ReadWriteWeb

For a total of 17 years, Karen Padir was an executive at Sun Microsystems, and was present for that company's astounding transition to open source technologies. She was an advocate for MySQL when Sun acquired that project, and then later when Oracle acquired Sun, promising the "Dolphin" faithful that good times still lay ahead. But then she left, to lead the marketing effort for MySQL's principal key competition in open source-derived databases, EnterpriseDB - the commercial provider of Postgres Plus.

Now, Padir is seeing another new and astonishing transition in her field: the open source development community's move towards less structured, higher capacity databases. So last week, EnterpriseDB started building a bridge to Hadoop, the cloud-oriented database born from Yahoo, launching a private beta program for the innocuously-entitled Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop.

Is HTML5 a common platform for rich Internet applications, or a common toolkit for building rich applications on varying platforms? Oracle's response to that question came yesterday, and in typical Larry Ellison fashion, it essentially boiled down to, "We don't give a rip."

When Sun Microsystems produced the first go-round of JavaFX in December 2008, its aim was to build and promote an entirely new declarative language - not Java, not JavaScript - for describing the front-end UI of a distributed app. What developers needed at that time was a simpler, programmatic way to approach the contents of UIs. CSS looked under-developed, and although Microsoft's approach (XAML) was certainly thorough, it lacked the more conservative, procedural approach that veteran programmers were accustomed to.

Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales has just joined the advisory board of CK-12 Foundation - a nonprofit organization that provides standards-aligned online textbooks to kindergarten to grade 12 students. One key element of the organization includes offering "FlexBooks" - a product that allows educators and students to create and edit their own open-content teaching materials. Users can add chapters to existing texts or create completely new material using the Flexr tool.

Web-based sequencers have never really caught on with professional audio engineers and musicians. Products like Avid Technology's ProTools, Ableton Live and Steinberg Cubase have maintained a stronghold on the audio editing space for decades. This is why it came as a surprise to see Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo endorse Indaba Music's private beta launch of the company's new digital audio work station (DAW).

Since last Spring when I first heard about it, I've been patiently waiting to get my hands on Livestation, a streaming television service from UK-based Skinkers, which is based on technology from Microsoft (who took an equity stake in the company in exchange for rights to the technology). Our digital lifestyle blog last100 previewed Livestation, which uses peer-to-peer technology similar to Joost, last July. Today, Livestation started granting beta access to people on the waiting list.