Engine Yard and DimDim obtain new rounds of funding. Sun announces preliminary quarterly results. Symbian Foundation gains more endorsements. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

Three months after open source systems management vendor Qlusters handed its OpenQRM code over to Sourceforge the company has apparently closed its doors and fired its 30 remaining employees. The new is reported by Israeli newspaper Globes, which leaves no doubt about what it sees is to blame for the apparent failure of the company: [...]

“Software should have no nationality, nor even a collection of them,” writes Dana Blankenhorn in his slightly odd post today about the SQO-OSS (Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software) project. “Calling software European, as opposed to American or Burmese, sounds like an effort at exclusion. And a claim that your quasi-nationalistic project is the [...]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written an interesting article over at CIO.com about the lack of policies for open source adoption among enterprises. The article has some interesting input from the likes of Maryland’s Howard County Library, the H. E. Butt Foundation, specialty tool vendor QEP, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Entertainment, HeavyLifters Network, and our [...]

Agenda: * M&A update – IONA Technologies and Linspire * Open source champions of Europe * Are Google open source gates opening up? iTunes or direct download (29:16, 6.7MB)

This week marked Apple’s release of the new iPhone 3G with bolstered connectivity and further refinement of the innovative device. While I had to smirk a bit at the iPhone hiccups, the OTHER device that keeps coming up for me (new models, press calls, wife wants one) is the netbook, or whatever you want to [...]

This is somewhat off-topic and also a personal bug-bear of mine but I hope you will forgive me as it does relate to open source and, in particular, the puzzling problem of source’s inability to make headway in UK schools. The Inquirer is reporting that Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in the [...]

Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker has written a couple of great posts recently on the subject of community, or more specifically the meaning of the term “community” as applied to the open source development process. The posts are particularly interesting to me as they related to an unfinished blog post that has been sat on my desktop [...]

Xandros acquires Linspire. Mozilla sets new world record. Openmoko finally ships. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

Google recently open sourced code for its protocol buffers, a data encoding format which company staffers describe as superior and more efficient than XML for its purposes. It is interesting to see Google back the protocol buffer approach, but the more interesting part of this to FOSS fans is that Google also appears to be [...]

Some time ago I wondered aloud whether free and open source software might one day follow environmentalism from being dismissed as the realm of “sandal-wearing and beard-toting troublemakers or romantic idealists” to being a significant corporate agenda item. While we are not at that stage yet, there are indications that open source development is being [...]

The Business Software Alliance has got itself in something of a flap over the European Commission’s European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services and its stance on patents in standards, according to this report in The Register. The report quotes BSA’s European software policy director Benoit Müller as saying: “Our concern is that they [IDABC] [...]

Score one for open source software in the history and record books. Mozilla announced its Firefox open source Web browser set a Guinness World Record for number of downloads in a day, notching more than eight million downloads in 24 hours June 17-18, 2008. The day also marked the release of Firefox 3, the latest [...]

Progress acquires IONA. Red Hat announces quarterly earnings. Optaros raises new round of funding. (and more)

Click to view today’s 451 CAOS Links.

The Linux world got a little fired up this week following former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony’s blog about Xandros buying Linspire. Carmony’s blog is tinged with his contempt for his old Linux company and particularly its president, Michael Robertson, who has his own history with tech companies. What seems ironic to me is that, according [...]

The figures originally reported here were preliminary and have been revised for a formal CAOS report to be published in the first half of 2009. In the interests of accuracy this data has now been removed. For a full assessment of VC funding in 2008 see this post.