As arguably the world's largest open-source company, Google has a big stake in maintaining its place at the heart of the open-source ecosystem. Recent events, however, suggest that Google can't rest on its laurels if it wants to secure the hearts and minds of open-source developers.

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament. The Czech Republic team was just three minutes away from qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 on Sunday before Turkey managed to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win.

One of the big journalistic trends of 2008 was to call every new Internet paradigm open source. Blogging was open source journalism. Social networks were open source crowdsourcing. This was both a compliment and a warning.

The Chicago Tribune suggests that increasing volumes of intellectual property are now being sold at to shore up balance sheets. So who in the open-source world is buying?

Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different. For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007.

It has been roughly a month since Tech Data launched Open Tech — an open source channel partner initiative. Why is the big distributor interested in the open source market? And how is Open Tech performing so far? I caught up with Tech Data VP Stacy Nethercoat for answers. Here's the interview.

Consolidation continues across the IT channel and the open source software market. The latest example involves Sparxent, a mid-market solutions provider, buying XAware, an open source data integration specialist. XAware is the second open source company to get gobbled up this week. And in both cases, venture capitalists seem to be consolidating their financial bets. Here’s the scoop.

Open Solutions Alliance finds that changes in the economy will open the door for new deployments of open source in business.

2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution.