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Interview: Sam Ramji says open source is burgeoning at Microsoft.....

MySQL thoughts from the head of Sun's database group.....

VirtualBox 2.1 adds support for hardware virtualization on Mac OS X.....

JumpBox: Open source meets SaaS (software as a service).....

Mozilla delivers alpha 2 of the Fennec mobile browser. Try it on a desktop Windows, Mac or Linux system.....

Is the Samsung G2 Android phone coming up?.....

It shouldn't surprise anyone to find that the number of books about the Ruby language, and about Web development using Ruby on Rails, has soared over the last year. Many books tell you how to write Rails applications, but very few tell you how to put them into production. Deploying Rails Applications, published recently by the Pragmatic Programmers, does try to answer these questions, and does so quite well, introducing a variety of programs and techniques that can make the difference between a painful deployment and a pain-free one.

There are many benefits to using open source software for web applications: rapid development cycles, leading functionality in many market segments, and of course the price. But actually deploying those applications can be a huge, daunting nuisance. The WordPress installation instructions, for example, may brag of taking only five minutes - but that presumes you are already running MySQL and PHP and a web server and are comfortable configuring them.

On the heels of the launch and funding of open source cloud computing player Eucalyptus Systems, the company has now announced its first commercial product. The Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware'VSphere virtualization platform, and ESX hypervisor.

VSphere is VMware's cloud operating system. Not only will Eucalyptus' EEE solution allow on-premise Eucalyptus clouds on VMware's platform, but it also supports other hypervisors, including Xen and KVM. With EEE, users can leverage all of these environments, and additonally develop applications compatible with Amazon's EC2.

Analysts and observers are still digesting the recent news of VMware's acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million, and I continue to find interesting perspectives cropping up. As we discussed here, the move has the potential to put the squeeze on Red Hat, especially in the application server and enterprise software development markets. It also gives VMware a lot more credibility with developers, because SpringSource's Spring Framework is a popular enterprise Java programming environment, it maintains the Apache Tomcat Java app server project, and more. It also gives VMware a strong presence in the open source arena, when it has been seriously threatened by open source virtualization offerings.

This week, though, Todd Weiss, writing on Linux.com, discussed how many analysts see the move as allowing VMware to tie virtualization directly to applications without requiring a separate operating system. Could VMware have its eye on the fast-growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) arena, aiming to deliver virtualized apps that users and IT administrators can hop in and out of without a tie to a parent OS??

As everyone digests the big news that VMware intends to buy SpringSource for $420 million--its biggest acquisition ever--I'm inclined to think that the move primarily represents a dedicated step from VMware away from just being a virtualization player. As we've discussed before,?VMware has been tightly squeezed by competition from open source and free, bundled virtualization software offerings. Its relatively new CEO Paul Maritz (who was a long time Microsoft executive), knows what it is for proprietary platforms to face free, open source competition, and SpringSource can help VMware compete very directly with Red Hat, particularly in the application server market.

Still, along with Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the move from VMware provides yet another example of a smaller company that has retained a strong focus on open source being acquired by a much larger, proprietary competitor. Just before last year ended, we predicted?that open source mergers and acquisitions would increase dramatically this year, but who would have thought that we would see such huge acquisitions? What are the implications for VMware, Red Hat, and open source?

In a move that marks a notable shift for Microsoft, the company has announced that it has released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code includes three Linux device drivers, and has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, company officials said in a statement.

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's open source czar, commented on the move in an interview posted on Microsoft's site. Today?s release would have been unheard of from Microsoft a few years ago, he said but it?s a prime example that customer demand is a powerful catalyst for change. It's a smart, long overdue play from the company.