OIN offers cash for patents. CentOS crisis averted. Microsoft denies GPL violation. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Open Invention Network offered individual inventors cash for patents, and acquired patents from V_Graph.

# The H Open reported that the management problems at CentOS are now resolved.

# Sam Ramji told Network World in detail why Microsoft believes its Linux IC code did not violate the GPL (from 15m 30s).

# Canonical delivered an on-premise version of …

Intuit launches open source project. SFLC on Microsoft GPL violation accusations.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Intuit launched open source projects and community to develop apps based on its Intuit Partner Platform, while Savio Rodrigues declared Intuit’s open source play is all business.

# SFLC’s Bradley Kuhn told SDTimes Microsoft was in violation of the GPL.

# MySQL and Memcached-based appliance vendor Schooner Info Tech has raised $20m in Series B funding.

# …

Microsoft makes a patent promise. JBoss is certifiable. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Microsoft announced that it will be applying its Community Promise to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications, reducing patent concerns related to Mono.

# Red Hat achieved EAL 2+ security certification for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

# A European Commission white paper on standards stirred some controversy with regards to open source. …

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license and concern over the openness (or closedness, depending on your perspedtive) of the latest devices. Amid all of it, we’re pleased to present our latest long-form report, CAOS 12 - The Myth of Open Source …

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

Open source and SMBs. New funding for Lucid Imagination. And more.

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On open source and SMBs
Savio Rodrigues contrasted Dell’s plans to target SMBs with bundles of hardware and open source with research from Forrester that indicated that SMBs are still wary of open source, while Matt Asay noted that there are significant opportunities for open source vendors if they can work out how to crack the SMB market and suggested that the way to make software easier for SMBs and to monetize it might actually be cloud-based computing.

OStatic noted that the issue may well be one of lack of awareness and that Dell’s initiative, as well as the …

Yahoo opens up Hadoop distribution. Microsoft and Novell claim customer wins. And more.

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The elephant in the room
Plenty of news emerged form the Hadoop Summit this week, including Cloudera announced support for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and introduced Sqoop, open source tool for importing databases into Hadoop, while Yahoo! Released! The! Yahoo! Distribution! Of! Hadoop! opening up its Hadoop developments to the wider community. As Savio Rodrigues noted, there has been a surge in the number of contributors for the Hadoop project in the last year.

Best of the rest
…

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

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I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

OIN aims to cut the FAT. What is the point of the GPL? Black Duck takes flight. Ingres delivers Salesforce.com appliance. The ongoing fallout from Oracle-Sun. Feedback on the Bee Keeper model. And more.

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OIN aims to cut the FAT
# The Open Invention Network announced plans to review the Microsoft FAT patents at the center of its recent skirmish and settlement with TomTom. have been placed for prior art review on the Post-Issue …

I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in …