JBoss seems to be undergoing some generational pains as it strives to morph from an open source products company to an enterprise open source products company. So its recent formal announcements covered the enterprise tack: something called Enterprise Acceleration that performs the basic blocking an tackling to show enterprises, ISVs, and systems integrators alike that nobody will get fired for buying JBoss. And then there were the pronouncements to the faithful that, while JBoss is trying to go enterprise, that it won't forget its roots.

In an apparent bid to calm still feisty regulators, Microsoft has agreed to publish application programming interfaces (APIs) for its major software products and provide free access to those interfaces. In addition, Microsoft will free up protocols around its client and server software and has vowed not to sue open source companies that create non-commercial versions of these protocols.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the name of the next Ubuntu release - Meeky Meerkat.

Er, well, it's really called Intrepid Ibex and will likely arrive in Oct. as Ubuntu 8.10.

Hands on A directory service is an application that lets you store, retrieve and modify information about network-attached resources such as users.

If you want to keep a directory of company employees, for example, you would use a directory service instead of storing that information directly in a database. A directory service is created in a directory server, which is built on top of the database.

The beta 3 version of Firefox 3, released this week, will probably be the last version of the browser based on the original Mozilla platform, celebrating its tenth anniversary next week. Work is already underway on a revamp of Firefox's underlying platform - Mozilla.

Mobile World Congress The jockeying for dominance in mobile Linux developer platforms has taken a fresh twist with key announcements from two leading players arm wrestling for advantage.

10th birthday interview Bruce Perens doesn't regret the fact that, since officially co-birthing open source with The Cathedral and the Bazaar author and hacker Eric Raymond ten years ago, Linux and open source have moved from the sandal-wearing fringes to acceptance by Wall Street and big, closed-source industry giants.

Parallels - aka the artist formerly known as SWsoft - will continue its march through China in tandem with Linux maker Red Flag Software.

In multiple media reports over the past two weeks, the US Army has professed its love for the penguin. The Army eventually intends to move from a Windows-based infrastructure over to Linux for its new, roughly $200bn weapons program.

Comment Should Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! go through, the combined company would face one very major infrastructure question - how far is it willing to go in the war against Google?

EnterpriseDB, the open source database company, aims to capitalize on the uncertainty around MySQL's purchase by Sun Microsystems, and is wooing developers with improved capabilities and services.

Barracuda Networks has called on open source advocates to help fight its patent dust-up with Trend Micro over the Clam AntiVirus software package. Specifically, the provider of network-based security products for email and websites is asking for help in dredging up old technologies that were developed prior to the filing of the patent in 1995.

Nokia is to acquire Trolltech, makers of the popular cross-platform Qt GUI API and widget set. Qt (Cute Toolkit) is used by KDE, one of the two most widely used Linux desktops. It is also used in many cross-platform applications.

It was all hookers and balloons at Sun Microsystems when the company first found out that Apple would pick up its well-regarded DTrace analysis tool for use with Mac OS X. Now, however, one of the lead DTrace developers has expressed some regrets after Apple "broke" his software in an apparent bid to protect big media and ISVs.

Mandriva and TurboLinux have mounted a continent-crossing charge on the Linux market. The software makers have formed a development collective dubbed Manbo-Labs dedicated to peace, harmony and a common base for their respective flavors of the Linux operating system.

Analysis Almost five years ago, Sun's then CEO Scott McNealy told me his company had little intention of entering the great database fray. "You know, we haven't decided that is a war we want to go fight," he said. "Why not let them all beat each others' brains in?".

Novell wants you to know that selling its soul to Steve Ballmer was a really good idea.

The grapevine is buzzing with the news Microsoft is looking for developers with knowledge of the Emacs Lisp-based editing tool. The big question is what Doug Purdy - Microsoft's group programme manager for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and web services guru - wants with a 30-year-old text editor that is generally confined to super-techies and how it will fit in with Microsoft's .NET.

The news that the operations chief from a major US airline, Jim Whitehurst from Delta, is taking over at Red Hat from Matthew Szulik is a further sign of the growing legitimization of open source and Linux in the eyes of corporate, mainstream America. It underscores how the “suits to sandals” ratio in the open source and Linux movement sliding further towards the suits.

Dell has caught up to the Ubuntu release machine, adding the latest version of the operating system as a standard option with Linux-friendly laptop and desktop.

Sun Microsystems is the latest big name in Silicon Valley to dangle financial baubles before open source developers to stimulate pet projects.

Novell is delaying the release of its fiscal fourth quarter results due to an ongoing accounting review by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The brouhaha (here and here) surrounding Sun Microsystems and ex-employee Neil Wilson over governance of the OpenDS project - first reported in The Register - continued to bubble this week, not least among Reg Dev's readers.

Have ready some clean towels and a cardboard box, Sun Microsystems is whelping the first in a litter of virtualization products next month.

Sun is sneaking off to a nice quiet closet to birth xVM Ops Center, the physical and virtual resource management stack for the xVM product family. This puppy will be available January 8, 2008.

The open source model has taken its toll on a number of EnterpiseDB staff. The company recently laid off some sales workers and under performers, as it realigns its business.

The success of the Everex gPC this month raises once again the possibility that Linux can make inroads into the desktop market. In stock at Walmart, initial sales of the gPC caused panic on a scale comparable to the recent stock market panic. Not only has the gPC sold well - it has also proved popular.

The complicated world of open source licensing has become a bit more complicated, as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced details of the final version of its Affero General Public License GPL (AGPL).

LG has shown off Voyager - its take on the classic Nokia Communicator design - and Venus - a touchscreen-based, music-oriented slider phone - both of which it plans to release in the US soon in partnership with Verizon.

OpenWorld This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change.

Red Hat and systems management specialist Hyperic have formalized their ties. The companies now plan to create an open source systems management package that will run across Red Hat's portfolio.

SC07 By our count, it has taken Sun about four years and 1,000s of promises to bring Dell over to the Solaris camp in a proper fashion.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz assured us of a Dell win so many times in the past that the discussion started to lose all meaning. "When will you line Dell up?" we'd ask. "Stay tuned. It's on the way," Schwartz would reply.

SC07 Red Hat and Platform Computing have opted to attack the high performance computing realm together.

The software makers this week touted a partnership will see Platform marry its Open Cluster Stack with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The end result? The Red Hat HPC Solution, of course.

M.I.T.'s Information Services and Technology organization has released the source code of MULTICS, a decades-old OS and important forebear of modern day operating systems.

Although there are no systems in operation today that could run MULTICS, the code release may serve as a fascinating research tool for computer scientists and academia.

Virtualization types will now find a fresh beta of VMware's Server 2 software out in the wild.

VMware Server has been VMware's response to rivals who opted to give away their base server virtualization software. VMware used to sell GSX Server - a lower-end package than its flagship ESX Server - until replacing it with Server last year. VMware uses Server to protect its low-end turf and to lure customers toward paying for ESX Server. More than 3m VMware Server downloads have gone out to date with the vast majority of those reaching SMBs, according to VMware.

Volantis, a specialist in making the same content work on every mobile phone, is open sourcing its server, allowing anyone to download and run their content-optimising system for free.