Cisco has announced it will acquire Jabber Inc, the company, not to be confused with Jabber, the protocol, formalised by the IETF and now known under the name XMPP.

So it seems the rumors were true: Xandros is acquiring Linspire. It's not clear to anyone if this will have a significant impact though....

The list of acquisitions continues to grow as Springsource, the company behind the Spring framework, announced the acquisition of Covalent, a company proposing support and other services around Apache technologies.

Nokia, the biggest mobile phone manufacturer, announced its intention to acquire Trolltech, maker of the famous Qt toolkit, but also Qtopia, the mobile application platform. QT is available under the GPL, and widely used by free and open source programmers, most notably as the base of the KDE desktop environment. Nokia intends to use Trolltech's cross platform experience to boost its S40 and S60 mobile phone platforms, based on Symbian, the leading mobile phone operating system, which is not open source.

Although Nokia announced plans to continue the development of Trolltech's products, there are clearly some conflicts in sight. Maemo, Nokia's linux based platform used in their internet tablet N800 and N810, is based on the GTK toolkit, another open source toolkit used in the Gnome desktop environment. Qtopia can also be seen as a competitor of both Maemo and S60.

The availability of Qt to free and open source developers is garanteed though, thanks to the KDE free Qt foundation, founded by Trolltech and KDE in 1998.

Sun announced an agreement to acquire Mysql AB, the company behind the popular open source database, in a transaction worth $1 billion, $800 million of it being cash, the rest being in options.

Until now Sun supported only Postgresql, but it will propose global enterprise support for the Mysql solutions rapidly.

Sourcefire, the company built aroung the Snort intrusion detection software, acquired ClamAV, the well know anti-virus toolkit for Unix. This acquisition will not affect the license of the project, which will stay under the GPL.

Interesting to note is that ClamAV has nearly one million unique IP addresses downloading daily updates.