Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Open source software, while not synonymous with Java, may often be seamlessly integrated with Java code to produce a versatile synthesis that makes developers' lives much easier. In recent years, developers have taken some open source dynamic languages, commonly referred to as 'scripting languages,' and adapted them to the more mainstream Java platform.

OrecX announced the formal debut of its Oreka Total Recording (TR) software solution for customer service management professionals, leveraging the power of open source in bolstering efficient call-center operation. Oreka TR allows organizations to comply with regulatory requirements and improve customer service by recording and retrieving phone calls without disrupting operations, exhausting annual budgets, or paying for extra implementation services that never get used.

Also in the book, DeFrank writes about Ford's opinion of Bill Clinton's addiction to women. Ford says about Clinton: 'He's sick - he's got an addiction. He needs treatment. He's sick. You know there is treatment for this kind of addiction. A lot of men have gone through the treatment with a lot of success. But he won't do it, because he is in denial.' DeFrank saved his thoughts on the upcoming election in a separate speech, which he gavae the next day. 'If Obama wins, he will win by a landslide margin. If McCain wins, it will be a very small margin.' thinks DeFrank.

Black Duck Software announced a substantial expansion to the volume of open source software managed in the Koders.com code search engine. Koders.com now contains 15 percent more code through the addition of C and C++ code governed by open source and other licenses. The addition will enhance Koders' position as the search engine of choice for developers looking for reusable open source code, methods, examples and algorithms.

Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board.

In the first annual survey of its membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance found much optimism despite a murky economy with 83 percent of participants saying they would see a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 of open source related software and services.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, a fully supported and integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris and Linux operating systems. The Web Stack software includes the open source, standards-based software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun OpenSSO Express, a new offering that provides enterprise support and indemnification for the technologies available in the OpenSSO project. OpenSSO is an open source, identity management project, providing highly scalable, high-performance single sign-on, access management, federation, and secure web services capabilities.

Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) has concluded a system integrator partnership agreement with U.S.-headquartered Apatar to distribute its open source data integration suite in South Africa. KID will use, consult, train, and offer support services for the Apatar integration package that offers a single interface into all integration projects across Mac OS, Windows, and Linux using an open source architecture and modular applications that deliver flexible deployment options.

Zoho, the online Office wannabe, has gotten Swisscom, the telephone side of the old Swiss PTT monopoly, to offer its 300,000 business customers a suite of Zoho's SaaS applications as part of a six-month pilot through its Teamnet portal. The Zoho Business suite, including Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting, will be free.

SnapLogic announced the SugarCRM Solution Pack, an extension to the SnapLogic open source data integration framework. SnapLogic enables enterprises to integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and to create custom integration solutions, including application integrations, enterprise mashups, and rich Internet applications (RIAs). The SugarCRM Solution Pack enables integration of SugarCRM with other SaaS applications, behind-the-firewall enterprise applications, Web sites, and other data sources. The Solution Pack supports both standard SugarCRM deployments, as well as Sugar On-Demand implementations. SnapLogic also announced that it has joined SugarCRM's SugarExchange program.

IONA has announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements.

IONA announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements. As a FUSE Partner, Chariot Solutions' consulting customers will have access to IONA's services for its FUSE product family, featuring fully supported, enterprise releases of leading Apache Open Source projects including ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel.

As predictable as the bet that night will follow day, Apple sued a little widely watched wannabe Mac cloner in Florida called Psystar that's been selling a $399 box called Open Computer for the last few months.

Red Hat announced that InfoCamere, an organization responsible for managing the IT systems that connect and secure over 100 Italian Chambers of Commerce, relies on Red Hat and JBoss solutions for flexibility, reliability and ease of use for its mission-critical systems.

Photon Infotech announced the opening of the Photon Drupal Training Center, a new facility that will leverage and expand Photon's experience and expertise with Drupal, an open-source PHP-driven Content Management System. With a goal of certifying 200 new Drupal experts a year, Photon will have the industry's largest and best trained army of Drupal consultants in the world.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Optaros has launched DoCASU 1.0, a user interface framework for Alfresco deployments as an open source project. The project will drive open source adoption rates and help users assimilate Alfresco's enterprise content management systems. DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework.

Black Duck Software announced that IONA Technologies has licensed and deployed the Black Duck Protex platform to ensure the proper use and validation of open source code in IONA's product development organization. IONA developers, managers and legal counsel use Protex to increase the efficiency of the development process by evaluating open source licenses, security issues and other potential complications related to open source code assembly.

Red Hat announced advancements that extend the Company's Linux Automation strategy by providing expanded capabilities and incorporating broadened community involvement for secure management of both users and systems across virtual and physical enterprise infrastructures.

Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison.

Apatar launched Apatar On-Demand for Salesforce.com CRM and QuickBooks accounting software. Apatar On-Demand Edition is a hosted service that synchronizes order data between Salesforce.com CRM and desktop QuickBooks accounting software. It was designed for business users, so the process of setting up the integration link does not require technical skills.

Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to the SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison.

Sun is offering to put its open source Glassfish application server and MySQL database on as many servers as a company's got for a flat annual subscription - no counting servers, CPUS, cores or virtual machines, it says.

After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people to wondering whether Intel, when it finally does upgrade, will go to the Vista-beholden Windows 7 or to Linux or the Mac, its newest hero. It also got other people to remembering that Intel exhibited the same resistance to XP when it was new. It took four years for XP to get 50% of the market.

Curl announced the release of its Curl Data Kit (CDK), the second product to be delivered from Curl's Open Source initiative. As the newest addition to Version 6.0 of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform, the CDK library facilitates building data-centric applications in Curl and provides support for local SQL databases. By allowing the storage and retrieval of data using the popular SQLite engine, the CDK library is an important foundation for occasionally connected computing (OCC) applications developed with Curl.

Jedox AG announced the release of Palo 2.5, the latest version of its flagship application that allows enterprises to centralize key Excel spreadsheet data for use throughout the organization. Leading the lineup of valuable improvements to Palo 2.5 are a newly-optimized MOLAP (Multidimensional OnLine Analytical Processing) engine and intelligent local data cache, giving users even faster read and write-back performance. Other improvements include faster multi-dimensional data processing, an enhanced multidimensional formula editor, and an advanced query capability.

MuleSource announced general availability of Mule Galaxy Enterprise, a new production-ready solution for storing and managing SOA artifacts offering new enterprise-class features such as clustering for high availability, an extensible query engine, and more. Mule Galaxy Enterprise, the open source SOA governance platform with integrated registry and repository, builds on the success of the Mule Galaxy Community Edition, released in January 2008.

Oracle announced new releases of Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition. The new releases and enhancements signify Oracle's commitment to continued innovation across the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, while maintaining the open source dual license business model.

Open source applications provider Red Hat has introduced three applications targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. It has introduced embedded Linux Hypervisor for hosting virtualized Linux and Windows environments, which provide virtualization with improved security, high performance, and a wide range of hardware.

Red Hat saw earnings rise 6.6% to $17.3 million, or eight cents a share in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31 on revenue up 32% year-over-year and 11% sequentially to $156.6 million. EPS was dead flat year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $130.7 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially. Training and services were up 64% to $25.9 million.

Nokia wants to buy the 52% of the Symbian operating system that it doesn't already own to open source it and set it free. It's a defense against advances into the fragmented mobile space that Nokia and Symbian dominate - particularly - from the looks of case - against Google's nascent open source Android initiative and the freebie Linux-based LiMo Foundation - but then there's also Apple's proprietary iPhone, Microsoft's equally proprietary, royalty-charging Windows Mobile and the ever-present Blackberry and Palm.

Quest Software announced the latest release of its Java profiler, JProbe 8.0, which is now offered as a plug-in to the Eclipse Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The release of this capability aligns with the increased adoption of the open source development. Launching JProbe in an Eclipse environment enables users to adopt continuous performance testing best practices.

Apatar announced the CDYNE Death Index connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector verifies the Social Security number against the U.S. Social Security Death Index database and returns whether the customer is departed, eliminating the possibility to use a deceased person's identification or deliver goods to individuals who do not exist. Using the CDYNE Death Index Web service, Apatar checks the legitimacy of social security numbers extracted from corporate applications (such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM) or databases (MySQL, Microsoft Access, Oracle, etc.) and allows for this data to be filtered or cleansed.

HP has open sourced the Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) that it got from DEC by way of Compaq. It's sent the 16-year-old Alpha-based source code, representing what it calls 400 R&D years, over to Sourceforge under the GPLv2 license as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system. It says it will provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources.

Protecode announced the general availability of its software development tool for governance and Intellectual Property (IP) management. The latest release enables commercial software developers and open source creators to accelerate managed adoption of open source code in a simple, painless process. Additionally, the software is now available to the Eclipse community for anyone working on an active Eclipse project. Protecode automatically generates records of software content, identifies and reports associated pedigree and licensing information by checking its properties and compliance against an organization's policies, establishing IP ownership and creating a software Bill of Materials (BOM).

Red Hat announced three strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. These initiatives will enable customers to deploy virtualization across their IT infrastructure by offering features and cost benefits that go beyond competitive solutions. With this portfolio growth, Red Hat solutions provide the market with comprehensive virtualization capabilities.

Genuitec announced the availability of MyEclipse 6.5 Blue Edition; a next-generation ALM and open source-friendly IDE for WebSphere. Of note, users will be drawn to multiple technologies not currently supported by IBM's RAD, such as Maven4MyEclipse (a professional implementation of Maven2), popular open source mainstays such as Spring, Hibernate, JPA, the Matisse Swing GUI Designer and more. In 6.5, users will also have the ability to run multiple WebSphere server instances, migrate WSAD/RAD projects to MyEclipse Blue Edition and enjoy WebSphere 6.0 portal server support. These advanced features offer organizations maximum flexibility to manage the entire application life-cycle with the infrastructure they already have.