OStatic

Launchpad, the open source hosting site sponsored by Canonical (who are, of course, the folks driving Ubuntu Linux) has announced their 2.0 relaunch. The new version of the site offers several big improvements over the old one, and points a way for other sites to follow. But is it the right place for you to host your next project? Here's a rundown on the new features to help you decide.

The Open Solutions Alliance (which you might recall as one of the sponsors of the Open Source Census) has released the results of a survey it did recently looking at business trends in commercial open source. The results paint a picture of an industry segment doing well, with a few challenges looming but easy continued growth.

Web development and design agency water&stone has released a thorougly-researched report on Open Source CMS Market Share. By looking at a wide variety of internet metrics, they try to identify the leading and up-and-coming open source software for content management systems. While the data is interesting itself, and useful if you're looking to implement a CMS backed by a vibrant open source community, there are also some wider lessons for developers here.

Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP) has been somewhat controversial, which is probably not what the company intended. The OSP is basically a we won't sue you promise to developers who implement software based on any of a variety of Microsoft specifications. Due to longstanding distrust or specific legal issues, some open source developers have viewed the OSP as a threat rather than a promise. As OSCON today, Microsoft tried to lay some of those fears to rest, and also extended the reach of the OSP.

Microsoft's IronRuby project is an interesting anomaly in the software world. On the one hand, it's a bona fide open source project aimed at a compliant implementation of Ruby, one of the most popular dynamic languages for open source projects. On the other hand, it's a product of Microsoft - who many still regard as an implacable foe of open source. At OSCON this week, the IronRuby team made a group of announcements that confirm their intent to be full members of the community, despite their corporate home.

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

The news came today from the Software Freedom Law Center that they've filed another suit to enforce the GPL on behalf of the developers of BusyBox. This time the company in the sights is Extreme Networks, manufacturers of various switches and other products. Will we finally get our test of the GPL in a US court?

The enterprise collboaration and content management space is a crowded one. Depending on what you want to empower your workers to do, you can look at anything from basic wikis to Microsoft SharePoint to Atlassian's Confluence - to name just a few of the choices. Cyn.in, which until recently had focused on a SAAS approach to providing this functionality, has recently launched its version 2.0 - and now it's available as open source as well.

A recent blog entry by Michael Arrington has stirred up some discussion around the web. Basically, it's a plea that someone design and build a $200 open-source web tablet: minimal specs, Linux, booting right into Firefox, that you can just pick up and use to browse the web with.

Is the availability and usefulness of open source support lagging behind its desirability? That's one of the messages that it's possible to get from a new survey conducted by OpenLogic, a company that specializes in selling enterprise-level open source software support. (We've looked at some other information from their open source experts in the past.)