Monty turns his attention to the East. The value of JBoss to Red Hat. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Monty Widenius predicted that the EU will clear Oracle-Sun “any moment”, turning his attention to Russia and China.

# Meanwhile the release candidate of MariaDB 5.1 is now ready for testing.

# With EC approval imminent, All Things D reported that Oracle has prepared its letters to Sun employees.

# Marc Fleury shared his thoughts on the Save MySQL campaign, suggests JBoss is making Red Hat $100m/yr.

# Hugo Roy published a draft of Why Free Software matters for Society.

# Disney Enterprises released its Ptex 3D modeling library under the BSD license.

# MuleSoft delivered Mule MQ JMS messaging software.

# Nexenta Systems claimed 740% revenue growth in 2009 over the previous year.

# Open source community forum software vendor Vanilla Forums raised CAD500,000 Series A.

# Datamation published The limits of Linux’s “live free or die”.

# The Canonical and Ubuntu leadership asked users what new proprietary apps they’d like in the next version.

# While Canonical launched a dedicated support program for Lotus Symphony.

# An insight into open source initiatives at BT, via FossBazaar.

# John Mark Walker speculated on the future of Zimbra at VMware.

# BAE Systems selected MontaVista Linux to power new artillery and naval gun systems.

# Assimilate Technology released its VersaFix open source FIX Engine for the .NET platform.

# The 9 most important events in open source history, according to Royal Pingdom.

# Interview with Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten on the importance of transparency.

# Russ Danner argued that leadership, rather than license, is key to a strong development community.

# Andrew Aitken suggested that helping CIOs get into the game might be the best way to sell them open source.