Open Source News

Rich Green, who recently returned to Sun Microsystems to head its software efforts, said that it's "not whether but how" Sun can open source Java and maintain compatibility that's delaying it from doing so. The promise, which might take some pressure off Sun, whose proprietary-style stewardship of the technology has always been a sore spot with Java licensees, was made at the opening of JavaOne Tuesday during Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's keynote when Green was brought on stage. Green said Sun was caught between a rock and a hard place - between the desire to open source Java and the fact that "compatibility matters" in a technology as ubiquitous as Java - but that it was going to be his job, now that he was back at Sun, to figure out how to do it. Sun has always been jealous of its control over Java and has voiced this logic before. Green offered no timeframe for it ha... (more)

Open Source Higgins Project Takes On Microsoft's InfoCard

IBM, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Novell and Parity Communications on Feb. 27 announced that they are contributing code to an open-source initiative, code-named the Higgins Project, which will help give people more control over their personal online identity information. The Higgins Project announcement, which comes just weeks after Microsoft announced a similar initiative, called InfoCard, at the RSA Conference, is for a user-centric identity management system where users actively manage and control their online personal information for things like b... (more)

Open Source Company MySQL Touts Storage Engines

MySQL's answer to its Oracle crisis is to say that it's opening up its pluggable database storage engine API and encouraging third-party companies and the open source community to develop other engines for it. This according to MySQL executive VP of marketing Zack Urlocker, who points out that there are already a few storage engines available for MySQL each good at different things. MySQL may ultimately narrow the confusion this situation has got to create because it's also going to have one of its own. It's going to be a transactional database engine, code named Falcon, based on t... (more)

QLogic HBA Drivers Interoperable With Open-Source Virtualization Software Code, XEN Hypervisor 3.0

QLogic announced that its Fibre Channel HBA drivers are fully compliant and interoperable with the XenSource Xen Hypervisor 3.0, an open-source virtualization software code that will be included in the upcoming releases of Linux operating systems (OSs) such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. QLogic HBA drivers combined with the virtualization-enabled OSs will offer end-users the means to establish a fully integrated, reliable virtual server environment and reap the benefits of dramatically increased server efficiency. According to conservative esti... (more)

JBoss And Patni Establish Open Source Global Partnership

JBoss, Professional Open Source company, and Patni Computer Systems , a global IT services provider,  announced a global partnership to offer application development and migration services to enterprises deploying solutions on the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS). As a global JBoss-certified systems integrator, Patni will be fully equipped to provide the latest services and technologies based on the JEMS platform. The partnership brings together the industry’s leading open source middleware and expert IT services from a global leader to help enterprises and indepen... (more)