Sun used strong-arm tactics and made threats to the owners of an open-source directory project to wrestle away control, according to one of the former owners and creators of the project.

Today is a very special day here at Sun Microsystems, and especially for the Project Darkstar team in Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Project Darkstar has been open sourced today and is available for immediate download!

Just as Microsoft has being accused of playing dirty over sales tactics and patents, the software company has launched its first open source organization. The CodePlex Foundation aims to act as a liason between commercial enterprises and open source developers and communities while increasing open source participation, says the foundation.

Red Hat has signed on to participate in Sun Microsystems' open-source Java Standard Edition (SE) project, OpenJDK, and to coordinate its own Java development efforts for Linux with the project.

One of the big concerns arising from the pending Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo, and of proprietary open source in general, is the fear that a project’s owner will abuse its power, even kill a worthwhile project.

Over three years, the OpenSolaris project has gathered some community under Sun Microsystems Inc. (SMI) guidance. The whole project resides at www.opensolaris.org and is focused on the open flavor of Solaris operating system, licensed under CDDL.

IBM and Sun Microsystems yesterday released the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project to make it easier for developers to use and develop ODF applications.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

Damien Katz, whose Apache CouchDB recently hit 1.0, provides some excellent tips on creating a successful open source project in his blog Getting your open source project to 1.0.