Sun organised their CommunityOne event today, and took the opportunity to also release a new version of OpenSolaris, after three years of development. Although things are not very clear (there's an announcement of the new release on sun.com, a new website on opensolaris.com, but no mention of this release on opensolaris.org!), this should be the result of Project Indiana lead by Ian Murdoch, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Will this make forget all passed difficulties?

Netbeans also saw a new release with version 6.1, providing faster startup times, support for the Spring web framework, tighter Mysql integration and further ruby/JRuby enhancements.

Virtualbox, also acquired by Sun recently, had a release last week.

The Ubuntu's GNU/Linux distribution has seen its popularity rise, as illustrated by its inclusion in some Dell products and in Sun's plans. Another sign of its popularity is the launch of WorksWithU, a website covering Ubuntu's evolution and usages for multiple audiences, including small businesses and large enterprises.

Microsoft announced that System Center will support the Linux distributions from RedHat and Suse. The solution is based on Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, where Microsoft will join the Steering comitee, and contribute code under the Microsoft Public License (OSI approved)

OpenBSDbversion 4.3 has been announced. This release significantly improves hardware support, but also contains some security fixes.

It seems (there's been no official announcement) that Sun closed a $10 million Mysql deal. Who said there's no business opportunity with Free and Open Source Software?

Started an open source project from a commercial product is not easy. If the time has passed when open source was seen as the panacea to revive a dying product, the difficulties to reach success still are the same, as is illustrated by Sun's OpenSolaris difficulties building a community of contributors. But is a community of contributors really what Sun wants?

Building a community requires openness of the code, the development process, and the pricipal developers, ie developers from the company initially developing the product. But Sun's certainly not the worst example.

Ubuntu's latest release, dubbed Hardy Heron, has been announced today, providing both a desktop and a server edition. A feature overview is available online, but the most important point of this release is certainly its long term support: 3 years for the desktop edition, and 5 years for the server edition.

Marseille is looking to deploy OpenOffice.org, and has published a call in the publication for tenders for government projects.

This is one more business opportunity around OpenOffice.org.

SugarCRM announced a reseller agreement with BT. BT will propose SugarCRM to it's 1.2 million business customers. Even though this won't translate in immediate deployment by all of them, it shows how far an open source product can go, as BT's CRM of choice was until now from Siebel.

Read on The Open Road.

After being announced back in december, the Open Source Census has now officially launched. A software, under an open source license, is available to scan a computer and send back the data to a central database that will be used to report hard facts about the use of Free and Open Source software.

This initiatice, by OpenLogic, has the support of several companies and organisations.