Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera makes it official
We previously reported the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects back in October. The company made its official debut in not-so polite open source society with the launch of its distribution for Hadoop and …

I’ve been talking to device manufacturers and the Linux-centered software providers that feed them code for mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, industrial control, automotive technology, medical devices, military uses and a slew of other categories commonly classified as embedded devices, and I can definitively report that I am not hearing or sensing any fear, uncertainty or doubt (FUD) as a result of Microsoft’s TomTom patent suit.

I wrote last month that the controversial MS TomTom suit was not aimed at Linux as much as TomTom and some market categories for Microsoft. While we must all remind ourselves that anything may be possible considering court rulings and Microsoft strategies, I don’t see Microsoft’s TomTom suit as truly aimed at Linux. If it is, I don’t see it having much, if any, impact on Linux. …

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. …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

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 …

Reaction to Marten Mickos’s departure from Sun. On open letter to President Obama. Lots of announcements from Sun, the LIMO Foundation and WS02. Mozilla offers to help EC investigation of Microsoft. Black Duck raises funding and gets a new CEO. The state of Red Hat. And more.

Mickos fallout
Kaj Arno maintained that “MySQL’s culture and business philosophy will live on in Sun.” He added: “In fact, you could say MySQL now becomes mainstream at Sun. Former MySQLers continue in key positions, in some cases with a mandate to generalise and apply MySQL related learnings on other open source products.”

For example, Charles Babcock …