OStatic

While the economy is showing only slight signs of recovery, Red Hat continues to turn in stellar financial performance. Yesterday, the company announced its second quarter results, which were quite strong, and this morning Red Hat's stock is up 13 percent. Red Hat's revenues for the quarter were $184 million, a 12 percent increase over last year's comparable quarter. Earnings came in at $28.9 million for the quarter, up from $21.1 million a year earlier.

One of the really notable things about Red Hat's report is that, as has been true for many quarters in a row, all 25 of its biggest accounts renewed, at subscription prices that were 20 percent higher. Red Hat continues to demonstrate that providing support and services for open source software is a winning business model, and that has to give confidence to small startups focused on the same model, including Cloudera and Acquia.

Microsoft is scrambling to counter conclusions made in a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, which suggest that India could save $2 billion if open source software solutions hit 50 percent adoption across its economy in 2010. As a story from New Delhi, running in the Business Standard reports, even if isolated categories of open source software such as server operating systems and antivirus software see broad adoption, the cost savings could be substantial.

Microsoft is firing back with its usual claims about support and other issues representing hidden costs that actually make open source more expensive than its proprietary software. There is an interesting footnote to the war of words, though: Red Hat was the sponsor of the study. Whose numbers are correct?

OpenID is the biggest government boost yet for open source. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a pilot program focused on it.

Red Hat challenges Ubuntu with KVM support. After placing its bets for years on Xen, the company has moved toward official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.

Oracle makes promises to Sun customers, but mum on MySQL. The company has much to say to Sun customers in a front-page ad it placed in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

he Linux kernel version 2.6.31 has been released. Desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support are among the new additions. Check out more from Linus Torvalds.

Kings of open source monitoring. OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring.

Noted blogger and novelist Cory Doctorow has posted a diatribe against cloud computing, in which he says the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free. In a post called Young man yells at cloud, ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn flatly disagrees with him, pointing out that the many headaches and screw-ups that go along with using computers are abstracted in the cloud, managed by others.

Meanwhile, The VAR Guy notes that Red Hat Executive VP Paul Cormier has warned the attendees of Red Hat Summit that Microsoft has its eyes on lock-in--not openness--with its Azure cloud platform. Is the cloud evil?

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.

Will new Skype owners deal differently with open source? There is growing speculation, especially given its deal with Digium, that the new owners of Skype may take a different attitude.

10 interesting Google Chrome OS mock-up designs. Transparent windows and dialog boxes and more make these mock-ups look unlike any other OS.

Red Hat seeks respect for JBoss and ecosystem. The company has made a slew of announcements at Red Hat Summit.

Parallels Desktop 4 for Windows and Linux released. It lets you run any combination of Windows and Linux OSs concurrently, and is reportedly much faster than previous versions.

Sharp to introduce new mobile Internet tool. It's a netbook-like device that doubles as an e-book and runs Linux.