Java worried about Oracle's silence

In August, Oracle sued Google, alleging the Android mobile phone platform violated Java patents, writes Javaworld.

A development team lead at Research In Motion expresses dismay about the Android lawsuit: "I find it concerning about suing everyone and that it threatens the open source model," says Allan McIntosh, software designer at Atreus Systems.

Java's fate itself remains a mystery under Oracle, says consultant Evgueni Smoliar, a manager at Capgemini. Smoliar is waiting to see what happens with the Google lawsuit. "I think that will show a lot about the future of Java [under Oracle]," he says. He also expresses disappointment over Oracle's silence about the lack of any plans for a new Java Community Process for enterprise Java.

The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, in collaboration with the Economic Community of West African States, has initiated the Open Source Resource Centre for West Africa, says Ghana.gov.

The deputy minister for communication, Gideon Quarcoo, who unveiled the initiative, explains the idea is about knowledge-sharing and uploading of information, adding that the time has come for West African states to move away from consuming technology, and instead, create technology and own it.

Africa, he says, is not well represented in active growth of open source initiatives, saying that nine out of 350 open source initiatives are in Africa. He advocated the need to raise public awareness on the use of the open source software and to build capacity at individual and institutional levels, stressing that the focus must be on solutions that best serve the needs of the citizens.

Lucid Imagination has unveiled an enterprise version of its commercial search engine offering based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, states CTO Edge.

Previously, the Lucid implementation of the open source search engine technology has been focused mainly on Web sites. But as the amount of data that needs to be managed continues to spiral, Lucid Imagination CEO Eric Gries says that demand for effective enterprise search has prompted Lucid to focus more on traditional enterprise customers.

LucidWorks Enterprise allows IT organisations to scale enterprise search implementations without having to worry about costly licensing fees, said Gries.