Microsoft sues Motorola. Oracle says no to LibreOffice. Time to fork Java? And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft is suing Motorola over alleged Android patent infringements.

# Oracle confirmed to SJVN that it will not be working with the Document Foundation on LibreOffice.

# Sean Michael Kerner reported that Red Hat has settled an alleged patent infringement case with IP firm Acacia Research.

# Greg Luck …

There is much excitement this week (understandably) about the formation of the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice fork of Openoffice.org.

Alan Bell sees correlation with the previous fork of Joomla from Mambo and has illustrated the potential impact that forking a project can have with a Google Trends chart, where Mambo is the blue line, and Joomla is the red line:

A similar chart for Debian (blue) and Ubuntu (red) is also instructive:

Or what about Nagios (blue) and Icinga (red):

Hmm. Maybe not the best example. …

Oracle launches Unbreakable Kernel, updates MySQL and Java plans. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Oracle launched its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

# Oracle announced the release candidate of MySQL 5.5.

# Oracle outlined its plans for Java platform. JavaWorld has the details.

# Novell and SAP have collaborated on SUSE …

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

We continue to see more evidence of the themes we discuss in our latest CAOS special report, Seeding the Clouds, which examines the open source software used in cloud computing, the vendors backing open source, the cloud providers using it and the impact on the industry.

First, as usual, we are seeing consistencies between our own research — which indicates open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and VMware — and that of code analysis and management vendor Black Duck. In its analysis of code that runs the cloud, Black Duck also found a preponderance of open source pieces, in many cases the same projects we profile in our report.

Indeed, open source software is an important part of the infrastructure, …

The development cycle is moving right along for the community’s newest MySQL benchmarking script. I’m pleased to announce that we now officially support FreeBSD (version 8.1 tested) so go ahead and download now and test your FreeBSD, Linux, or OSX MySQL server! Click here for the download.

Courtesy of Darren Cassar and some generous coding this weekend, we’re going to be releasing a auto-installer / updater for the application which you can use to automate that part of the process. Stay tuned for information on that release.

The future of open source licensing. OpenSolaris governing board quits. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Glyn Moody asked which open source software licensing is best for the future?

# The OpenSolaris Governing Board has collectively and expectedly resigned.

# OpenBravo has updated its rapid implementation ERP offering for small and mid-sized businesses, Openbravo QuickStart. …

It seems safe to say that Oracle is currently ahead of Microsoft when it comes to the company with the most contentious relationship with open source. To some extent that is due Oracle’s questionable approach to community, but it must also be noted that Microsoft has managed not to put its foot in it for a while.

In Microsoft 2009 published its first companywide perspective on open source, made its first contributions to the Linux kernel, and created the CodePlex Foundation, an independent entity designed to encourage its developers and other companies to contribute more to open source software projects.

Doubts have remained about Microsoft’s ongoing commitment, however, with the company being labeled opportunistic in its approach to open source, and skepticism persists – particularly in relation to software patents. We have recently published a new …

During the development of an application, not all time is spent on writing code. A lot of time is spent on reading debug output, crawling through log files and firing up the debugger to figure out what the application does. While the debugger helps us to inspect details of a running application on a testing environment, logfiles are often the only indication of the origin of an error on a production system. In this blogpost I want to describe how to log SQL statements on an existing application without touching any existing line of code at all. We will use a new MySQLnd Extension developed at the Mayflower OpenSource Labs for that purpose.

As an example, I will use PHProjekt 6. The project is particularly suitable for demonstration purposes as it has a logging infrastructure for function calls, but does not log SQL statements. …

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding smartphone market and open source software. The first question is: what is Oracle doing?

Many are speculating that this is simply an effort to further and more effectively monetize Java, a storied program language that has move more toward openness and survived several supposed death sentences as newer languages arrived. Still, with all of the open source parts — GlassFish application server, MySQL database, OpenOffice.org suite — is Java the most significant to Oracle? It may be, but regardless of what Oracle is doing, its legal moves here may certainly have an impact on the …