Cloudera debuts Hadoop support with $5m in funding. The financial value of open source. More patent problems for Red Hat. Government open source projects on both sides of the pond. Symbian’s release plan. And more.

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Cloudera makes it official
We previously reported the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects back in October. The company made its official debut in not-so polite open source society with the launch of its distribution for Hadoop and commercial support. The company also confirmed that it had raised $5m in funding from Accel and other investors including:

“Mike Abbott (senior vice president, Palm), David desJardins (early Google employee), Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr), David Gerster (entrepreneur), Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Youssri Helmy (entrepreneur), Dr. Qi Lu (president of the Online Services Group, Microsoft; former executive vice president, Yahoo!), Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL), In Sik Rhee (former chief tactician, Opsware; founder, Loudcloud), Mendel Rosenblum (founder VMware), Jeff Weiner (president, LinkedIn; former senior vice president, Yahoo!), Dick Williams (CEO, Illustra; former CEO, Wily Technology), Gideon Yu (Facebook CFO; former senior vice president, Yahoo!; CFO, YouTube).”

The financial value of open source
We previously noted that Bruno Von Rotz had calculated that that the total financial value of the today existing open source code base is $100bn to $150bn. Carlo Daffara performed some calculations of his own to confirm that assessment and then performed some more calculations to demonstrate that an project containing 10 million lines of code costs €210m ($273m) less if 75% of the development uses open source software.

More Red Hat patent problems
Patent problems for Red Hat have recently involved being sued for patent infringement. However, the company has also got in hot water with AMQP-related developers for apparently claiming a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match, an extension of AMQP. Kirk Wylie declared himself “apoplectic with rage” at what he saw as a “really bad maneuver on the part of Red Hat”.

Matt Asay insisted everyone should “Get real. Be reasonable. [and] Settle down.” While Red Hat maintained that there is “no reasonable, objective basis for controversy”. Did that satisfy Kirk? It did not. More on this later in the week, one suspects.

Government intervention
Following its recent open source conversion The UK government launched the UK’s first national open source project, the National Digital Resource bank, which enables schools to create, search for and share digital content online. Meanwhile the US Department of Defense released its corporate management information system under open source licenses via an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI).

The best of the rest
# “How to create an unbelievable amount of buzz” Christopher Keene on openness as a marketing tool.

# Carlo Daffara provided details on The FLOSSMETRICS study on OSS business models, now with 218 companies.

# Red Hat on board for Cisco’s Unified Computing System.

# Wind River launched Wind River Linux 3.0.

# Richard Stallman told eWeek Free software is not about saving money.

# Free Software Foundation Europe president Georg Greve discussed what makes a Free Software company.

# The Symbian Platform release plan.

# Jaiku is now open source.