We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …

The reason we are confident that the comparative decline in the use of the GNU GPL family of licenses and the increasing significance of complementary vendors in relation to funding for open source software-related vendors will continue is due to the analysis of our database of more than 400 open source software-related vendors, past and present.

We previously used the database to analyze the engagement of vendors with open source projects for our Control and Community report, plotting the strategies used by the vendors against the year in which they first began to engage with open source projects …

One of the favourite blog topics on CAOS Theory blog over the years has been our quarterly and annual updates on venture capital funding for open source-related businesses, based on our database of over 600 funding deals since January 1997 involving nearly 250 companies, and over $4.8bn.

There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

Following the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever in Q3, Q4 was the second largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors …

There has been no shortage of reaction to HP’s move to make the Linux-based WebOS open source software. Below, I offer some of my thoughts on the meaning for the different players affected.

*What’s it mean for WebOS?
Moving WebOS to open source was best option for HP. It retains some value in the software depending on its involvement. It is also the best fate for the code, rather then being sold or simmered to its IP and patent value or even used as another weapon in the ongoing mobile software patent wars. Still, the move comes amid huge developer and consumer uncertainty for WebOS. Nevertheless, at least WebOS was already in the market with a compelling products, the Palm the Pre, in the modern smartphone market. WebOS will hopefully have a faster path to open source than Symbian since the former is based on Linux. I still think the greatest opportunity for WebOS may be in serving as an …

Funding for BlazeMeter and Digital Reasoning. Red Hat goes unstructured. And more.

# BlazeMeter announced $1.2m in Series A funding and launched the a cloud service for load and performance testing.

# Digital Reasoning announced a second round of funding to help develop its Hadoop-based analytics offering.

# Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, based on its recent acquisition of Gluster.

# Red Hat also …

Talend delivers v5. Zentyal raises series A. The TCO of OSS. And more.

# Talend announced version 5 of its data integration suite, adding business process management capabilities via an OEM relationship with BonitaSoft. Yves De Montcheuil explained the name changes in version 5.

# Zentyal closed a series A venture capital funding of over $1m by Open Ocean …

Rapid7 secures new funding. Microsoft drops Dryad. And more.

# Rapid7 secured $50m in series C funding.

# Microsoft confirmed that it is ditching its Dryad project in favour of Apache Hadoop.

# Arun Murthy provided more details of Apache Hadop 0.23.

# The Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT Designer projects are now fully open source.

# openSUSE released version 12.1.

451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but non-clients can find a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding, over at our Too Much Information blog.

Cloudera raises $40m. Accel announces $100m fund. Rackspace takes OpenStack private. And more.

# Cloudera raised $40m in series D funding and announced a partnership with NetApp around its NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

# Accel Partners launched a $100m Big Data Fund to invest in Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors.

# Rackspace …