ReadWriteWeb

First of all, let's leave aside the issue of whether we're in a bubble or not, and just assume that we are. Ashlee Vance has an excellent piece in Business Week looking at one tragic aspect of this bubble: too many mathematicians are flocking to Silicon Valley to work for companies like Google, Facebook and Zynga to work on advertising platforms. Former Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher is quoted saying "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

I couldn't agree more. But I disagree with the subheading of the piece "Tech bubbles happen, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. This one--driven by social networking--could leave us empty-handed." Thanks to this bubble, we've already got Apache Hadoop, Apache Cassandra, Membase and many other free open source tools for working with big data. If the bubble popped tomorrow, researchers in many fields would still have all of these tools.

STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.

Wiredset created the protocol to deal with the challenges it faced when building the Trendr API. The team needed a way to offer extremely high-volume API calls with low latency, deliver the results in real-time at scale, and do so through a RESTful interface.

Neo Technology, the sponsor company of the graph database Neo4j, has released the Community Edition of Neo4j under a GNU General Public License (GPL). Previously, it was available under the Affero General Public License.

"That means that in every scenario where you can use MySQL for free, you can now also use Neo4j Community for free," writes Neo Technology co-founder Emil Eifrem on his blog.

Microsoft is trying hard to become an open source friendly company, and it's made some strides since the days in which Steve Ballmer was calling Linux a cancer. But today, everyone pays lip service to open source. It's harder to walk the walk than to talk the talk, as we explored in our article on how to spot open-washing.

Microsoft has open-sourced various projects, is working with developers to run open source programming languages on its operating systems and recently hired a senior director of open source communities.

Over the weekend we told you about Oracle's killer quarter. One of the interesting things about how well Oracle is doing is that a large part of the company's revenue growth is coming from new licenses for its proprietary database software. Even as database types are diversifying and open source competitors step up their game, Oracle is still crushing it.

David Linthicum wrote earlier this year that the won't open source won't gain in the cloud. I disagree. Plenty of open source software is being used to build clouds. But I think what we're seeing is that the cloud isn't curbing the adoption of proprietary software.

Are you still using proprietary databases in your enterprise? Are you expanding the use of proprietary databases, or phasing them out?

What do we know about developers? What can we deduce about what they don't do?

We can make the educated guess that open source developers are unfamiliar and not really interested in the "one stack fits all" approach that the enterprise giants still battle to control.

Oracle's sales increased 37% to $8.76 billion last quarter, according to Bloomberg. Cloud computing gets some of the credit for the revenue jump, causing a surge of interest in Oracle's databases and a 29% gain in new license sales.

Earlier this year David Linthicum wrote a post titled "Amazon's Oracle move shows open source won't gain in the cloud" in response to Amazon Web Services offering Oracle Databases on RDS.

Until now, Ushahidi has been most known as a service for reporting location during times of crisis. From its use during the earthquake in Haiti to, most recently, the revolution in Egypt and Libya, the service has been used to help humanitarian workers quickly report location using SMS technology. Today, the company has taken a bit of a turn with the release of its open-source check-in service.

Now, anyone with a bit of PHP knowledge and a server can create a Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places or check-in service of their own and keep their location data out of the hands of the public and corporate alike.

More than half of the 517 organizations surveyed by Gartner use open source software (OSS). When the firm first started tracking open source in the enterprise five years ago, only 10% of organizations were using OSS. Gartner published the results in a report titled Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software. This announcement summarizes the findings.

Decision makers aren't just looking to OSS because it's cheaper - they're also trying to gain competitive advantages through open source. "Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions," reads the announcement.

We've been chronicling what has been a rather frought six months or so for Java, ever since Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google last summer for copyright infringement in its Android software. That lawsuit has prompted a flurry of responses from Java developers (including observations from the "father of Java" James Gosling) and from the Apache Software Foundation (which resigned from the Java Executive Committee in December).

No surprise, then, this chain of events has resulted in what seems to be a shaken confidence in Java. Indeed, that seems to be the consensus from a survey taken at JavaOne last fall. The survey was meant to gauge the Java community's thoughts on Oracle and open source.