OStatic

On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the companyﾒs MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlookﾒs stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.

With the economy as volatile as it has been, there has been a good deal of speculation (both positive and downright pessimistic) about how open source companies will negotiate the ups and downs to come.

Today, Open-Xchange must be feeling quite optimistic, as it announced it's just closed a round of venture funding totaling $9 million and has four times the number of paid mailboxes now than it did last year. The company is focusing on a decidedly rosy looking future.

Earlier, Lisa talked about Funambol's addition of non-intrusive advertisements to their myFUNAMBOL portal, at least for a few phone models.Being the somewhat reluctant owner of a new Blackberry, and a Linux user, I had heard of Funambol. I knew it was open source software, and I knew that Funambol was one of a few applications that had reasonable success syncing BlackberryOS, and a few other platforms, with Linux.

MyFUNAMBOL portal has a few hiccups to iron out (it is still in beta), but it seems to be truly useful. The operating system used on the desktop could become a non-issue for most.

Eucalyptus cloud platform updated. It now features multi-cluster support and enhanced concurrency management for improved scaling on almost any infrastructure.

Linux to own 32 percent of the netbook market? ABI Research predicts that Linux will get there, particularly because of sales in less developed countries.

What would make you trust Microsoft? Without the competition of open source, would Microsoft?s trend toward bureaucracy have ever been slowed?

Amazon's move mocks EU's fear of Oracle. Oracle hasn't even started with MySQL yet, and it already faces significant competition from forks like Amazon's.

Why Funambol acquired Zapatec. Fabrizio Capobianco explains how the move extends Funambol's mobile tech strategy.

This week, the European Commission announced its preliminary satisfaction with a settlement offer proposed by Microsoft that would end an antitrust battle that has been simmering for over 10 years. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith posted a response that said: We welcome today?s announcement by the European Commission to move forward with formal market testing of Microsoft?s proposal relating to web browser choice in Europe. We also welcome the opportunity to take the next step in the process regarding our proposal to promote interoperability with a broad range of our products.?

As Smith alludes to, a big part of the proposed settlement has to do with Microsoft including a browser ballot window in Internet Explorer that lists a broad array of browsers and allows users to choose which one to use. Opponents of that proposal, including Mozilla and Opera, have criticized the fact that the ballot screen is found within Internet Explorer, which is still bundled with Windows, and the fact that any alternative browser must be downloaded, which many users will be too lazy to do. So why are Mozilla and Opera being so reticent in the wake of the European announcement?

Is Moblin, the open source mobile operating system initially launched by Intel and now overseen by the Linux Foundation, a potential thorn in Microsoft's side? It seems from Microsoft's own stance toward the early stage netbook- and smartphone-focused OS, that it is not. There are also reports that Microsoft may in fact favor Moblin among Linux-based operating systems aimed at computers that Windows might otherwise run on.

Last week, at the Intel Developer Forum conference, Microsoft's Silverlight team demonstrated the Silverlight 3 web application framework running on both Windows 7 and Moblin Atom chip-based devices.? The announcement from the Silverlight team was very ecumenical, describing the Novell-sponsored open source Moonlight implementation of Silverlight as aimed at the broad range of Linux platforms, while Silverlight 3 will be especially adept at running on Moblin. What is Microsoft's real stance toward Moblin?