The importance of transparency. GroundWork gets a new CEO, CFO, funding. Nokia updates Qt. MontaVista adopts Moblin. Is Oracle about to acquire Virtual Iron? And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live on Twitter @caostheory

Not just open, but transparent
Transparency has been a recurring phrase on open source blogs in recent weeks. Carlo Daffara focused on the importance of transparency in dealing with partners while Roberto Galoppini recently noted the importance of transparency in relationships between open source vendors and their communities. This week Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl covered the importance of pricing transparency, maintaining that transparency is not just useful but essential for modern software vendors: “If you don’t have a clear pricing model driven by channels and inside sales you’re just dead as a company. The days of enterprise elephant hunting is over.” It was a theme that was taken up by Sonatype CEO Mark de Visser, who expressed surprise at the number of open source vendor that seem to have something to hide when it comes to how much their products and services cost.

Best of the rest
# GroundWork Open Source confirmed Peter Jackson (not that one) as president and CEO and appointed Wendy Nieto as CFO. Meanwhile OStatic reported that it had also raised an undisclosed amount of Series D funding provided by JAFCO Ventures, SAP Ventures, Canaan Partners and Mayfield.

# Nokia announced version 4.5 of Qt and the launch of Qt Creator, a new IDE, while also discontinuing Qt Extended.

# MontaVista adopted Moblin and formed the Meld embedded Linux community.

# Talend provided an update of its progress in 2008.

# Jefferies & Co’s Katherine Egbert thinks Oracle is getting ready to acquire Virtual Iron.

# Infobright delivered a version of its open source data warehouse software for Windows.

# Protecode launched software intellectual property audit services.

# Ars technica article on the importance of community: Building belonging is the secret to open source success.

# Kirk Wylie pointed out that just because Open Core can be done wrong, doesn’t make it a flawed strategy.

# UK Government contributed to Open Source with consultationXML.

# Which is more evil, open core, or copyright attribution? Asked Luke Kaines.

# CITTIO launched an open source initiative called Project Zeppelin for cloud monitoring and instrumentation.

# CollabNet claimed 200,000 community members.

# Jonathan Schwartz took to video blogging to explain Sun’s open source strategy.

# Dana Blankenhorn: How Acquia makes Drupal more valuable.

# Sam Varghese – Governments and open source: never the twain shall meet.

# Roberto Galoppini: Open Source usage statistics: About how Bitrock Network Service helps.

# Matt Asay: Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux not breaking RHEL.

# Enterprise Architecture Solutions announced the Essential Project, open source enterprise architecture support tools.