After a call from Viviane Redding in november for a European strategy, the European Commission quietly published a document about .
In a big change from its usual neutral position, the document states that " For all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform".

A nice overview of the document can be found at The 451 Group.

Although there's no trace of a formal announcement, the Affero GPL is now an OSI approved license. The Affero GPL requires that you share your code changes whatever distribution channel you use: software as a service, or traditional software distribution. This is particularly important as more and more software is offered as a service on the web.

Read more on The Open Road and the Mobile Open Source blog from Funambol.

Version 2 of the GridGain open-source Java grid framework includes monitoring, intermediate checkpoints, a fully dynamic MapReduce implementation, Data Partitioning & Affinity Load Balancing and more. More details on The Server Side and InfoQ.

Free/OPen Source software is viable for enterprise usage, but there has to be some caution from both sides to understand the reasoning of the other party. Computerworld has a story giving some reactions and examples with Mysql, JBoss, RedHat.

With version 3.0 of its suite, OpenOffice will make the switch to the GPLv3. There's also the move from the Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) to the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), easing the hosting of source code of extensions. Let's hope it will help solve some problems of the past.

As seen reported by The 451 Group.

Quotero is a new open source DMS, released under the GPL. It is based on the Java platform, and its features include close integration with MS Office and Open Office, email storing, workflow designs, search on content and metadata, a clustered architecture, and more.

Current version is 0.4, and is already in active use. Version 1.0 is planned for september 2008.

As seen on Linuxfr.

Sun hired Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki, two key Python developers, which should further help dynamic languages on the Java platform, and the Jython project. After the success with the JRuby project, and with Sun's CEO talking of future open source related acquisitions, some see PHP as a next candidate.

In a mail sent to the discussion forum on Sourceforge, Dhiren Patel announced IBM's decision to stop further development of SolidDB for Mysql, a product acquire with Solid, the companny developing it. Being released under the GPL, the community of users and developers will be able to continue the development, but without the involvement of IBM. Would this have something to do with Sun's acquisition of Mysql?

Matthew Aslett, from The 452 Group, brings a short analysis of the power of the GPL and BSD licenses for software makers. The reasoning is that the fact that BSD allows anyone to add proprietary bits makes it easier for competitors to overtake the main developer of the project. Worth reading if you plan to publish your software under an open source license.

IDABC(Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) has published a news on the use of open source at the german air traffic control, as was presented at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nurnberg.

Impetus for looking at open source was the fact that some proprietary software used was not supported anymore, or running on hardware not being made anymore. This situation was not acceptable in highly regulated environment, needed 99.9% availability. Currently there are already 1030 applications running on GNU/Linux systems. The switch was made from Unix systems, which eased porting applications.