A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party - the far-right, whites-only political party - to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme.

Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on the grounds that its role as a politically neutral public service broadcaster would be undermined if it excluded the BNP - which won its first European Parliament seats this year with an estimated million votes.

To me it is clear that no matter how abhorrent the BNP’s policies on certain issues may be the BBC has a duty to invite it to participate as it is a legitimately recognised political party. We live in a society …

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

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

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …

Funding for Engine Yard and DataSync. Red Hat and Microsoft joint support. And more.

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

# Engine Yard raised $19m in Series C funding from the likes of Benchmark, DAG, Presidio and Amazon.

# Red Hat and Microsoft are now providing joint support for virtualization interoperability options.

# DataSync raised $1.2m and announced a partnership with SugarCRM.

# Simon Phipps began building a scorecard to …

Patents. M&A. Adoption. Business strategies. And more.

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

This bumper edition of 451 CAOS Links is brought to you courtesy of the Open World Forum’s temperamental wireless connection.

Patents
# Red Hat urged the Supreme Court to to make clear that it excludes software from patentability, while the SFLC and the FSF also filed briefs with the US Supreme Court arguing against software patents.

Investment and M&A
# The WSJ …

At the Open World Forum event in Paris this morning I presented a quick overview of the state of free and open source software in 2009 and a look at the trends shaping FOSS into the next decade. The presentation was just 10 minutes rather than the 20 I had originally understood it to be, so I wanted to use the blog to expand a little on the discussion and my thinking.

War is over (if you want it)
Aside from the ongoing adoption of open source, one of the trends that has defined FOSS in 2009 has been the numerous declarations …

Oracle is keeping MySQL. Yahoo is selling Zimbra. Linus is feeling bloated. And more.

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

# Larry Ellison reportedly said Oracle has no intention of spinning off MySQL.

# Yahoo is trying to sell Zimbra, according to All Things D.

# Linus Torvalds said Linux is “bloated and huge”.

# GroundWork Open Source released GroundWork Monitor 6.0.

# Zend launched Simple API for Cloud Application …

Citrix joins the Linux Foundation. BonitaSoft raises $3m. And more.

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

# Citrix joined The Linux Foundation.

# Open source BPM vendor BonitaSoft raised $3m from Ventech and Auriga Partners.

# Jaspersoft updated JasperReports Professional with enhanced data visualization.

# US CIO Vivek Kundra outlined the government’s cloud strategy, using NASA’s open source Nebula cloud.

# Infobright …

Before I even start this post I am going to repeat our view that Oracle is well aware that it has little to gain from killing off MySQL and that we expect MySQL to become the scale-out database for non-transactional web applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental deployments.

That said there has been some interesting discussion on Twitter this week in response to the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle-Sun about whether Oracle could - in theory - kill off MySQL. Here’s a Q+A explaining my view as to how Oracle could kill MySQL but probably won’t, and why MySQL AB’s choice of dual licensing and the GPL has come back to haunt Monty Widenius.

Q. Oracle can’t kill MySQL even if it wants to, because its open source. Right?

A. …

CodePlex, patents and Linux code. An interesting few days for Microsoft open source.

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CodePlex, CodePlex, CodePlex!
Microsoft launched the CodePlex Foundation to facilitate open source contributions, and confirmed the departure of Sam Ramji.

Patents, Patents, Patents!
The OIN confirmed the acquisition of 22 patents formerly owned by …

Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay. OIN to acquire ex-Microsoft patents. And more.

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

Reaction to EC’s Oracle-Sun delay
Despite widespread criticism of the European Commission’s decision to open a formal investigation into Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, Glyn Moody maintained that the EC deserves credit for making open source a central part of its analysis. Meanwhile Monty Program (by way of Steven J Vaughan Nicholls) explained why the EU should block Oracle/Sun, Roberto Galoppini reported …