open-source license (the GNU General Public License, version 2). Infobright also announced that it had raised a $10 million round of venture capital funding, and that one of the investors is Sun Microsystems.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating free Unix.

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

The latest means to create desktop-style Web applications using JavaScript was announced last week, and has created quite a flurry of excitement. Cappuccino, an open-source application framework, was released by the programmers at 280 North, a Web startup that has been using Cappuccino in its own development. Cappuccino, as the FAQ states, is released under the Lesser GNU Public License. This license ensures that while the Cappuccino framework itself will remain open source, applications written using it may be released under any license, without restrictions.

Red Hat, along with the City University of New York and Intel, announced yesterday that they are creating the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab. This lab, which will be headquartered at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development in Manhattan, is aimed at helping local and state government agencies in New York take advantage of open-source solutions. The lab will provide governments with the ability to develop and test a variety of open-source technologies running on Intel chips.

Database company Continuent announced the availability of its Tungsten stack earlier today. These programs are meant to improve the replication capabilities of the open-source MySQL database, with an eye toward other database products in the near future. Tungsten is apparently written in Java, allowing it to run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh.

For most people, the most important part of a software license is the end. That's because they're totally uninterested in the license itself; they are merely interested in scrolling past it, so that they can click on OK and install the software that they are running. For users of open-source software, however, licenses should be extremely important, because they determine what you may and may not do with a particular program. Open-source developers have long debated the merits of the GNU General Public License vs. the BSD License. As open-source software becomes mainstream, and is integrated into larger systems, these age-old arguments are less theoretical than ever, and should be understood not only by developers, but also by managers and executives of organizations working with open source. Van Lindberg's new book is an excellent place to start.