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With the current economic recession, open source software is a route that some enterprise developers are increasingly considering as a lower-cost alterative to proprietary solutions. However, one of the potential issues with open source software adoption is license compliance—ensuring that developers and enterprises are not in violation with a particular license. "Open source has made its way into enterprises of all sorts, and because open source software is so pervasive now, it's critical for companies to look at how they comply with open source licenses," Kim Weins, senior vice president of products and marketing at OpenLogic, told InternetNews.com."Before they can comply with open source licenses, they need to know which open source licenses they are using. As much as you might think that's easy to track, it's not."

At the heart of every serious software development project is the use of some kind of version control code repository. For Ubuntu Linux, that version control system is its own Bazaar (bzr) system, which make it easier for the project to encourage and manage developer participation. Now thanks to a new effort from Ubuntu's commercial sponsor Canonical, Bazaar is now set to receive commercial support.

Key to Google's Web application development effort is its Google Web Tools (GWT) applications, which became open source in 2006. This week, Google debuted GWT 2.0, which provides new developer workflow improvements as well performance enhancements. "Developers are impatient because their users are impatient," Dave Glazer, Google's director of engineering, said during the Campfire One developer event this week. "We all—when using and building software—just want to get things done. The theme of GWT 2 is building faster apps and running them faster."

With MRG 1.2, Red Hat is publishing new performance benchmarks. For Infiniband (define) users, the MRG 1.2 system has throughput of greater than 1.5 million reliable messages per second per system. "On both throughput and the latency results we're seeing somewhere on the order of a 50 percent increase in throughput and a reduction in latency compared to some of the previous benchmarks we've published," Bryan Che, product manager for Red Hat MRG, told InternetNews.com

Members of the Java Community Process (JCP) voted to approve the JavaEE 6 specification this week, concluding two years of discussions and development. Yet even after JCP members' approval for JSR-316, the Java Specification Request (JSR) that defines the new Java spec, the release still has its detractors.

It has been a tough year for a lot of vendors in the IT space and for Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), it's been no exception. But even as it posts a widening quarterly loss, the company's executives aren't easing up on the pace going into 2010. Instead, they described plans to expand Novell's Linux business as well as a new strategy to cash in on what they see as enterprises' need to better manage their workloads across physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. "I believe there is a new market for solutions that address the risks and challenges for computing securely across multiple environments," Hovsepian said. "This need plays to the strengths of Novell -- identity and security, systems and resource management, and our new SUSE Appliance program."

One thing that I've always been curious about, is why Red Hat itself doesn't go after CentOS users in an effort to convert them to paid Red Hat support. Today, I got an answer on that question from Red Hat's Marco Bill-Peter, vp Global Support Services. "We are not actively chasing users of CentOS, but rather find that enterprises are naturally turning to Red Hat for the value of the Red Hat subscription model and support," Bill-Peter said. I personally find that a little 'interesting' especially in light of the comments made by Red Hat's CEO and CFO during recent quarterly investor conference calls. As an overall sales strategy, Red Hat is pursuing the free-to-paid opportunity.

At the heart of Cisco's new SMB products is a different approach and a different operating system than that which it has traditionally delivered to big enterprise customers. As opposed to Cisco's own IOS operating system, the open source Linux operating system is the mainstay in the new SMB products

Among the bits of minutiae that I personally find entertaining about the Linux distribution release cycle is how different distros come up with their respective release names. Ubuntu with its 'interesting' animal inspired names like Dapper Drake and Karmic Koala gets its names from it's Dictator-for-Life Mark Shuttleworth. Rival Linux distribution Fedora doesn't have such an autocratic approach to naming. Instead the process (like much of the distro itself) is driven by the community. It's a process that is now gearing up for 2010's Fedora 13 release.

The first update to PHP 5.3 is now available providing 5 security fixes in addition a long list of bug fixes to the popular open source dynamic language. PHP 5.3 was released at the end of June, so the 5.3.1 point update has been in the works for five months at this point.

HP is partnering with a Linux vendor for the operating system used on ProCurve ONE, though Hilton declined to specifically disclose the name of the vendor. The fact that Linux is being used on ProCurve ONE doesn't mean it's just another Linux server on a network. "Don't think of ProCurve ONE as a server that is open where users can put any application they want on it," Hilton said. "It is a server, but its primary function is to be able to port pre-certified application onto it. So the operating system is of less importance. The fact that we're using Linux is something that helps our partners but it's not necessary a benefit to the end-user, they just see an application running."

When it comes to IT security, is the best defense a good offense? That's the thinking behind the open source Metasploit vulnerability testing framework, which is out with its new 3.3 release this week, sporting new features for researchers to deliver payloads and test wireless, database and browser security. While Metasploit could potentially be used as a malicious tool, its intent is all about verifying security and keeping vendors honest, according to project leader H D Moore. "Metasploit is a great way to enforce the 'trust by verify' method of IT security management," Moore told InternetNews.com.

While the latest installment of the Red Hat-sponsored community Linux distribution offers many new features, at the top of the list for users including Fedora's project leader, Paul Frields, are improved networking capabilities that raise the bar for mobile connectivity on Linux. "The features that I feel closest to this time, and that have affected me, are the network manager improvements in mobile broadband, which are pretty extensive," Frields told InternetNews.com. "Not only do we have a provider database that makes it easy to tether your phone to your laptop and get online, but also we've got functions to allow use of newer EVDO cards and mobile USB interfaces that are out there."

"There is an immense number of virtualization improvements and features in this release," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields told InternetNews.com. "These things will affect anyone using virtualization across the board." Virtualization has been a big push this year for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). It's also a big area of focus for the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux 12 release, which is due out next week. The Fedora Linux distribution has been including virtualization technologies beginning with the Fedora Core 5 release in 2006 and has been steadily adding new virtualization features ever since. In Fedora 12, the open source Linux community project is adding new technology to improve virtualization memory management and performance.

Software updates aside, the real key to the new openSUSE release is about how the Novell-led community distribution itself comes together. "This cycle for us has been a lot about increasing the independence of the project and being able to allow contributors to work directly with openSUSE, as opposed to going through people that work with Novell," Brockmeier told InternetNews.com.

"We want to make it a lot easier for Windows developers to get their hands dirty on Linux, deploy on Linux and debug their software on Linux," Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and vice president of developer platforms at Novell, told InternetNews.com. "We're trying to eliminate the barriers to adoption for Mono and Linux and address the developer concerns that we've heard over time."

Red Hat execs explain why Linux vendor's Linux virtualization management solution runs only on Microsoft's rival OS. Andy Cathrow, product marketing manager for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, told InternetNews.com. "We spent a lot of time talking to customers to see what their view was on this and I think with the possible exception of Red Hat, everyone has some Windows in their datacenter."

"One of the reasons why we've been so successful is we've been able to have a place where people with different sets of interests can come together and work," Leung said. "For the most part, people believe it's a neutral playing field, though every year there is a different company that owns Apache, from IBM to Sun to Google, but that's mostly a joke."

Red Hat has been talking about its new virtualization strategy for much of 2009. Today, the Linux vendor is making good on that talk with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor (RHEF-H) as well as a management platform (RHEV-M). The new virtualization products are intended to help advance the adoption of virtualization and enable cloud computing infrastructure deployments. "Today marks a milestone in Red Hat's virtualization roadmap, the immediate availability of RHEV-M an operational management system for virtualizing servers as well as RHEV-H a standalone, lightweight high-performance hypervisor built on KVM," Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CTO Brian Steven said during a press conference. "With these additions to the virtualization product family, Red Hat has dramatically lowered the bar for IT to deploy and manage virtualized environments based on the RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] platform."

Back in 2005, I wrote a story for InternetNews.com where I wrote that I expected PHP 6 to be out in 2006. Here we are three years later and guess what? No PHP 6. What happened? Is it ever going to come out?