OStatic

While Novell's report yesterday that its quarterly Linux revenue soared 22 percent year-over-year was a positive note, and one that was expected, the real upshot of the company's earnings report was that every other part of its business sank. Overall, its revenues slipped to $216 million for the quarter, compared to $245 million for the comparable quarter last year. Despite the company's drum pounding about the promise and growth of its Linux business, Novell is a public company that needs revenues to come from more than one aspect of its business.?

As Matt Asay notes, Red Hat's financial performance has been much rosier during the recession, but there are also questions arising about why Red Hat's revenue growth is slowing. Both companies need more than just Linux business to grow over the long run, and there are good reasons to believe that Red Hat may be the one of the two that pulls a rabbit--or a series of them--out of its red hat.?

New consortium to define software quality. CISQ will standardize metrics and license software quality evaluation service providers.

Little can save Google and Nokia from mobile failure. Are they disruptive enough to beat Apple in smartphones?

Red Hat spins JBoss 2.x off As HornetQ. It's a project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, very high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system.

Openshot: A new Linux video editor. A developer preview is available now, version 0.9.22.

Nvidia pushes out new Linux driver updates. For those sticking with the official driver releases there is the 185.18.36 release, while for those willing to try a beta driver there is the 190.25 build.

Today, the Linux Foundation released its updated study of mainline kernel development. The report examines the slight variations in release frequency, the lines of code submitted, deleted and modified since the April 2008 study, new trends in subsystem patch signoff, and the remarkable diversity (and, perhaps, adversity outside the realm of kernel development) of the companies contributing to the kernel.

While the study is obviously pertinent to those working in kernel development, it covers so many aspects of the development process that everyone working with open source software -- developers, community managers, and even non-IT managerial roles -- can find something directly related to their positions.

It's also (perhaps surprisingly) engaging reading for those interested in the Linux kernel but a little foggy on how the kernel relates to the rest of the operating environment or how changes are approved and applied to the kernel tree.

We've reported?a number of times before?on Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of the open source Drupal?content management system. OStatic runs on Drupal, and Drupal version 6 is expected to soon run over 240,000 web sites,? with many large media companies switching to it.

In a post just yesterday,?we discussed the proven business model of support and services for open source software that Red Hat has built, and how Acquia, Cloudera, Eucalyptus Systems, and other commercial open source companies are pursuing the same model. Until now, though, even though the company has gotten healthy venture capital funding, it hasn't been easy to tell how privately held Acquia is doing. Here are some new details.

As everyone digests the big news that VMware intends to buy SpringSource for $420 million--its biggest acquisition ever--I'm inclined to think that the move primarily represents a dedicated step from VMware away from just being a virtualization player. As we've discussed before,?VMware has been tightly squeezed by competition from open source and free, bundled virtualization software offerings. Its relatively new CEO Paul Maritz (who was a long time Microsoft executive), knows what it is for proprietary platforms to face free, open source competition, and SpringSource can help VMware compete very directly with Red Hat, particularly in the application server market.

Still, along with Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the move from VMware provides yet another example of a smaller company that has retained a strong focus on open source being acquired by a much larger, proprietary competitor. Just before last year ended, we predicted?that open source mergers and acquisitions would increase dramatically this year, but who would have thought that we would see such huge acquisitions? What are the implications for VMware, Red Hat, and open source?

Recently I got to talking open source with a friend of mine who has worked in the proprietary database market, especially at Sybase, for several years. He made a few interesting observations during the conversation. For example, we talked about open source competition in databases, and he said a few good things about MySQL, but also said that the proprietary databases often outdo MySQL based on just a few small features, and also commitment to legacy systems that many companies have. His take on what Oracle might do with MySQL is that it might treat it as an open source on-ramp to its own proprietary databases, but that Oracle will have to keep MySQL like WordPad --Microsoft's text editing application, which falls far short of the features found in Microsoft Word.

When we got down to discussing business models for successful commercial open source companies, my friend especially liked the Red Hat model of providing support and services for free software, which has provided the company with substantial financial success, and also consistency. There are quite a few companies following the Red Hat model, and there are also signs appearing that that model will end up immeasurably improving important open source software applications and platforms--not just business bottom lines.