OStatic

Google has given Oregon State University's Open Source Lab $300,000, following a previous gift the company gave of $450,000. The gifts have come under the wing of the Campaign for OSU--an effort to raise funds for the university's research and other projects. Can companies like Google and Microsoft benefit themselves from this kind of gift-giving?

Although several open source virtualization applications exist, and some proprietary players are taking a bruising, it's still common for businesses deploying virtualization to face vendor lock-down and inability to move their application workloads between environments. However, Citrix, which owns XenSource and is behind the Xen project, has just announced a novel spin on the problem, to arrive as a preview in September. Project Kensho will distribute open tools for deploying virtualized application workloads. Applications will be runnable under the Open Virtual Machine (OVF) format, and IT managers and others will be able to run them across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMWare ESX virtual environments.

Lately, we've written quite a bit about virtualization, including Red Hat's entry into the race, and virtual data center strategies.? Today, on our sister site GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham has an interview with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. Crosby was the former CTO of open source virtualization company XenSource (which Citrix acquired). He discusses Xen, Microsoft, VMware, cloud computing, and more. Check it out.

Last week, following a report in VentureBeat, we wrote about the rumor that Microsoft was set to acquire natural language search company Powerset for $100 million. Turns out the rumor was true, although the terms of the deal are not disclosed. Powerset gets its semantic search muscle from the open source, cluster-based technology Hadoop. As we've discussed before, Hadoop also powers much of Yahoo's search. It looks like Microsoft's LiveSearch is going to be embracing powerful open source clustered search. This could represent a new chapter in natural language search. Find more analysis on GigaOm.

While it's still only a rumor, VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset for over $100 million--apparently to be announced next month. Powerset's search technology uses the open source cluster-based technology Hadoop, which provides fast answers to queries by using the resources of many computers. We wrote about both Hadoop and Powerset here, and got to hear from Powerset's Chad Walters. Based on what I saw Chad demonstrate, and Microsoft's need to catch up in search, I won't be surprised if this rumor is true.

There's no stopping the virtualization race. Microsoft has just released to manufacturing WIndows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The Release Candidate of its? virtualization application is found here.? Hyper-V is hypervisor-based virtualization software that allows you to run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux, on one installation of Windows Server.

As we reported this week, European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes recently took a very tough stance in calling for governments throughout Europe to use open source software and adopt open standards. Kroes is the European Union's top antitrust official, and her comments were largely interpreted as a jab at Microsoft. (The EU has recently levied the largest fines in its history against the Redmond giant.) Now, the ODF Alliance--the organization that backs Open Document Format--is applauding Kroes' comments. The ODF Alliance's position isn't exactly a surprise, but it's another step in what is becoming a coordinated march.