Opera has freed its first open source project, moving code for its Dragonfly debug tool onto the popular BitBucket hosting service. Dragonfly - a website debug tool similar to Mozilla's Firebug - was always intended as an open source project. From its inception in 2008, it carried an open source BSD license. But until this month, the code repository sat on Opera servers.

A young maker of Web-based project management software is jumping headfirst into the open-source world as a way to woo users from the dominant, but possibly vulnerable, Microsoft Project.

Opera 11 was released just a few hours earlier today, and it comes with several notable features, a new interface, and many other improvements.

Projity is a company that provides two alternatives to Microsoft's popular Project application. Project-On-Demand is software-as-a-service (SAAS) code that runs in any browser and is available via a monthly subscription. OpenProj is a desktop version of the application that is built on Java and is licensed with the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

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.

Opera Widgets, unlike most other browser plugins, can be downloaded to serve as browser-independent desktop widgets. These are managed through Opera Widget Manager, so the Opera process remains open (without running the browser). This tutorial explains how to use Opera Widgets as desktop widgets on Ubuntu 11.10.

Intel has unveiled an ambitious project aimed at developing open source software for mobile devices. The Moblin project comprises a Linux kernel, UI framework, browser, multimedia framework, and embedded Linux image creation tools, along with developer resources such as documentation, mailing lists, and an IRC channel.

Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why.