Today I readed on O’Reilly Radar this new:

Sun was arguably the first great open source success story, co-founded by Bill Joy, who not only led the Berkeley Unix project but wrote the open source TCP/IP stack on which so much of the internet was built.
Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design.
Sun has long been the single largest corporate contributor to the open source ecosystem promoting others open source projects such as openoffice.org and netbeans.
Sun Microsystems announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire open source database leader MySQL AB for $1 billion.

To the question in comment :

“How they want to monetize their investment?”

O’Reilly reply with:

… have to look at is Red Hat to see a company directly monetizing open source at reasonable scale. It’s not Microsoft, but few companies have ever been that profitable…

I find interesting also the tought of Matt Asay that in his post say:

Perhaps most importantly for MySQL and its employees, an acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source.

Is it an exciting day for open source?

SilverStripe is a great example of a well-constructed open source project. It makes innovative use of technology and it is easy to use too.

Sigurd Magnusson on the SilverStripe Release Announcement Forum inform You can find new Themes and widget.

• WIDGETS
  Google Adsense Widget 0.1
  Make money on your site by displaying Google’s ads. By Ryan Rymax.
• Google Custom Search Widget 0.1
  A powerful multi-website search to enhance your site. By samiam14.
• LastFM widget
  Advertise what music you listen to. By sharntehnub.
• PayPay donation widget
  Let people easily donate money to you. By Simon Welsh.
• Ohloh Contribution widget
  Shows your global rank as programmer. By Simon Welsh.

Download and preview widget
all of which have been produced through the Google Highly Open Participation Contest!
You can get produce further themes and widgets through the Google
Contest.
If you would like to contribute to Silver Stripe, you can joining to the SilverStripe developer documentation wiki!

I’m registering to the silverstripe developer network to contribute to this amazing CMS.

Technorati Tags: Silver stripe, cms, open source, Sigurd Magnusson

Government funds were destinated to Open Source in Italy, but we do not know where are now the funds for the last year 2007. Some operators in Open Source field have written a letter to the Minster for Technology to have some explanations about that. Read the following posts.

In Roberto Galoppini’s blog you can read through many links about that.

I want to help the diffusion of this letter writing this post. You can find the letter published at punto informatico portal.

Yesterday, Wikia Search has been released. It’s a new search engine, developed by Wikia Inc. , company founded by Jimmy Wales, the wikipedia founder.
It’s still an alpha release , with 100 million pages indexed, and the results doesn’t are so good.

But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

Someone are already thinking , it is a Google’s search engine opponent also because the Wikia algorithm is open and anyone will should contribute to improve it.
Yes, Wikia follows the 2 Wikipedia’s axioms : open source and collaboration.

Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “miniarticles” that appear at the top of popular search terms. These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:

* Short definitions
* Disambiguations
* Photos
* See also

At the bottom of every page is a linke to “Post bug reports here”… please use that link liberally to give us large amounts of feedback.

I’m glad to announce the availability of the first book coauthored by Roberto Galoppini on open source in public administrations, published by McGraw-Hill “Finalmente Libero. Software libero e standard aperti per le pubbliche amministrazioni “.

I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I got a chance to read his chapter on Open source business models, reporting ideas derived from his blog postings on the matter. He asked me some feedback since I’m used to work by Italian public administrations and because I am advocating open source usage by Italian schools. As MPI researcher I am on duty for seeking informatics ditactis for all Sicilian public schools, and I am following new trends and IT technologies aided at educational fields.

Italian schools are managed locally all over Italy, but effectiveness and efficiency are not an easy goal to achieve for schools, and I believe that open source could greatly help. After five years of experiences by different schools, ranging from colleges to universities, and I am convinced that beyond economical reasons open source has also a cultural advantage that matters.

Best wishes to Roberto.

Technorati Tags: Roberto Galoppini, McGraw-Hill, Open Source, Education, Busines Model