OStatic

In a series of recent posts, our own John Mark Walker has been discussing the viability of open source business models and what the term open core really means to the FOSS community. He makes several great points and calls out the increasingly common practice of companies turning open source efforts into a viral marketing play, when it can be so much more.

Given the competitive nature of business, it's probably too much to ask the commercial software development industry to be self-policing and put an end to calling a product open source simply because it uses an OSI-approved license. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, thinks it's time to hold vendors' feet to the fire and make them prove themselves to be true supporters of the open source community. He has a plan.

When it comes to getting a good turnout at a FOSS event, half the battle is getting yourself noticed above behemoth get-togethers like OSCON and SCALE. Sponsors like O'Reilly and IBM have little trouble getting press about their upcoming events but LUGs and regional conferences have a tougher time.

The team at the Peer-Directed Projects Center (best known for its work running the freenode IRC network) feels your pain. They've launched a new site called fossevents.org to help smaller events keep from getting lost in the din, and prevent I-wish-I'd-known-about-this-sooner syndrome in community members who find out about local conferences a little too late to attend.

Open source network management system Zenoss has released Zenoss version 2.4. It sports a number of new features, refreshed documentation, and more than 400 bugfixes to improve overall stability. In addition to the system's core monitoring capabilities, the Zenoss community has created over 70 plugins called ZenPacks that provide additional functionality, statistics, and data.

Late last year, open source network and systems management software vendor GroundWork offered an early look at Groundwork Monitor 5.3 and requested feedback from the community. Now the official update has been released and it contains a number of enhancements, including an increase in the number of devices that can be managed by a single subscription -- all without an addtional price increase.

Open source business intelligence (BI) company Jaspersoft and application performance monitoring software vendor Hyperic announced today a deepening of their ongoing relationship. JasperServer Professional Edition will be embedded in the new Hyperic Operations IQ to give IT teams an in-depth look at metrics and service levels.

Before dismissing the news as just another corporate partnership, consider that these kinds of match-ups are the very thing software vendors are likely to begin offering as companies get more serious about monitoring the bottom line.

If you've hung on to your BlackBerry smartphone in the hopes that you'll one day see an open source version of it's code, you're in for a long wait.

Speaking at the BlackBerry Developer Conference hosted by Research In Motion (RIM), RIM Senior Software Developer Cassidy Gentle said, I would expect some of our Eclipse or Mobile Tools for Java could be made available on an open source basis, but as for our APIs or other softwareﾗthat's a pretty big leap.

Aduim is a free, open source instant messaging (IM) application created especially for the Mac OS X operating system. Unlike IM tools like AOL Instant Messenger or GoogleTalk, Adium can be used to connect to several different messaging services at once. Adium?s easy installation, robust features, and outstanding community support make it a must-have in every Mac user?s toolbox.