Anne Zelenka recently predicted that software businesses will move from the extreme 'closed' and 'open' licensing models toward the center, what she refers to as 'clopen', or hybrid closed and open licensing models. I think she's missing something.

"...The problem is that the moment Mozilla becomes public it will exist for its shareholders benefit and not the web and its users. Not that their interests are diametrically opposed but any intersection less than a 100% could signal the end of Mozilla as we know it..."

Charlie Schluting

One of the best uses for Linux is special-purpose, tightly managed distributions for a single purpose, and Untangle has created one of the most impressive applications of this principle. The Untangle Gateway bundles together a list of applications that even seasoned sysadmins couldn't install and effectively manage in a timely manner. We've been playing with the Untangle Network Gateway for a few months, and we must say: "well done."

One of the reason that open source has yet to make a huge impact on business in Europe is that there are relatively few ways that it can make its voice heard. The newly-formed Open Business Organisation of Europe (OBOOE) aims to change that:

The most overlooked open source security vulnerabilities, according to Palamida researchers, occur in Apache Geronimo, JBoss Application Server, Libtiff, Net-SNMP and ZLIB. "The most popular projects appear in every test. This always surprises companies. There is from three to 10 times the use of open source code [in software enterprise uses] than companies realize," said Theresa Bui-Friday, cofounder of Palamida.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales - "alpha" version of his open source community-driven search engine, 'Wikia Search.' The basic premise is that instead of using a typical algorithm to prioritize search results, users can rate them on relevance.

I had a play with the site today, and it appears this will initially take the form of a simple five star rating system placed alongside each search result -- though the system is not yet active.

Although Wales insists the engine could eventually become a significant player in the search space, its reliance on user feedback means that it will take some time to become effective. As a result, don't expect it to challenge Google in terms of depth and relevance of results any time soon.

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

Analysis: Most analysts agree it all depends on what Sun does with MySQL, the leading open-source database management system.