Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today the availability of Ingres Database 10, the latest version of the company's flagship open source database product.

Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos says there's still "more to develop and more territory to conquer", and predicts Microsoft will "become one of the biggest friends of open source".

IBM is licensing technology from an open-source database company it's invested in, hoping to convince Oracle customers they should switch to its next DB2.

Though the tools for voice control and dictation in the open source world lag far behind those in the commercial arena, I decided to see how far I could get in querying a database by voice and having the computer respond verbally. Using a number of open source tools, I'm happy to report success.

According to a post on the MySQL blog site last night, by MySQL's Vice President for Community Kaj Arno, Sun Microsystems plans to purchase MySQL AB, the commercial firm selling enterprise database products built atop the ubiquitous open source database which represents the M in the LAMP open source software stack.

Black Duck has analysed its database of 200,000 open source programs to see which programming languages are most popular. The database is used by the company as part of their compliance and license management services.

Anyone following the open source phenomenon can’t help but be amazed at what appears to be volunteerism on a massive scale for corporate gain. Almost every company in the world has some strands of open source code floating around their company.

Sun Microsystems has backtracked on previous plans to release important backup features for its MySQL database under a proprietary license, following widespread criticism from the open source community.

Mickos [Mårten] was recruited to lead open-source database provider MySQL AB in 2001 by chief technology officer and co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, a college classmate. Since then, the MySQL database has become one of the most popular open-source technologies around, used by many of the biggest Web 2.0 sites.