Sun reports second quarter results. Compiere reports 216% quarterly revenue growth. EnterpriseDB grows customers accounts. Hyperic and JasperSoft team up on BI for IT. Microsoft embraces Apache but resists GPL. And more.

Sun up or Sun down?
There was some comparatively good news from Sun, which reported a net loss of $209m on revenue down 10.9% at $3.2bn. As Sam Diaz at ZDnet notes, however, “after excluding one-time costs related to recent layoffs and other costs, the company posted a profit of 15 cents per share, beating analysts’ expectations of a 10 cent loss”. In regular trading, shares of Sun were up more than 5%.

Matt Asay noted the impact open source software had on the quarter, and highlights the leap made by MySQL since the acquisition closed. So is this the start of a turnaround for Sun? Wall Street isn’t sure, prompting The VAR Guy to ask whether Sun is the new Novell.

The Industry Standard certainly isn’t convinced, noting that Sun’s stock-market value of $2.9bn is less than the company’s cash reserves of $3.1bn as of September 30, and predicting that Jonathan Schwartz will step down as CEO by April 30, 2009.

Signs of success
There have been plenty of open source vendors boasting about their successes in 2008 recently and this week was no exception. Compiere reported record revenue and partner growth, including revenue growth of 216% in Q4 2008.

Likewise, EnterpriseDB boasted of 50% growth in new customer accounts and revealed that its Series C1 founding round in October was worth $6m.

A slight note of caution from Matt Asay, perhaps. His experience of customers cutting planned spending on Alfresco shows that open source vendors will not be immune to current economic conditions.

New products and services
Meanwhile Hyperic and JasperSoft announced a partnership which sees JasperServer Professional Edition is being embedded in the new Hyperic Operations IQ, a new business intelligence platform for IT and web operations teams. The product itself does not appear to be open source.

REvolution Computing made its distribution of the popular R statistical software available as a free download, while Jitterbit announced integration with Oracle CRM On Demand.

Meanwhile The Eclipse Foundation’s Ian Skerrett welcomed the proposal for Jetty to become an Eclipse project.

Microsoft’s open source progress
Microsoft indicated that it continues to make progress in its open source efforts, noting that visits to its Codeplex open source project hosting website more than doubled to over 19 million in 2008.

Perhaps more meaningfully the company also released more code under an OSI approved license. This time it has made the source code for the Web Sandbox runtime available under the Apache 2.0 license.

I have always wondered why Microsoft hasn’t embraced permissive licenses like Apache. Its resistance to the GPL is more understandable and will likely endure, as this article from the SDTimes , including the perspective of Sam Ramji, indicates

Mainstream press attention
On the subject of press reports, open source continues to see coverage in some of the more conservative titles. Witness this interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in the FT (which has always been quite proactive in its coverage of open source) and this discussion of Wikinomics in the Yale Daily News. Meanwhile CIO Insight has published a slideshow detailing the 10 areas where open source is open for business. Alongside browsers and operating systems and developer tools are VoIP, business intelligence and ERP.

Open Source Meets Business
I was once again unable to make it to the Open Source Meets Business conference this year, but The Silent Penguin is reporting the highlights, such as Lessons from Mozilla and Open Source is a safe bet, and his own suggested steps towards creating an internal open source strategy.

Community management
I predicted that community strategies will be a hot topic this year, and we continue to see some good articles and blogs on community management and engagement. Matt Asay reported on seven lessons from Mozilla on community building while Dawn Foster explained that online community manager really is a job. Meanwhile CIO.com reported on five things Mark Shuttleworth has learned about organizational change.

Not-actually-open-source-at-all story of the week
Open-Source car set to debut at Geneva Motor Show