Cloudera announced their distribution of Hadoop, software to distribute the handling of vast amount of data to a cloud of servers. And yes, you can get support.

The Openbravo World Conference will start on 17 april with a full day dedicated to Openbravo Partners. 18 and 19 april are the Community days and open to all.
300 IT professionals from across the globe are expected at the conference which will feature such speakers as Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho and Matt Asay, VP of Business Development at Alfresco.

Marketcetera recently released version 1 of their automated trading platform. From the homepage: Marketcetera's platform lets brokers and traders build effective automated trading systems, develop proprietary algorithms, create order management solutions and manage risk faster, easier and at much lower cost than with closed platforms.

Another illustration of the breadth of solution proposed under an open source license.

As also mentioned during the first ERP session organised by Profoss, lots of open source companies are still searching their definitive business model. This is again put forth by an article from Stuart Cohen (former CEO of Open Source Development Labs) in BusinessWeek. His point is that support businesses are not sustainable because open source software is of great quality. Quite a big shortcut I think, but it has the benefit to have generated an interesting discussion on slashdot.

Open-Xchange received $9 million funding. "Open-Xchange combines e-mail, appointment, contact and task management with document management", which makes it a competitor of Ms Exchange and Sharepoint.

Just when the first Android powered phones become available in the US, google has published the source code of Android to source.android.com/. The code is managed with git, the source code control software originally designed by Linus Torvalds to managed the Linux source code, and is made available under the Apache license

As mentioned on numerous websites, Microsoft's Webapplication Installer proposes the installations of open source web applications such as Drupal and Wordpress.

OpenOffice.org has been released in version 3.0, which brings a lot of new features, including MS Office 2007 import filters. Worth a try if you're using or evaluating OpenOffice.org!

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Redhat, claimed the economic crisis would boost open source in the enterprise, relative to its commercial counterpart.
Compared to commercial software requiring high upfront licensing costs and providing less flexibility, FOSS might be doing better indeed. But the economic downturn might encourage CIOs to choose for the status quo and block or delay new projects. That will certainly do no good to Free and Open Source Software.

As posted on the JQuery blog, Microsoft will make it part of their development platform, as it will be distributed with Visual Studio. This includes Intellisense support, and will not replace their other technologies, but rather complement it.

In the same blog post, Jquery announced that Nokia will included it in their Web run-time, their widget platform for S60.

This should help new developers, possibly in 100% microsoft shops, discover JQuery, maybe even without knowing they're using an open source tool.