OStatic

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says he doesn't get the point of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. After expressing surprise and saying he doesn't understand the deal on Monday, he's now more specific: I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company, Reuters reports him saying while speaking to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. We don't want to buy any hardware companies.

Isn't it a bit reductionist to call Sun a hardware company? Sun has a huge portfolio of compelling software, not the least of which is MySQL. On that front, IBM is also revealing how it will counter Oracle and MySQL in the database wars.

Maybe it's not a completely counterintuitive concept that giving away a service can yield new business relationships and profits, but undoubtedly, actually doing so is still a leap of faith. It was a chance that Open-Xchange felt was worth taking when it announced it would be giving away its webmail module to qualifying telecom, non-profit, and educational organizations. Almost three months later, Open-Xchange is seeing that giving a little bit can bring good returns.

Open-Xchange's ongoing Webmail4Free promotion offers a free (in speech and cost) webmail module in exchange for marketing the company's open source groupware and mobility modules to the qualifying organization's users and signing a support agreement. The agreement terms vary depending on the organization's size and scope.

It's working out for Open-Xchange, which is reporting a rosier Q1 than expected, and has seen a number of new partnerships and customers thanks to the promotion.

Though the use of open source software in federal health care programs is being considered far more seriously than it has been in the past, ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn reminds us that landing a government contract requires more than the sympathetic ears of legislators and administrators.

So far, Blankenhorn explains, Obama has committed to creating interoperability between health records kept by the military and Veterans Administration, but not to a completely open (in terms of code, or standards) health information technology platform. The Obama Administration seems willing to investigate open source solutions, but government contracting procedures could be a major roadblock to adopting an open platform. The open alternatives could be out-lawyered, out-lobbied, and minimized by an army of salesmen.

Richard Stallman explains why software patents are wrong. Check out the video.

Highlights from Google's Summer of Code. Over 1,000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations.

Aaron Seigo talks about KDE's past and future. He heads the German non-profit that handles the project's financial and legal affairs.

Hackfests, fundraising and the economy. Stormy Peters, who directs the GNOME foundation, weighs in on what can be done to preserve hackfests in a poor funding environment.

Making the switch to OpenOffice. Here's how easy it is to break free of Microsoft Office and take advantage of top open source productivity apps.

Red Hat commissioned a study released today that takes a fascinating look at which countries use the most open source software. The usual suspects -- the U.S., UK, and China -- made the top of the list and Africa brings a decent show of support to the table, no doubt due, in part, to the efforts of the One Laptop Per Child program. The interactive Open Source Environment Map Red Hat created to display the results is a terrific visual representation of where FOSS is found, and where the community needs to step up its efforts toward the goal of worldwide FOSS adoption.