About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

FSF sues Cisco for GPL violations. JasperSoft and Lucid Imagination raise funding. Sun updates OpenSolaris. WaveMaker launches IDE for the cloud. And more.

Official announcements
Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations Free Software Foundation

Jaspersoft Secures $12.5 Million in Venture Funding JasperSoft

Sound Investment Red Hat

Jaspersoft Announces New Community Edition of the World’s Most Widely Deployed Business Intelligence Software JasperSoft

…

Happy Halloween! – well by the time you read this it will be more – Remember, remember the 5th of November!. So what’s been happening?

Well I spent the last month getting to grips with DB2 – why I hear you ask?.
You shouldn’t keep all your eggs in one basket, and there were rumors that DB2 might become Open Source at some point (or not). Anyway even if that never happens there is a lot to learn from the original DBMS and with DB2 Express-C available for free there’s nothing to stop your Open Source app taking advantage of that fact. Besides competition is a good thing.

Anyway not forgetting my …

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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Kickfire and 10gen obtain new rounds of funding. BusyBox developers drop lawsuit against Supermicro. OpenLogic and EnterpriseDB release open source survey findings. (and more)

Kickfire Raises $20 Million in Series B Financing, Kickfire (Press Release)

10gen, New Cloud Computing Firm, Closes $1.5m Series A, 10gen (Press Release)

BusyBox Developers and Supermicro Agree to End GPL Lawsuit, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) (Press Release)

OpenLogic Releases Survey on Enterprise Open Source …

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks.

On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an opportunity than a threat following Jay’s post about the company releasing more code under open source licenses.

Nik Cubrilovic over at TechCrunch, meanwhile, has written an interesting …

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

    This video …