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

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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 …

Last week I helped a customer setup a JBoss application against MySQL Cluster. It turns out it is not immediately obvious how you should setup our JDBC connector to do loadbalancing and failover. For instance, setting the connector up for an Master-Slave setup (with MySQL Enterprise) is well documented, but not doing the same with MySQL Cluster.

It's not really properly documented in the manual part, but I found in the changelogs, and confirmed on IRC that to do load-balancing across the SQL nodes in MySQL Cluster, you would use a different JDBC connection string with the "loadbalance" keyword added...

jdbc:mysql:loadbalance://host-1,host-2,...host-n/database

That does indeed …

Last week I helped a customer setup a JBoss application against MySQL Cluster. It turns out it is not immediately obvious how you should setup our JDBC connector to do loadbalancing and failover. For instance, setting the connector up for an Master-Slave setup (with MySQL Enterprise) is well documented, but not doing the same with MySQL Cluster.

It's not really properly documented in the manual part, but I found in the changelogs, and confirmed on IRC that to do load-balancing across the SQL nodes in MySQL Cluster, you would use a different JDBC connection string with the "loadbalance" keyword added...

jdbc:mysql:loadbalance://host-1,host-2,...host-n/database

That does indeed …

Last week I helped a customer setup a JBoss application against MySQL Cluster. It turns out it is not immediately obvious how you should setup our JDBC connector to do loadbalancing and failover. For instance, setting the connector up for an Master-Slave setup (with MySQL Enterprise) is well documented, but not doing the same with MySQL Cluster.

It's not really properly documented in the manual part, but I found in the changelogs, and confirmed on IRC that to do load-balancing across the SQL nodes in MySQL Cluster, you would use a different JDBC connection string with the "loadbalance" keyword added...

jdbc:mysql:loadbalance://host-1,host-2,...host-n/database

That does indeed …

Sun updates MySQL Enterprise. The Microsoft/Novell deal is two years old. Nuxeo and Boxee get funding. Red Hat’s CEO on open source in a downturn. Steve Ballmer as a glove puppet. And more.

Press releases
Sun Enhances MySQL Enterprise With New Query Analyzer Tool to Boost Database Application Performance Sun Microsystems

Microsoft and Novell Mark Two Years of Interoperability Progress Microsoft

Nuxeo secures 2 million Euros and strengthens its board of directors and corporate governance Nuxeo

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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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We knew Marc Fleury couldn’t stay out of the business world for long. The founder of JBoss has leaked details of his new venture, an open source home automation community named OpenRemote.

The OpenRemote team also includes the creator of Asterisk Mark Spencer, JBoss veterans Juha Lindfors, Christian Bauer, Java X10 project creator Wade Wassenberg, and Linux Home Automation founder Neil Cherry.

Together they, and others, plan to create a complete open source home automation including the OpenRemote Controller hardware, OpenRemote Console Applications to make use of the iPhone and iTouch as a universal remote (although any device with browser will work), …

Sun advances GlassFish. Red Hat announces JBoss momentum. Mandriva releases Linux update. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Red Hat Continues Middleware Industry Momentum, Red Hat (Press Release)

Mandriva presents its latest distribution: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, Mandriva (Press Release)

Hyperic Announces MySQL …