The future of MySQL. The SCO Group terminates Darl McBride. And more.

The future of MySQL
Monty Widenius urged Oracle to give up on MySQL in order to land Sun while Richard Stallman, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group sent a letter to the EC urging it to block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. All of which prompted Florian Mueller, who it should be noted is working with Widenius as part of his campaign, to claim that there is growing public opposition to Oracle owning Sun’s MySQL.

Meanwhile The VAR Guy reported on rumours that Oracle is to combine Unbreakable Linux and the MySQL database following the completion of its acquisition of Sun, Carlo Piana explained why he offered to help Oracle’s legal team in its attempts to acquire Sun/MySQL, and Matt Asay argued that EU’s MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source.

In the interim, Sun Microsystems is to lay off up to 3,000 people.

Incidentally, one of the implications of Stallman’s letter, as pointed out by Matt Asay and Simon Phipps is Stallman’s admission that the GPL alone doesn’t guarantee software freedom

Best of the rest
# SpringSource released version 3,0 of its Spring Java development framework and also announced tc Server Developer Edition.

# The SCO Group eliminated the positions of CEO and president, waving goodbye to Darl McBride, while announcing a new restructuring plan and the desire to raise funding and sell non-core assets.

# Jive Software announced that it has received $12m from Sequoia Capital in its Series B round of funding.

# REvolution Computing announced $9m in new funding and named Norman Nie CEO.

# The Symbian Foundation announced the release of the platform microkernel (EKA2) and supporting development kit under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). http://www.symbian.org/media/news/pr2009_10.php

# Infobright has appointed Mark Burton Interim CEO.

# Talend launched Talend Integration Suite 3.2.

# BonitaSoft unveiled Bonita Open Solution 5.0 BPM software.

# Open-Xchange and SugarCRM partnered to combine their open source collaboration and CRM software.

# Rapid7 acquired Metasploit, the organization behind the open source penetration testing framework.

# SplendidCRM 4.0 Community Edition runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform.

# Zend Technologies has released a public beta of Zend Server 5.0, the new version of the company’s PHP Web application server.

# IBM and Canonical are teaming up on a Ubuntu Linux-based hybrid cloud computing and desktop product for businesses.

# As Red Hat passed Microsoft’s stock price, CIO.com asked, now what?

# Zmanda teamed up with ParaScale to launch a Disk-to-Cloud (D2C) backup product.

# Sandro Groganz listed the top commercial reasons why open source communities matter.

# The Open Database Alliance entered phase two, with the involvement of Georg Greve.

# A graphical representation of six different models of co-creation/open innovation.

# Bradley M. Kuhn: “Open core is the new shareware“.

# Andrew Aitken: Open Source and The Geographic Divide – Europe and North America.

# Glyn Moody presented the reasons why open source companies need to give up control.

# Savio Rodrigues noted that with open core, the question is when to give up control.

# Sandro Groganz reported on marketing “At the Edge of Open Source Communities and Companies”

# Carlo Daffara argued that COMmunity+COMpany is a winning COMbination.

# James Dixon claimed that the Free Software movement limits its own future.

# IPwatchdog reported that open source success must embrace proprietary features.

# Mark Logic released its open source MarkLogic Toolkit for PowerPoint to integrate Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 with MarkLogic Server.

# Savio Rodrigues argued that open source vendors should focus on value and price.

# TechWorld reported that IBM is to offer open source VoIP for small businesses.