Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

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Quietening the patent drums
Cnet’s Ina Fried had the scoop on the news that Microsoft and TomTom had reached a settlement in their patent dispute. The news story was quickly followed by Microsoft’s official statement, as well as a note from the Software Freedom Law Center that the situation is not completely dealt with. Jay Lyman delivered the 451 CAOS …

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

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IBM to acquire Sun?
No prizes for guessing the big story this week as the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for $6.5bn, according to “people familiar with the matter”. Raising the game, the New York Times reported that the purchase price was nearer $7bn citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations”.

The media exploded with …

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …

How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core model?

These are some the questions we hoped to try and address with our Open Source is Not a Business Model report, published in October last year. As I mentioned yesterday, however, without an agreed set of definitions and a common vocabulary it is difficult for a broader understanding the implications of the various models to develop.

One of the ways we might be able to do that is to map the categories we used in our …

One might have thought Microsoft was back rattling the patented software sabres against Linux and open source this week, reading some of the recent reports regarding Redmond’s patent infringement suit against automotive navigation and GPS player TomTom. However, upon further review, it seems that Microsoft is making a point to say that these suits are not aimed at the Linux OS or open source. In response to my own query, the company offered this:

First, to answer your earlier question on how the suit with TomTom involves the Linux Operating System, three of the infringed patents read on the Linux kernel as implemented by TomTom. However, open source software is not the focal point of this action. …

The open source vendor definition debate rumbles on. How open source could save the US government $3.7bn. Red Hat plans MASS migration to JBoss. Open source content management invades the US. Exploiting the attribution loophole in the GPLv3. And more.

Definition debate rumbles on
Roberto Galoppini joined the open source vendor definition debate, with a perspective looking at the impact on community engagement, and also caught up with David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, about the company’s strategy, noting that not all open source core vendors are created equal.

Meanwhile Tarus Balog of OpenNMS, who …

Yesterday Sun introduced Glassfish Portfolio. Its a new stack of open source middleware products including Glassfish Enterprise Server, Glassfish ESB, Glassfish Web Space Server, and the new Glassfish Web Stack, which includes support for projects such as Tomcat, Memcached, Apache, PHP, Ruby and Python and a copy of MySQL Community.

It’s a pretty complete infrastructure stack. What it is not, however, is an integrated LAMP stack, despite Sun’s reference to it as such not once but twice on its press announcement.

Glassfish Portfolio runs on Linux of course, as well as Solaris, but it does not contain Linux (integrated or otherwise) or Linux services (although that is available …

All change at Sun. A new CEO at Zend. Ingres enjoys revenue up 32%. Purple Labs raises funding. Is open source a danger to Microsoft or will Danger bring open source to Microsoft? (Not) open source food. And more.

It’s a good week for business card printers
There was a rush of new appointment and departure announcements this week. As already noted today, Sun has confirmed the departure of Marten Mickos as Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Earlier in the week Monty Widenius confirmed that he has left Sun, along …

I just got news that Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO, is to depart Sun amid a reorganisation of its infrastructure and database business units. Don’t expect an announcement from Sun on this, but the news is confirmed.

It seems that Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Marten will be transitioning out of Sun by the end of the company’s (current) third quarter.

Marten’s departure is a big loss for Sun and follows quickly after the departures of Monty Widenius and …

I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).

Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email raises a valid point about how we determine which companies are considered “open source vendors” and I wanted to use the opportunity to outline the rules I use to make that decision.

As a technical snafu at our end had prevented Tarus from leaving a comment on the blog I hope he won’t mind me using his words to explain the issue he raised.

He wrote:

“You …