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.

InfoQ is reporting the release of 2 open source projects by Orbitz, a big online travel company.

The first project is for the java platform: ERMA (Extremely Reusable Monitoring API), is "an instrumentation API that has been designed to be applicable for all monitoring needs" with the goal to "make instrumentation as simple as logging".

The second, built with Python, is Graphite, "a highly scalable real-time graphing system". this project seems similar to MRTG and RRDTool.

Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Open Source Census Project. Announced in december, and officially launched earlier this year, the project seems to be gathering steam at the sponsoring level. And as expected, this announcement as been followed by some reactions and coverage.

About the data collection: you can already access to the census reports, which currently are based on 1,316 machines scanned. Which is quite limited to be statistically representative.

As read on OStatic.

A recent IDC report mentioned that 2007 revenue for stand-alone FOSS was $1.7 billion, and that it was projected to reach $4.8 billion by 2012.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.