OStatic

For years, you could tell the hottest open-source projects by the number of programmers on an e-mail list, or by the number of books published. Increasingly, though, the hottest projects are those around whom service-oriented businesses are being formed. Yesterday, Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard received a $15 million series B round from NEA, Amazon, and Benchmark. This follows an earlier $3.5 million round in January of this year.

As Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference kicks off this week, along with its CommunityOne open source conference, Sun and the OpenSolaris community have jointly announced the availability of the OpenSolaris operating system. It's a fully open source open, community-driven operating system, based on Sun's Solaris kernel. You can download it free now. There is more news out of Sun today, too, including a hookup between Amazon and the OpenSolaris community, focused on cloud computing applications. Can this OS compete with Linux rivals?

Last week Amazon announced a new web service called FWS (Fulfillment Web Service). FWS is an add-on to Amazon?s existing fulfillment system which allows any developer to interface directly with Amazon?s inventory management system using open APIs. This service allows you to programmatically print shipping labels for your inventory which you then send to Amazon. They store it until your app issues a shipment request at which point your web service call causes some human (or perhaps a robot) to pick and pack your product and then ship it out to your customer.

Amazon turned quite a few heads when it announced that it would be entering the music download business by selling MP3s unencumbered by Digital Rights Management (DRM). Now Amazon is raising the stakes even further by offering its download client for Linux, in addition to the existing Mac OS X and Windows clients.

By dint of its openness and multiple platform support, users should really be looking to Amazon -- rather than Apple -- for their digital music needs.