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The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it's a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it's a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it's both.

To get a sense what SUSE is in for in 2012, I talked to Nils Brauckmann this morning. Brauckmann's involvement with SUSE started with Attachmate's purchase, so the first time we spoke was earlier this year just after he took over the role. This time I found him much readier to discuss details of the SUSE strategy, if not every minor product detail.

GlusterFS was introduced back in 2007, as an open source network-attached storage system that used Ethernet or InfiniBand RDMA to pool together multiple storage volumes into one colossal pool. It became a cloud storage system in 2009, meaning that it added the elasticity and self-service provisioning necessary to qualify for the official "cloud" moniker. And although it was designed for enterprises, that didn't stop some very clever coders from reworking it into a locally-mountable cloud storage store, now called HekaFS.

What's 338 days late between friends? Last year Hexxeh promised ChromiumOS Lime builds "within the next two weeks." Unfortunately, the schedule slipped just a little, and Lime builds didn't come out until December 2nd. Better late than never, though.

Netflix has taken the wraps off of its ZooKeeper library and has given some insight to coming open source projects as well. The company announced four projects in its pipeline, and a portal on GitHub for its projects.

Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven't caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.

Puppet Labs announced today that it is receiving $8.5 million in Series C financing from Google Ventures, Cisco and VMware. The new round of financing brings Puppet Labs up to $15.75 million, which begs the question – what does the IT automation company need with that kind of dosh?

Crisis averted, so far. Last week's hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.

Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it's the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith's bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department "determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement."

Somewhere along the line, Microsoft went from being the 800-pound gorilla in the browser market to begging users to switch back to Internet Explorer. Now, Microsoft is running a "where's the love?" campaign to offer "free stuff" for users who download IE9. After all these years, hasn't Microsoft learned yet that it can't buy love? Is the company capable of competing on features at all?

This week, SUSE announced that it had joined OpenStack and today the company announced a development preview of SUSE Cloud which is powered by OpenStack. With the green team at SUSE behind OpenStack, along with Canonical, does that make OpenStack the de facto open source cloud? Not so fast – I wouldn't count Red Hat out just yet.

In a large organization, no single IT staffer will be able to observe all the millions of system events and glean from them a pattern worth paying attention to. It's a problem with the level of knowledge decreasing in proportion to the rising amount of data.

One of the questions that comes up frequently in open source projects is "who's contributing to this thing?" For single-company efforts like MySQL, it's usually pretty obvious where the bulk of contribution is coming from. But for projects like the Linux kernel or Hadoop, a little digging is in order. The problem with measuring contributions to projects is it's not trivial figuring out how to credit contributions from individuals as they move from one company to another. Consider, for instance, the question of who really wrote Hadoop. Hint: It's not just Yahoo and Hortonworks, as some might have you believe.

Amazon has declared its Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) production ready. With the update, Amazon is introducing a security center to track security and privacy issues, providing 50 new packages for the distribution and adding access to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the ESRs will be a second-class citizen.

The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.

Microsoft is trying to lock down system firmware to prevent malware and pirated copies of Windows. Unfortunately, this may have some undesirable side effects for Linux users and anyone else that wants to boot an operating system not officially blessed by Microsoft and OEMs.

Jesse Vincent is taking a hard look at where Perl 5 is headed. Vincent, who's at the forefront of maintaining Perl 5 these days, says that the Perl Porters are doing "a stellar job" of getting Perl 5 "back into a reasonable groove." But Vincent says there's more to do and that Perl 5 will continue to evolve.