Popular open source news

Dries Buytaert celebrates his thirtieth birthday today. For someone that has built an open-source community that numbers in the millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of contributors, Dries is a very unassuming, interesting, and likable person.

This has been a big week on the open source database front. Yesterday, Ingres launched version 9.2 of its database, which you can download here. And today, Sun Microsystems announced the new version 5.1 of MySQL, with a near-final candidate release downloadable here, and a final version expected on December 6th.

SunPorch, the leading manufacturer of ready-to-assemble sunroom kits, has reduced its annual advertising spend by $100,000 because of its deployment of PBXtra Call Center from Fonality(R), a leading provider of open source unified communication systems for businesses.

Open source rules in a bad economy, but perhaps not always for the reasons suggested. Forget source code for a minute, and put development aside. One of the biggest assets that open source provides is a low-cost distribution model. In a bad economy, you want your software to find budgets still filled with cash, rather than spending money to chase money, and nine times out of 10 coming up empty.

Optaros Inc., assemblers of Next Generation Internet (NGI) applications, completed a global in-house implementation of SugarCRM, a leading commercial open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution. The deployment includes enhancements to Optaros' revenue module and the creation of a substantial forecasting module.

WebXchange is suing Microsoft--or, rather, three of its customers--for allegedly infringing its patents in Microsoft Visual Studio, as CNET reports. Just desserts?

It was probably inevitable given what Google did with Gears, but Yahoo said Tuesday it's releasing BrowserPlus software as open-source software. BrowserPlus and Gears are aimed at improving browsers' native abilities so Web applications can better match those running natively on a computer's operating system, and Gears already is open-source software.

Gartner researchers have found that Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software in some form or the other. The report added that most of the remaining entities are also planning to start using open source applications in the coming months.