Reaction to Marten Mickos’s departure from Sun. On open letter to President Obama. Lots of announcements from Sun, the LIMO Foundation and WS02. Mozilla offers to help EC investigation of Microsoft. Black Duck raises funding and gets a new CEO. The state of Red Hat. And more.

Mickos fallout
Kaj Arno maintained that “MySQL’s culture and business philosophy will live on in Sun.” He added: “In fact, you could say MySQL now becomes mainstream at Sun. Former MySQLers continue in key positions, in some cases with a mandate to generalise and apply MySQL related learnings on other open source products.”

For example, Charles Babcock reported that Zack Urlocker is taking on the role of VP of life-cycle management across multiple product lines including MySQL and Sun’s portfolio of Java middlware.

Savio Rodrigues noted that Marten’s departure “is a blow to Sun and its open source street cred. But it’s not insurmountable.” Dana Blankenhorn agreed.

Elsewhere Chris Keene revealed that Marten was once arrested by a Sherriff at the Progress headquarters during a spat between MySQL and Progress about the MySQL trademark.

An open letter to President Obama
Executives from the Collaborative Software Initiative, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, Hyperic, Talend, Cleversafe, Compiere, Medsphere, MuleSource, Atomic Object, OpenLogic, Sonatype and Unisys have signed an open letter to President Barack Obama requesting that his administration consider greater use of open source.

Why make one announcement when you can make five
Sun has launched Glassfish Portfolio, a new open source stack built around its Glassfish Enterprise Server. It includes a new Glassfish Web Stack with support for open source projects such as Tomcat, Memcached, Apache, PHP, Ruby and Python, as well as the Glassfish ESB and Glassfish Web Space Server, a new portal product developed in conjunction with open source portal vendor Liferay. Paying subscribers also have access to Enterprise Manager.

The LIMO Foundation was busy this week, announcing that Telefonica and SK Telecom had joined its board of directors, that six major operator members will specify and deliver handsets using LiMo Platform implementations in 2009, as well as updates to LiMo Platform, and the endorsement of the OMTP BONDI specification. It also selected Wind River as the systems integrator to deliver the common infrastructure, tools, testing and integration services for the LiMo platform.

Meanwhile WS02 announced the release of WSO2 Carbon, its componentized service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, not to mention WSO2 Business Process Server, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 2.0, WSO2 Web Services Application Server 3.0, and WSO2 Registry 2.0.

Mozilla offers to help EC investigation of Microsoft
Mitchel Baker offered her assistance to the EC as it considers an effective remedy after it concluded that Microsoft’s tying of its web browser Internet Explorer to its dominant client PC operating system Windows infringes the EC Treaty rules.

Another good week for business card printers
Black Duck Software raised $9.5m in equity investment and debt financing and named former Red Hat and EqualLogic marketing exec Tim Yeaton as its new CEO.

Meanwhile EnterpriseDB hired former Red Hat sales director, Jay Barrows, as vice president of sales.

Hippo appointed new executive vice president of North America as it looks to target opportunities Stateside.

Infobright named former MySQL channel exec Mark Burton to its board of directors.

The best of the rest
Jim Whitehurst’s State of the Union at Red Hat.

Funambol announced version 8 of its MobileWe software for syncing mobile phones.

GroundWork Open Source has updated its Monitor product.

After his criticism of the Open Solutions Alliance, Glyn Moody published an interview with its president, Anthony Gold.

Is Open Source A Recession-Fighting Tool? At InformationWeek Serdar Yegulalp delves into some analyst reports, including our own Cost Conscious report from 2006, and our recent musings on the potential for M&A, to find out.