A busy week for Sun includes new product releases and an annual shareholders’ meeting. Microsoft tries to unseat open source with BizSpark for entrepreneurs. Who is making money from open source? Obama: Open source President? And more.

Press releases
IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union To Grow Adoption, Community and Software Innovation Sun Microsystems

Sun Unveils New Systems And Storage Solutions For MySQL Sun Microsystems

Microsoft Jump-Starts Global Entrepreneurs With BizSpark Microsoft

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Sun Microsystems always seems to be forced to defend itself, whether it is the company’s ongoing strategy amid dimmed revenue and earnings or its participation in open source. As one who recently considered the fate of a somewhat weakened Sun, I’d also like to highlight a recent series of promising technologies and efforts — dominated by open source — from the venerable technology giant.

Despite continued doubts, Sun continues to focus its strategy on open source software, which is finding its way into the company’s Solaris OS, storage technology with ZFS file system and MySQL database and elsewhere. The company recently launched a new Web site where it is figuratively letting its open source ponytail down and more succinctly staking out its place and …

I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Juanjo Hierro from the Morfeo Project, a Spanish community of open source communities set up to speed up the development of Service Oriented Architectures-related software standards and create business opportunities for local suppliers.

Hierro explained that the Morfeo Project is based on “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Christensen’s law has also been used by Tim O’Reilly …

Open-Xchange raises Series B funding. The FSF enables Wikimedia’s potential move to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The “Bilski” decision and software patents. Mindtouch reports revenue growth. And more.

Press releases
Open-Xchange Closes Series B Venture Funding of $9 Million Open-Xchange

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications OASIS

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License Free Software Foundation

Federal Court Issues “Bilski” Decision Software Freedom …

Sun and Sourcefire report Q3 results. SpringSource elected to JCP executive committee. Alfresco launches Enterprise 3.0. How to go from 0 to 700 customers in one year. Open sourcing Jonathan Schwartz’s ponytail. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Reports Final Results for the First Quarter Fiscal Year 2009 Sun Microsystems

Sourcefire Announces 2008 Third Quarter Results Sourcefire

Sourcefire Adopts Stockholder Rights Plan Sourcefire

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Actuate and Black Duck report on third quarter performance. Red Hat welcomes Microsoft to AMQP. Canonial launches Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition. How to pronounce my surname. And more.

Press releases
Actuate Reports Third Quarter 2008 Financial Results
Actuate

Black Duck Software Continues Phenomenal Growth in Q3 Black Duck

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition enables mobile, flexible computing for a changing digital world Canonical

Microsoft Joins Working Group for Open Standards Messaging Software Microsoft

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VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

(Or “the return of 451 CAOS Links“)

Having been a bit busy for the last three weeks I have a bit of catching up to do on the latest open source software news. Here’s the headlines that caught my eye.

MySQL co-founder resigns from Sun
No, not that one. David Axmark resigned stating “I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.” If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one co-founder may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both …

Until this week Infobright’s claim to open source fame was its partnership with MySQL that enabled its analytical data warehousing software to act as a storage engine for the open source database.

However, the company is now taking the open source route itself by releasing the code behind its Infobright data warehouse (formerly Brighthouse) as Infobright Community Edition.

Earlier this month the company announced that it was moving to a subscription model for the commercial version of the product, Infobright Enterprise Edition, which comes with “enhanced features, services and support, warranty” amongst other things.

The company has also announced a $10m Series C investment …