OStatic

This post from ZDNet and this one from Matt Asay provide some good angles on the momentous changes we've seen on the open source front this week. The fallout and immense industry changes that we're likely to see as Oracle digests Sun Microsystems are staggering to consider. As Dana Blankenhorn says, Oracle is going to control three crown jewels of open source in the form of Java, OpenOffice, and MySQL--among the most widely used projects and among those with the largest developer communities outside Linux itself. Meanwhile Matt points out that only Red Hat is thriving as a public, pure open source company, which I would agree with. So what has Red Hat done right?

As Kristin noted earlier, this week, Red Hat and IT services distribution provider SYNNEX announced the formation of the Open Source Channel Alliance. The alliance is squarely aimed at taking federated and logically connected collections of top open source applications and platforms straight to resellers. I think Matt Asay gets it right when he refers to the move as pulling a Microsoft, in terms of aiming to leverage the sales channel. I suspect that all of the commercial open source players involved with the alliance will be well served by the arrangement, and, as The Var Guy notes, the alliance begs the question of how Novell and Canonical are going to react.?

One of the first announcements rolling out of the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco this morning is the Linux Foundation's addition of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) to its Linux Developer Network. The Foundation plans to provide an interface to the OBS via the LDN site to aid developers wishing to package their projects for all of the major Linux distributions.

This is a significant step forward for the OBS, the development community, and, ultimately, Linux users of all walks of life, using just about any distribution on nearly every chip architecture.

For the past few weeks, off and on, I've heard some low-level, excited buzzing about iFolder. What is it? Think of it as an open source Dropbox service that lives on your servers under your jurisdiction, with a few added perks.

iFolder isn't new, per se, but it hasn't seen an updated source code release since 2007. Late last week, Novell, which sponsors the iFolder project, announced that iFolder 3.7.2 client and server packages -- as well as source code -- were available for download. The new release runs on Mac, Windows (including Vista) and Linux 32- and 64- bit environments. The push is now on to keep iFolder a very community-driven initiative.