It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction's supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money.

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment. That is the finding of the Standish Group, which after five years of research on open source has delivered a $1,000 report called 'Trends in Open Source,' a study that finds that FOSS is now costing software vendors $60 billion a year in annual revenues, and it's still only 6% of the global spend.

Is software development a science or an art? The software industry treats it as a science. It uses processes like MRDs, PRDs, and functional specs to convert customer needs into software that solves their problems. Various roles like product managers, engineering managers, project managers, architects, and programmers work together to drive the process like an efficient machine.

With only two weeks to go now before JavaOne, its annual Javaganza for developers, Sun has revealed that Java is at long last to be made 100% open source. 'We're trying to get Java into places it's never been before,' Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, told an interviewer on Tuesday.

rPath announced a technology partnership enabling application providers to use rPath's rBuilder to create virtual appliances using the rPath Appliance Platform and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. The agreement promises to reduce complexity and costs of application distribution and deployment, while maintaining the strategic value of investments in application certification. The Novell-rPath collaboration marks an industry milestone, enabling customers to utilize an open-source operating system with a virtual appliance lifecycle management platform.

Just as we have become dependent on oil as an energy resource, we have also become dependent on a single vendor solution for saving our digital history - in the form of our word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. Last year, it was estimated that more than 90 percent of the office productivity suite market was controlled by one vendor, and, historically, because of this dominance, consumers, businesses small and large, and governments have been left with few viable options.

In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will not be supported by Microsoft. In today's corporate world that is a death nail for most companies.

Anyone who's ever been involved in the beginning of a nonprofit consortium will tell you that the first year is the hardest. The initial high of coming together in the name of a shared cause gives way to the drudgery of meetings, working groups and member politics. The realities of executing against the vision and the inherent challenges of keeping an all-volunteer organization active and engaged set in. For many such consortia, the first year can be the last.

Josep Mitjà, COO of Openbravo and OSA board member, argues that while technological advances in open source software should be viewed on a worldwide basis, its ultimate success in the market requires a localized approach. The secret, he says, is to 'think global, but act local.'

Although organizations are not realizing the full potential benefits of open source due to the way open source projects are currently managed, this does not mean that there are no benefits from developing in open source. Once you get past the 'free developer' presumption and carefully look at the larger picture, it becomes clear that open source, even in its limited participatory forms today, brings real value.

Enterprise networks are growing increasingly complex. Over the past five years, the increased focus on unified security, network optimization, and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices, and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed connectivity networks and logical overlay networks - all running over the same physical links - have made it all but impossible for network teams to maintain consistent security, access, audit and change control using manual processes and device-specific management tools.

One of the most exciting things about the software industry is how fast it moves. Software is constantly optimizing itself around the state-of-the-art. Inherent industry bottlenecks change cyclically every five years or so. Architectures and solutions change too. CPUs too costly? Enter dumb terminals. Network running slow? Build client/servers.

Governance is currently a key topic for many IT functions. Its definition varies, but its key themes are true for all companies: effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Business value and risk mitigation are also at its center and represent a significant part of enterprise governance overall.

Efforts to modernize enterprise infrastructure have never been more complex. While the need is certainly there on multiple fronts - competitive edge, cost savings and new business initiatives, to name just a few - new hurdles seem to pop up no matter where an IT administrator might look. That includes not just management issues such as cap/ex costs and user resistance, but also an increasing pancake stack of integration layers within and among applications.

There's a great deal of interest in open source software development these days. While the concept of open source (if not the name itself) is hardly new - people have been freely sharing source code since the beginning of the computer industry - the convergence of commercial interest in open source participation along with the maturation of open source development processes and governance models have greatly raised the visibility of open source development during the past several years.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

2X has announced the release of 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server for Linux, which enables users to run a Linux desktop and Linux / Windows applications over any type of connection. The 2X TerminalServer is based on the open source NX X-Windows compression protocol.

X-Tend announced an extension to the partnership with XenSource, by joining the XenSource Partner Program and becoming a XenSource Solution Provider (XSP). This partnership will allow X-Tend customers access to XenSource's XenEnterprise virtualization platform, the enterprise version of Xen.

Solution providers can now offer small and medium businesses a choice - bringing the security, power, flexibility and cost-savings of Linux - with the U.K. launch of Collax server solutions. Interactive Ideas will handle Collax product aggregation and distribution while working together with Collax to generate leads and create new sales opportunities for channel partners.

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, the OpenVZ project released its operating system-level server virtualization software in the form of a kernel build for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4), plus enhancements that provide users with additional flexibility.

The Apache Software Foundation is pleased to announce the release of Apache Geronimo Version 1.1, an open source J2EE application server from the Apache Geronimo project. This release continues the evolution of the Apache Geronimo server, adding new features and capabilities to a fully compliant J2EE container suitable for everything from development to enterprise deployments.

Collax, a leading European vendor of affordable, turn-key, Linux-based server solutions for small and medium businesses, has announced that Paula Hunter, formerly of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), has joined the management team as vice president of U.S. marketing.

Mandriva and the OpenVZ project have announced that the OpenVZ operating system virtualization software will be included as part of the Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0. Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 is the foundation for a stable and cost-effective open source infrastructure for organizations building on Linux.

As anyone who has used Linux systems for production systems knows all too well, there's an art to arriving at a stable configuration with all dependencies met. Linux distributors do an excellent job of delivering systems that meet this criteria, and keeping them there through their update processes as functionality updates, bug fixes, and security updates get laid on top of the out-of-the-box system. The amount of work and the success that they have in delivering both the base distribution and the stream of updates that follow is widely unappreciated.

Mixing Open Source and commercial software isn't a new concept. IT departments have been doing it for years, especially when building out their core server, networking, and database infrastructures. But using a novel 'blended' application development strategy - one that combines Enterprise Java APIs and Open Source Java application frameworks - offers the best of both worlds.

Open Source is the current rave of the software industry. It's making great progress because of Linux - an operating system that truly works. People are all a-bustle about Open Source and are beginning to look for an Open Source option appropriate to all their application needs. This raises questions: How can you take advantage of Open Source when you're building applications? Are there any dangers involved in using Open Source?

In December 2004 it was decided that DotNetNuke would break out its existing core modules into separate Projects so that they could be enhanced, released, and supported independently from the core Web Application Framework. It was further decided that some additional modules would also be added as official Projects to provide an increased level of richness to the platform. The first modules that we determined were going to be added were the TTT Forum and TTT Gallery, authored by Tam Tran Minh of TTT Corporation.

InfoParc has announced the release 4.54 of the absoluteBUSY web CRM software. The release includes a new sales module plus a new keyword/tagging feature. An unlimited, freely defineable set of markers/tags can be applied to companies, contact persons and projects.

A rollercoaster - as trite as that image may be - is the right analogy for venture capital investing in open source companies. And what a long, strange trip it's been.

The rise of Open Source and the well-known problems of the proprietary management suites are driving companies to the public domain for simpler, more cost-effective IT management solutions. Zenoss offers a new Open Source alternative for enterprise monitoring that does much more than lower costs. With an integrated architecture, automated-modeling, template-based configuration and cross-platform coverage, Zenoss provides a powerful, easy-to-use application for enterprise-wide infrastructure monitoring.

There's not much question mobile devices exploded last year. In 2005, more than 750,000,000 new mobile phones were shipped worldwide, and over 75% of them were more than just a voice handset: they include a Web browser, a contact manager, a calendar, a mail client, or Java. These are small handheld computers disguised as phones.

Developers in an enterprise need to use the best tools for the job. Increasingly they have found that Open Source projects such as Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, Eclipse, and others are ready for prime time. However, the stack is rarely composed entirely of Open Source. These projects are typically used in conjunction with industry standard, non-Open Source tools such as Oracle, WebLogic, and ClearCase.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to sit back and reflect. Where is the open source movement going? What is the next frontier? In 2005, we explored the business models of the open source movement. We almost got through the entire list, though we still need to finish a column on the software-as-a-service model and its poster children, Webex and Google.

In the wake of open source, traditional hiring practices seem like an unnecessarily risky way to hire new employees, especially for small teams where each hire can make it or break it. Why bet the composition of your collective on abstract indicators, hearsay, and a biased bio?

The open source software development model clearly represents a profound and fundamental change from traditional, proprietary development models. In the proprietary world, a software company invests massive dollars in development, sales, and marketing.

The first draft of the revised GNU General Public License has been released for comment. The project will bring together organizations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular free software license.

More than ever before, information managers are under intense pressure to standardize their environments for the sharing of information - and to do so in ways that beef-up data security. That was the consensus of top IT experts who recently gathered for an industry summit webcast, 'The Case for Linux in the Federal IT Sector,' conducted by Larstan Business Reports.

In the past few years, there has been significant interest in using open platforms for building communication devices. Linux and open source platforms are being used in various devices on the network - end systems such as mobile phones and client devices, and access and edge routers for forwarding data packets and server platforms.

Frank Wiles, President and Founder of Revolution Systems has started a new blog located at http://ww w.revsys.com/blog/ which will focus on Open Source Software packages such as Linux, Apache, Perl, mod_perl, Sendmail, and PostgreSQL. He will also discuss various on topic Open Source news, businesses, and trends when appropriate. While most articles will be very technical in nature, he aims to provide enough non-technical content in an effort to help out readers of all skill levels.