The community driven open source project initiated by Sun Microsystems seems to be dead. Instead, Oracle sees growth potential in the enterprise market for the commercial release of its operating system. "The growth opportunity for Solaris has never been greater," the memo says. "As one example, Solaris is used by about 40% of Oracle’s enterprise customers, which means we have a 60% growth opportunity in our top customers alone. In absolute numbers, there are 130,000 Oracle customers in North America alone who don’t use our servers and storage yet, and a global customer base of 350,000. That’s a huge opportunity we can go attack as a combined company that will increase Solaris adoption and the overall Hardware server revenue. Our success will also increase the amount of effort ISVs exert optimizing their applications for Solaris.”

Oracle says that it will continue to deliver upstream contributions to open source based projects, including Apache, OpenSSL, Gnome, X11, and others. Through the Oracle technical Network, it will provide design information and documentation.

The real question is what’s next! The open source database MySQL could be high on the list. "We can’t do everything," the memo (available here) says. "The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time."

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"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," said Oracle’s spokeswoman Karen Tillman in a statement. Oracle says that Java is now a key asset for Oracle and is seeking an injunction to stop Google from building and distributing the Android OS. The Redwood Shores based company is also claiming monetary damages.

In the end, the uncertainty seeded by the law suit may have the power to shake up the mobile industry for years to come. Google says that about 200,000 Android powered phones are being sold every day.

The Android operating system uses a virtual machine called Dalvik that Google re-compiled and that competes with Java. On its Android developer website, Google says that "Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language." It continues saying that "Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently."

In a clever move, Sun made the "free java" source code available under the GPLv2 license to gain the support of the open source community. However, the "standard edition" of Java had some exclusion to the GPLv2 license. It stated that only the platform code itself was open source, but not the user code running on it.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. district court in San Francisco.

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"As Linux has proliferated up and down the product supply chain, so has the complexity of managing compliance," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation."Our mission is to enable the expansion of free and open source software, so we created this program to give companies the information, tools and processes they need to get the most out of their investment, while maintaining compliance with the licenses governing the software.”

A dependency checker capable of identifying code combinations at the dynamic and static link level will be included in the initial release. A Bill of Material (BoM) Difference Checker will enable companies to identify changed source code components. The set of programs allows companies to evaluate compliance in comparison to top tier best compliance practices, according to the Linux Foundation.

The OPC was triggered by the use of open source code for mobile devices. The recent explosion of applications build for Smartphone's based on Google's Android motivated companies to fast-track their own Linux-powered devices. "You have a really complicated supply chain, where you might get source code coming from lots of different places, whether it is a chipset vendor, a mobile handset provider or embedded software vendor," said Zemlin. "Managing open source license compliance is complicated."

The array of tools and services included in the OPC should allow companies to get up to speed. Adobe, AMD, Cisco Systems, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Novell, Samsung, and Sony, among others, have already put their support behind the new initiative. Official launch date for the package is the fourth quarter of 2010.

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Google plans to release most of the source code developed for Google Wave as open source software, allowing the community to develop its features through extensions.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," said Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, on Google’s official blog site. "We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

Google says that central parts of the code, as well as the protocols like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source. Google will work on tools to allow users to “liberate” their content from Wave.

“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” said Hölzle. “We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

Google first unveiled Wave at its annual I/O developer conference in 2009. The company says that despite huge internal excitement over the possibilities offered by Wave, users did not display the same enthusiasm.

"It's a very clever product. You never know why it didn't work," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt at a technology conference in Lake Tahoe. "Our policy is we try things. Remember we celebrate our failure. This is a company where it is okay to try something that is very hard and not have it be successful."

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OpenSUSE 11.3 uses KDE 4.4.4 as the default desktop environment. However, users that prefer Gnome can choose to install Version 2.30.1 or a preview of the upcoming Gnome 3.0 during the initial setup. Owners of netbook computers can use the lightweight LXDE environment, which debuts in the latest release.

"The openSUSE distribution is a stable, easy to use and complete multi-purpose distribution," Novell says on the openSUSE Wiki. "It is aimed for users and developers working on desktop or server. It's great for beginners, experienced users and ultra geeks, short it's perfect for everybody! OpenSUSE is also the base for Novell's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products. The latest release … features new and massively improved versions of all useful server and desktop applications. It comes with more than 1,000 open source applications."

A first is the inclusion of Oracle’s Btrfs filesystems. While not recommended for production environments yet, users need to configure a separate boot partition to give it a test run since grub does not recognize Btrfs at this time.

The new version includes the updated Build Service 2.0 provides software developers with a tool to compile, release and publish their software, and a full collection of popular open-source programs such as OpenOffice and Firefox. The YaST2 system administration tool combines all programs users may need in one easy-to-use set of menus.

After the release of openSUSE 11.3, the development community starts to focus on version 11.4 that is scheduled to be released in March 2011. The project aims to release a new version every eight months. Critical updates will be provided for two releases plus two months, which at the current release cycle results in a support lifetime of 18 months.

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