Sourcesense teams with Microsoft

Despite continued turmoil over standardisation efforts surrounding its latest Office file formats, Microsoft is pairing with Sourcesense, a European open source systems integrator, to work on projects that integrate open source software with the Office 2007 applications suite, reports Internet News.

That and a second announcement seem to be meant to telegraph to developers and users a Microsoft commitment to expanding support for open source projects.

The companies plan to help develop a new version of the Apache POI Java libraries for handling Office file formats, with updated programming interfaces built to support Microsoft's Office Open XML file formats, according to a joint statement.

To date, Red Hat has been one of the most financially successful open source vendors on Earth. The goal now though is to grow even more to hit a new financial milestone: $1 billion in revenue, says Internet News.

"We believe there is tremendous opportunity for Red Hat over the next decade and that we're still in the early stages," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said during the company's fiscal 2008 year-end conference call. "We are pleased with our fiscal 2008 results of surpassing $500 million in revenue and we are now squarely focused on our next goal, to become the first billion-dollar revenue open source vendor."

Revenue at the Linux vendor hit $523 million for its fiscal year 2008, which is a 31% increase over its total 2007 revenue tally. The 2007 total revenue figure of $400.6 million was a 44% improvement over Red Hat's fiscal 2006 year-end revenue.

A group of US universities is blazing a new path in open source software. The members are building a set of enterprise applications - the big, important, mission-critical ones that have long been the exclusive domain of software companies like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, reports Infoworld.

The first application is the Kuali Financial System, a financial management application designed from the outset for the specific requirements of colleges and universities. It's available under a variant of the Apache 2.0 licence. The first deployment is a small school in Nairobi, Kenya: Strathmore University, which estimated that it cut deployment costs by more than half compared with using a commercial product.

The software project is being overseen by the Kuali Foundation, a non-profit group that brings together academic institutions, grant funding and a small but growing list of commercial partners, all committed to an open source software model for a suite of administrative applications.