After Sun's acquisition of Mysql, some questions arose about the future. Some answer are now available: version 5.1 has been released announced. What's more, after IBM exit from the storage engine, several news in that field have come out: Oracle released a new version of Innodb, and Kickfire unveiled their datawarehouse solution based on Mysql.

UPDATE: this news wrongly stated that Mysql 5.1 had been released. Only its upcoming release was announced.

Companies spent $21 billion in 2007 on the Linux server platform, in hardware, software and services, said IDC. And that amount is expected to grow to $49 billion in 2011. And software expenses were at $10 billion, which is still a tiny part of the global software market, evaluated at $242 billion.

Cisco announced at its partner summit that it is opening up its Integrated Services Routers and Wide Area Application Services platforms to third party applications. This platform called Application eXtension Platform is built on Linux. Hardware modules and daughter boards are part of the offering.

Dimdim is a web conferencing platform, that chose to publish an open source version of its software. Features include the ability to run slideshow presentations, hold collaborative freehand drawing sessions, chat (in groups or privately), and share desktops. This is not only interesting for technically savvy users, but also for manufacturers looking to integrate webconferencing in their solutions.

Apache's Directory Studio is an Eclipse based LDAP browser and Directory client. It proposes an Ldif editor, a Schema editor in addition to plugins specific to Apache's Directory server. Version 1.1 was announced and gives the changelog.

OpenQRM, the provisioning and management solution for physical and virtual systems, initially developed by Qlusters, is now an independent project. Release 3.5 will be the last done by Qlusters, and Matt Rechenburg, the manager of the project, will continue to lead its development.

As seen on the 451Group

Ejbca, the java based certification authority management software, reached version 3.6 and continues adding features, including auto-enroll certificates for Microsoft systems, support for delta CRLs, support for Oracle Application Server and Websphere, more WebService API commands, etc

The project also launched a new wiki.

Ejbca is primarily developed by Primekey, a swedish company, that also provides support.

Texas Instruments joined the LiMo foundation, an industry consortium dedicated to creating a "truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices". Texas Instruments is joining other industry heavy-weights on the LiMO Foundations' members list, such as founding members Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, Vodafone, but also Access, McAfee, LG, AMD, ARM, Ericsson, Amsung SDS and others.

Amanda, the venerable open source backup tool touted has protecting data from half a million servers, has reached version 2.6. Its cross-platform availability enables admins to use one tool to backup a heterogeneous infrastructure.
This version brings improvements in the ease of installation, the security features, the performance level, the device management and the robustness of the solution. A very insteresting element though is the device API introduced in this release. It lets developers integrate with new kinds of storage, and has already been used to use Amazon's S3 storage service.

10 years ago, on 31 march 1998, the source code for Netscape's Communicator 5.0 product was released. It is certainly worth a mention, as it was a significant step in Open source's spread. The Mozilla Public License has also been used as a foundation by other projects.

It might have been a difficult start, with complete rewrites being the only solution in some cases and bringing numerous delays, but those days a far way now. Mozilla is now an independent organisation that launched a for-profit subsidiary based on Firefox' success.