Oracle faces culture shock

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, a famously activist exponent of competitive strategy, has long followed an approach that sets Oracle's interests against those of its main rivals, with Microsoft, IBM and SAP cast as the enemy, writes Financial Times.

With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, however, he is about to walk on to new terrain where some of the methods that defined Oracle's traditional approach to strategy no longer apply.

Sun's main software assets - and the jewels for which Ellison said this week that he had agreed to pay $7.4 billion for the company - are all closely tied to the open source world: the Java programming language and development tools, which are partly open source, as well as the Solaris operating system and MySQL database.

Red Hat has published the results of a research project conducted in collaboration with Georgia Tech with the aim of determining the level of open source activity in various regions, reports Ars Technica.

The study illuminates open source hot spots and provides some insight into where the development model is most prevalent. European countries took the top three spots on the list and the US ranked ninth.

The report quantifies open source activity and also provides some statistical insight into the potential for growth in open source adoption for each region.

An open source network file system client is cooking for the Windows operating system, courtesy of the University of Michigan's Centre for Information Technology Integration (CITI), according to Softpedia.

Still, behind CITI is none other than Microsoft, and the company is in fact sponsoring the open source network file system client for Windows, according to Microsoft open source community manager Peter Galli.

The initiative is a perfect fit into Microsoft's interoperability puzzle, with Galli pointing out that the new file system is set up to enable Windows to better interoperate with the Internet storage protocol designed for fast file sharing.

The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (Mampu) aims to enhance cost savings by implementing an open source software system in all 724 agencies under its management in the public sector by early next year, reports thestar online.

The agency's deputy director of ICT policy and planning division, Tan King Ing, says Mampu has to date recorded total savings of over RM47 million (R115.8 million) after the adoption of the open source system in 462 agencies.

“We are calling all agencies which are not using open source solutions to come to us so that we can identify the solutions for them,” she told a media briefing for the upcoming inaugural MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2009.