Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.

At CeBIT Open Source 2009 Martin Michlmayr, past Debian project lead, presented his current projects FOSSology and FOSSBazaar, and spoke about the role his employer Hewlett-Packard is giving him in the governance project and how the FOSSBazaar work group is organized within the Linux Foundation.

Ruckus has released the Zap source code under a modified BSD license to provide the tool to the world, and hopefully spur development of this and other related analysis tools. Zap measures performance, statistically, to provide insight into the true nature of how a network can perform.

Security company Qualys has released a new open source tool, 'BlindElephant', which can accurately fingerprint web applications down to version level in order to better manage the security issues which now plague such software. According to the company, the need for such a tool is pressing.

Pandora FMS is a performance & availability monitoring system, ready for big environments. It uses agents for local monitoring and can do several kinds of remote network monitoring. Agents works on Linux, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and BSD systems.

Software development company Loohuis Consulting and process management consultancy OpenDawn have released a new binary analysis tool that is designed to detect Linux and BusyBox in binary firmware. The program, which is freely available for download, is intended to aid open source license compliance efforts.

A free software Framework for Modular Analysis of C (Frama-C) has been released. It is written in OCaml and uses the C Intermediate Library (CIL). Much more information can be found on the project's "more information" page.

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.

I recently spent some time talking with Christine Martino, Hewlett-Packard's vice president of Linux and open source, about HP's plans to provide services around open-source software. That HP is doing this is now old news (the news broke this week). But the truly interesting thing in this is HP itself.