Oracle, Red Hat ride out recession

For those wondering whether Oracle or Red Hat is weathering the recession best, this week may have settled the question, as the market cheered Oracle for only seeing a 5.2% drop in revenue, with a 7.2% drop in profit, according to CNET News.

Red Hat's fiscal first-quarter revenue was $174 million, up 11% from the prior year, with subscription revenue up 14% year-over-year to $148.8 million.

The company's total deferred revenue balance is now $567.3 million, an increase of 15% on a year-over-year basis. Net income for the quarter was $18.5 million.

ERP software may be largely the realm of large enterprises, but little known open source application, webERP, is becoming more popular and fits into businesses of all sizes, reports Computerworld.

WebERP is released under the GPL and now averages more than 100 downloads per day from SourceForge.net and has totalled some 250 000 from SourceForge alone.

Developed with PHP, MySQL and “minimal use of JavaScript”, webERP aims for cross-browser compatibility.

Key founders of Puppet have incorporated and received $2 million in venture capital funding to advance the open source configuration management software project, says ZDNet.

Reductive Labs, which has evolved from the same named consulting firm founded in 2003, will provide training, service and support for Puppet, the next-generation open source infrastructure automation framework which is reportedly gaining strength and numbers of users.

Reductive has formed partnerships with Red Hat, Fedora and Canonical and has about 20 paying customers. Puppet currently supports Linux, Unix and Macintosh environments.