jfruhlinger writes "When Oracle took over Sun, its hamhanded treatment of the open source Hudson continuous integration project, which resulted in a fork, became symbolic of the company's awkward relationship with open source projects. Now Oracle is looking to make amends, or at least get Hudson off its hands, by handing the entire project over to the Eclipse Foundation."

jbrodkin writes "Oracle hasn't done much to foster a community around open source projects, but the former CEO of MySQL said Oracle's expertise has helped boost the database to new heights from a technology perspective. 'Many in the community will ... feel that it's not as open and open source as it used to be and that's true,' Marten Mickos said. 'But the core product, the actual code, is in better shape than ever. And I think they will keep it that way.' Mickos, now head of Eucalyptus, left Sun before the Oracle merger because he correctly predicted that the company could not survive on its own."

itwbennett writes "Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion. Earlier this month, lawyers for the two companies gave Judge William Alsup of the US District Court in San Francisco a crash course in Java to prepare him for a claim construction conference."

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle releases NetBeans IDE 7.0, which introduces language support for development to the proposed Java SE 7 specification with the JDK 7 developer preview. The release also provides enhanced integration with the Oracle WebLogic server, as well as support for Oracle Database and GlassFish 3.1. Additional highlights include Maven 3 and HTML5 editing support; a new GridBagLayout designer for improved Swing GUI development; enhancements to the Java editor, and more."

jm2dev writes "The title is self descriptive, you will learn what a REST architecture is, the concepts behind it, advantages and constraints, and how to implement web services in a RESTful way serving and consuming content using the Java programming language, as command line applications, desktop graphical client, run by an application server or even as standalone applications. Almost everything you need to know to start working with web services in Java the REST way is covered by this book." Read on for the rest of Jose's review.

Since Oracle has decided to give OpenOffice back to the community, a lot of people wondered if there would be some sort of re-unification with the ex-Oracle and the Document Foundation run by a lot of the original involved folks. The latter has released a statement saying, "the development of TDF community and LibreOffice is going forward as planned, and we are always willing to include new members and partners. We will provide as many information as we can with the progress of the situation. We are currently making every possible effort to offer a smooth transition to the project."

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'"

itwbennett writes "Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."

Mr. Shotgun writes "SEC investigators Jedi Vulcans Cylons claim to have broken up an underground fighting ring in which participants beat each other bloody dueled with lightsabers battled in mind melds nuked Caprica . To add insult to injury, the victors then brokered business deals that skirted US securities law and deprived the losers of valuable stock options midichlorians katras skinjobs . The mastermind behind the Silicon Valley fight club is alleged to be eccentric billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Mace Windu Sarek, son of Skon GE toaster ."

jfruhlinger writes "Some months after leaving Oracle in a huff, father of Java James Gosling has joined Google. It's not clear what his job responsibilities will be there, but given some of his past statements about Google projects — that Android has no adult supervision, for instance — it will be interesting to see what develops."

iceco2 writes "MySql.com and associated sites were hacked today. Among other items some simple passwords were recovered and private emails were revealed. Ironically the attack was performed using a blind sql injection attack."

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat is almost at its goal of being the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in Revenues. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2011 revenues this week which hit $909 million. Going forward, Red Hat has already taken steps to protect its business by changing the way it packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel, making it harder for Oracle to clone. 'We are the top commercial contributor to most of the components of the Linux kernel and we think we have a lot of value and we want to make sure that, that value is recognized,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said. 'In terms of competition, I don't think we necessarily saw anything different from before but I'd say better to close the barn door before the horses leave than afterwards.'"

Blacklaw writes "Intel's ill-fated Itanium line has lost another supporter, with Oracle announcing that it is to immediately stop all software development on the platform. 'After multiple conversations with Intel senior management Oracle has decided to discontinue all software development on the Intel Itanium microprocessor,' a company spokesperson claimed. 'Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life.'"

jbrodkin writes "Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds has scoffed at a new claim that Android violates the Linux license. Google's use of the Bionic Library does not result in a derivative work that has to be licensed under GPL, as some lawyers are claiming, Torvalds says. 'It seems totally bogus,' Torvalds said. 'We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL.' While some claims against Android can be dismissed outright, Google and its partners still must fend off patent lawsuits filed by rivals Microsoft and Oracle."

joabj writes "Last week, Oracle announced that it is decommissioning the Sun.com site, which it acquired as part of the $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. So what will Oracle do with the domain name, which is the 12th oldest .com site on the Internet? Domain brokers speculate Oracle could sell it for $1 million or more, if it chose to do so."

jfruhlinger writes "Yesterday, news broke that Android might have a Linux copyright problem, which would be big trouble for Google, already locked in an IP struggle with Oracle over the mobile platform. Blogger Brian Proffitt looks deeper into the alleged violations. He notes that, while it's possible that Google's on shaky ground, the motivations behind the news release are murky: the lawyer who outlined the violation is an ex-Microsoft hand, and the news was widely propagated by gadfly Florian Mueller, who's tangled with Google over patent issues in the past. Moreover, the alleged violations are in header files, and it's not clear that those are copyrightable; if they are, no actual copyright holders have come forward to complain."

An anonymous reader writes "Ars is reporting that the CCIA, a trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, is calling the copyright wiretaps requested by the IP Czar 'Hollywood's PATRIOT Act.' For those who don't remember, IP Czar Victoria Espinel recently wrote a report calling for more charges of felony copyright infringement under the NET Act, as well as felony charges for illegal web streaming, authorization for the use of wiretaps in going after copyright infringement cases, and several other measures. In short, this means that the copyright cops are coming online."

snydeq writes "MySQL fork Drizzle has been released for general availability, giving companies a viable alternative to Oracle-owned MySQL, InfoWorld reports. 'Organizations that have been seeking a less-expensive alternative to Oracle's brand of MySQL — or a variant devoid of feature bloat — now have an option that Drizzle's creators deem ready to package in Linux distributions.'"

mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."

linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."