OStatic

Many online news sources continue to be completely dominated by discussion of Microsoft's hostile bid to acquire Yahoo! And no wonder: a deal of this magnitude has the potential to touch the lives of pretty much everyone living and working online. It's a rare web worker indeed who doesn't use something from one or another of those two companies in their daily lives.

While nearly all of the analysis of Microsoft's offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion has centered on the Redmond giant's intent to compete with Google for online advertising dollars, swallowing Yahoo! would also plant Microsoft squarely in the middle of the open source software arena. Yahoo! is so firmly entrenched in open source software-from the server farms that its own site runs on, to its Zimbra division delivering open source apps, to the APIs that it offers to application developers-that Microsoft, as corporate parent, would have no choice but to shed much of its long-standing antipathy toward open source.

Over the past few years, the set-top box industry has been nothing short of a disaster. In addition to Digeo, makers of the Moxi DMR, cutting its workforce in half and ditching most of its products, TiVo - the world's most popular DVR company - lost almost $48 million last year, easily eclipsing the company's $34 million loss in 2006.

Dell begins bundling Fonalityﾒs open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market ﾗ this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

Om reported yesterday that Automattic, which makes the blogging platform WordPress (which we use), just raised $29.5 million in a B-round of venture funding. It is a big deal for the blogging industry ﾗ one investor is The New York Times, just the latest warning flare over the bow of old media. (True Ventures, an Automattic investor, has also funded GigaOM.)

Chris Lyman, the founder of the VoIP startup, Fonality, blogs under the moniker Janitorﾗ which he prefers to his other title: CEO.

Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed an open, collaborative video experiment, will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages.

In a move designed to make MySQL enterprise friendly, give prospective IT hardware buyers more reasons to consider Sun and further fuel Microsoft's Open Source heartburn, Sun announced today it is acquiring MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and debt.