By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the 'next IBM' and why Google is not the 'next Microsoft' - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors, like Zoho, to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled last week. As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore s Law on these computing eras.

Open-Xchange and Parallels are integrating Open-Xchange open source email and collaboration software with Parallels technology to deliver a cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative to commercial email and collaboration products at a competitive price. The products, which will be fully integrated with Parallels Automation solutions, will be offered to end-users via hosting and service providers.

Any large Java source base can have insidious and subtle bugs. Every experienced Java programmer knows that finding and fixing these bugs can be difficult and costly. Fortunately, there are a large number of free open source Java tools available that can be used to find and fix defects early in the development life cycle. In this article, we'll look at a few examples of specific uncommon1 or unusual defects that can happen in code and see how different Java static analysis tools detect them.

Hybrid applications made up of proprietary, open source and third-party components are the result of today's fast-paced and complex software development landscape. Applications developed within the last five years - whether internal or external - are at least 50% open source software (OSS) and third-party components.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments, with a focus on ESB, and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

OpenOffice.org is publicly beta testing OpenOffice 3.0, which is not recommended for production use. General release is expected in September. Aside from cosmetics, it will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format 1.2 and is capable of opening Office 2007 and 2008 for Mac OS X files.

Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

MySQL has backed off a plan to charge for some encryption and compression backup widgetry in the next version of the database - and, heavens, NOT OPEN SOURCE THE STUFF, an idea it trotted a few weeks ago and predictably caught hell for. Sun, which bought MySQL for a billion dollars, a good reason to try to make some of the money back, took the rap.

db4objects has announced that its db4o object database is now optimized for Microsoft's LINQ. With the new support, developers can choose an object-oriented optimized engine without changing the API or compromising performance. db4object's db4o database offers a persistence solution to store objects of any complexity natively with a single line of code.

Kaazing Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced an alliance to deliver the scalable and advanced real-time Web 2.0 platform. The integration between Kaazing's real-time Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, Enterprise Comet, and Sun Microsystems' open source Java EE application server, Glassfish, enables customers to create and deploy scalable mission-critical real-time solutions such as trading systems, betting and gambling applications, and interactive sports and news broadcasts, to the Web.

Neocleus announced that it has completed more than 18 months of work to enhance the Xen hypervisor to work on endpoints such as desktops and laptops. Neocleus will contribute these enhancements to the open source community to accelerate the adoption and development of a new generation of enterprise endpoint solutions. To create the hypervisor, Neocleus enhanced the Xen Open Source server-oriented hypervisor and transformed it into an endpoint-oriented hypervisor.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Parallels announced it has signed an agreement with myLittleTools to resell myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005, the web-based management tool designed for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The application enables service providers to manage most database and server objects, such as tables, views, programmability and security objects, through a web browser.

Red Hat announced the release of JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.0, an integrated middleware management platform that simplifies application development, testing, deployment and monitoring. The release of JBoss ON 2.0 represents continued momentum for the Enterprise Acceleration initiative announced earlier this year, which is aimed at fostering adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware by increasing its capabilities for large-scale enterprise use. Available in modular format, JBoss ON 2.0 provides organizations with an end-to-end application management solution to coordinate the many stages of the application lifecycle and improve operational efficiency through a single integrated tool.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community announced the availability of the technology preview release of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 and new Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sun also announced a new GlassFish Partner initiative designed to provide developers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) with access to a large number of frameworks and applications running on the GlassFish application server.

Sun Microsystems and the OpenPortal community announced a new open source initiative with Liferay to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from both companies. Developers will now have access to a new, stable, standards-based Web presentation platform. The Sun and Liferay products resulting from this initiative will bring developers simple, lightweight presentation capabilities for GlassFish, Sun's open source Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server.

The JCP introduced the Annual Awards six years ago to recognize excellence in Java standards development and innovation. Since its launch in 1998 as the open, inclusive process to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits, the Java Community Process program has fostered the evolution of the Java platform in cooperation with the international Java developer community.

Why is an Enterprise RIA Platform different? Simple: it must handle the demands of enterprise class applications. Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that a web application must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records.

Sun Microsystems and the global OpenSolaris community announced the availability of the OpenSolaris Operating System (OS). According to the company, OpenSolaris, based on Sun's Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, offers the combination of innovation, platform stability and support to meet business and development needs. It combines the foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation.

In his opening keynote at the annual CommunityOne open source developer conference, Ian Murdock, vice president for Developer and Community Marketing at Sun Microsystems, will discuss the increasing role communities play in the software industry, how technologies and the companies and communities that create them are increasingly interconnected, and how the power of community can and should play a role in next generation platforms. Additional Sun executives keynoting at the event include Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, and Rich Green, executive vice president of Software.

Talend announced that Pipeline Software has signed a strategic partnership within the Talend Alliance Program. Under the terms of the agreement, the optimized interoperability between Talend's open source data integration technologies and Pipeline Software's Transporter solution will allow customers to integrate data between SAP and other business-critical applications.

VIA is setting up a Linux Portal, still in beta, to get open source driver developed. It will initially focus on graphics drivers for its CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the latest Ubuntu distribution. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, says it will work to get the drivers built into Ubuntu.

'The world is moving to open source innovation, and Sun continues to lead that revolution,' said Jonathan Schwartz yesterday, as Sun reported yesterday its Q3 fiscal 2008 results. 'We continue to invest in the future created by open alternatives to proprietary technologies, best exemplified by the acquisition of MySQL,' Schwartz added.

PrismTech announced that the two open-source middleware communities are merging their CORBA Component Model (CCM) initiatives, underpinning the company's OpenFusion CCM offering. The Distributed Object Computing (DOC) Group and the OW2 Consortium - with support and contribution from PrismTech - are combining their efforts to advance the development and deployment of CCM technology.

Last summer, a group of technical experts from various open source companies came together under the banner of the Open Solutions Alliance, rolled out an enterprise-class application, and demonstrated the power of collaboration with the launch of the Common Customer View project, an interoperability project that integrates data from diverse front-office, back-office, and planning applications.

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.

Veteran Business Intelligence (BI) entrepreneur Ward Yaternick has released his latest business analytics product, nextanalytics 3.0, with industry-disruptive pricing, top-tier product functionality, and easy online distribution. nextanalytics 3.0 emulates MySQL's strategy, offering business analytics capabilities. Yaternick has spent nearly 20 years in the BI industry, including key development roles at Cognos, OLAP@Work, and Business Objects. In 2003, Yaternick founded Ottawa-based nextanalytics with the mandate to deliver innovations in business analytics.

Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions, furthering the promise of Sun's open source Java technology initiative. In addition, the NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is being delivered as part of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release and Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several Sun x86 systems.

Sun Microsystems announced the addition of developer tools and expanded professional service capabilities to help developers better leverage the growing open source communities that are fast changing the economics of the storage IT landscape. Over 3,000 members and 30+ projects within an active and growing OpenSolaris storage community demonstrate a groundswell within the storage industry for developers and enterprise companies to use open source alternatives to expensive proprietary storage offerings.

Aras announced expanded operations throughout Europe, Middle East, and Africa [EMEA] and opened an EMEA headquarters office in Solothurn Switzerland to meet the growing demand for the Aras Innovator enterprise software solutions. As part of the expansion, Aras plans to add sales and support operations and extend the partner network across the region to provide local geographical representation.

In last month's article I wrote about Open Source and Open Standards. This month, having just returned from the QCon conference (http://jaoo.d k/london-2008/conference/ ) in London, during which I discussed the role of community in the JCP, and particularly the role that individual ('non-corporate') developers could play in the organization, I'd like to address some other aspect of openness: transparency of process and community involvement.

SnapLogic, the open source start-up that been fostering the eponymous data integration project for the past year, is going commercial with the widgetry, claiming that the stuff can do what proprietary software from TIBCO and Infomatica can't and make it easy to tap and use the data trapped in practically impenetrable data warehouses. Guess they ought to know - cause one of SnapLogic's founders, Gaurav Dhillon, was the founder and CEO of Informatica before embarking on this new adventure.

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.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Oracle's announcement to acquire Empirix e-TEST suite solutions is a positive move for all involved. The acquisition helps Oracle round out its Enterprise Manager offering with a comprehensive testing component for pre-deployment applications. The acquisition is a natural fit for the e-TEST suite products which are architected to work with modern applications and deliver testing capabilities to both packaged and custom applications.

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.

Open source has made signficant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments, with a focus on ESB, and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.