Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

The youngest virtualization player to enter the x86 virtualization market is Innotek. And the company has recently announced a new release of its product, VirtualBox version 1.4.0, for Windows and Linux. The new version, like its predecessors, is available as both open source under the GPL as well as under a commercial license which allows you to use the product free of charge (in most cases).

The latest release also brings the fledgling virtualization product into the Apple MAC OS X market, where it will go up against veteran VMware and Parallels as they fight for Mac virtualization dominance.

Read more: InfoWorld

Mountain View, June 16: The high priests of free software have congregated at Google Inc headquarters this week to debate the future of the movement and face down recent patent threats by Microsoft Corp.

Leading names of Linux, the world’s biggest grassroots software phenomenon, are spending three days to Friday debating whether an increasingly commercial open source community should fight or ignore the world’s largest software maker.

Dressed in the alternative software movement’s casual uniform of T-shirts and jeans, the group is coming to grips with internal divisions that sap at its success — Linux is now used to power desktop computers, major Web sites, mobile phones — since rival factions often create very similar products.

But as many of the world’s top tech companies and corporate customers demand ever more from Linux, open source devotees still fight among themselves with the fervor of a tiny monastic order seeking to root out theological error in their midst.

“Guys: Be seekers of truth, not finders of contradiction,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, organizer of the event, only half-jokingly told the 150 attendees of what is billed their “Collaboration Summit.”

Linux is the best-known variant of so-called open source software — software that is freely available to the public to be used, revised and shared. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services. By contrast, Microsoft charges for software and opposes freely sharing its code.

Recently, Microsoft has sown dissension by claiming open source programmes such as Linux violate 235 of its patents while striking deals to insulate the customers of two Linux suppliers — Novell and Xandros — from patent lawsuits.

On Thursday, Linspire Inc, which sells Linux-based personal computers through Wal-Mart and other retailers, became the third company to strike a patent deal with Microsoft.

Read more: Zee News

Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks the last GPLv3 draft is better than earlier drafts, but he still doesn’t like it much, preferring the existing GPLv2 that the Linux kernel is currently licensed under.

He has problems with the GPL 3’s ban on so-called “tivoization” – Tivo shuts down if users mess with its DRM software – and deals like the Microsoft-Novell pact.

” All I’ve heard are shrill voices about ‘tivoization’ (which I expressly think is OK),” he wrote Sunday on the Linux development mailing list, “and panicked worries about Novell-MS (which seems way overblown, and quite frankly, the argument seems to not so much be about the Novell deal, as about an excuse to push the GPLv3).”

However, he told the mailing list that he might move to GPLv3 if Sun puts OpenSolaris under the GPLv3 like it’s been saying it wants to so it can have a standard license.

“I have yet to see any actual reasons for licensing under the GPLv3, ” Linus said. But “if Sun really is going to release OpenSolaris under GPLv3, that may be a good reason. I don’t think the GPLv3 is as good a license as v2, but on the other hand, I’m pragmatic, and if we can avoid having two kernels with two different licenses and the friction that causes, I at least see the reason for GPLv3. As it is, I don’t really see a reason at all. I personally doubt it will happen, but hey, I didn’t really expect them to open source Java either so it’s not like I’m infallible in my predictions.”

Not that Torvalds is particularly enamored of Sun.

Nope.

To someone on the listing mail he wrote:

Read more: Java Developer’s Journal

Adobe has delivered itself of a public beta of Flex 3, a free open source cross-platform framework for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) except they don’t necessarily have to run on the Internet.

The Flex 3 drop includes a companion beta of the widgetry code named Apollo, now renamed Adobe Integrated Runtime, that will let developers move their on-air RIAs offline to the desktop using HTML/CSS, AJAX, Adobe Flash and Flex itself.

Needless to say this presents another problem for Microsoft, which has its anticipated like-minded Silverlight scheme.

Adobe speaks of a “new generation of applications that work across operating systems and both inside and outside the browser, bridging the gap between the web and the personal computer.”

Salesforce.com has visions of its cadre of developers who build on-demand business application using AIR to make on-demand applications “more compelling.”

Google has been looking over Adobe’s shoulder at how to develop software that works both on- and offline and has come up with the Google Gears plug-in.

Adobe described the open source AIR as including a WebKit HTML engine, an ActionScript Virtual Machine (the Tamarin Project) and an SQLite local database with full text search same as Google Gears is using – and the two should have a common API soon enough.

Adobe says web developers used to relying on a database for storage should be able to build desktop programs without changing their techniques. And Dreamweaver projects will be deliverable as AIR apps.

Read more: Enterprise Open Source Magazine