Sun reports second quarter results. Compiere reports 216% quarterly revenue growth. EnterpriseDB grows customers accounts. Hyperic and JasperSoft team up on BI for IT. Microsoft embraces Apache but resists GPL. And more.

Sun up or Sun down?
There was some comparatively good news from Sun, which reported a net loss of $209m on revenue down 10.9% at $3.2bn. As Sam Diaz at ZDnet notes, however, “after excluding one-time costs related to recent layoffs and other costs, the company posted a profit of 15 cents per share, beating analysts’ expectations of a 10 cent loss”. In regular trading, shares of Sun were up more than 5%.

Matt Asay noted the impact open …

Red Hat gets a new VP. rPath appoints former Red Hat COO as chairman. Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source. Open source Windows. SCO formally files for Chapter 11. And more.

Official announcements
Industry Veteran Greg Symon Joins Red Hat as Vice President and General Manager of North American Sales Red Hat

rPath Welcomes Ex-Red Hat COO Tim Buckley rPath

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition LifeRay

Adaptive Planning …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

A bumper CAOS Links rounding up the news and views from the festive period, including: Red Hat revenue up 22% in 3Q. Alan Cox departs for Intel. Evolving open source business strategies. The commercialization opportunity around OpenOffice.org. And more.

Official announcements
Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Results Red Hat

OpenLogic Survey Highlights Enterprise Perspectives on Open Source Application Servers OpenLogic

Asianux Concludes Triumphant Year, Welcomes Fifth Member Asianux

News articles
The future of open source …

Red Hat increases its service levels. Linux Foundation appoints Ted Ts’o CTO. Sun delivers VirtualBox update. Novell cancels BrainShare. BBC enables iPlayer for Linux. And more.

Note: This is the last 451 CAOS Links post of 2008. We’ll be back with a bumper holiday special on January 2. Happy holidays!

Official announcements
Red Hat Increases Service Levels and Reduces Costs for Customers with Extended Update Support Red Hat

Linux Foundation Appoints Ted Ts’o to Position of Chief Technology Officer Linux Foundation

…

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

My CAOS colleague Matt Aslett wrote recently about how we expect to see an uptick in open source merger and acquisition activity given the current economic conditions and bargains for the larger, mostly proprietary players. Matt also discusses the difficulty of further VC funding, though we have seen some significant investment announcements, such as Open-Xchange, Infobright and others. Still, Matt is probably right that funding will be harder to come by for any company, open source or not.

I also continue to see a number of startup and younger open source vendors — would-be fundees — that are opting to hold off on venture funding and stick to building up business, customers and …

MySQL 5.1 reaches GA. But is it ready for production deployments? SpringSource launches commercial version of Apache Tomcat. BusinessWeek focuses on open source business models and open source in the downturn. And more.

Official announcements
MySQL 5.1 Downloads — Generally Available (GA) release for production use Sun Microsystems

SpringSource Launches tc Server; Continues to Redefine Application Server Market SpringSource

Open Solutions Alliance Appoints New President, Announces New Leadership Team Open Solutions Alliance

…

I just noticed that Sun/MySQL has dropped SCO OpenServer from its list of supported operating systems for MySQL 5.1 and higher (along with Mac OS X 10.3 and QNX).

It is not a massive surprise to see MySQL doing this given SCO’s current position but MySQL teamed up with SCO in the midst of its controversial legal claims against IBM et al, so I thought the end of the deal warranted a quick mention.

At the time Marten Mickos defended the deal by claiming that he hoped working with MySQL would educate SCO’s executives:

“In a partnership you exchange thoughts,” he said. “If you exchange thoughts hopefully the other side will listen to you. We understand …