When the "Software MegaCorp Sues Over Some Patent" scenario was tossed about, it was usually Microsoft cast as the villain, with the usual "Watch out for Google!" voice or two. Yet, after Oracle acquired Sun, it wasn't really a surprise to learn they were choosing to be less "open" and more "profit oriented".

It was a Friday the 13th double-whammy. First, Oracle came out and said they were suing Google, and then word leaked that OpenSolaris is dead as a Sun project.

The up-and-coming NoSQL server, MongoDB, has just released their latest version: 1.6.0.

New features include sharding, replication, and a slew of internal improvements.

The Khronos Group has released the specification for OpenGL 4.1. They claim this release surpasses Microsoft's Direct3D. However, Ars Technica says "Whether this truly constitutes a leapfrogging of Direct3D 11 is not obvious."

Read more at Ars.

If it does, then this could be good news for game developers, everywhere, as MS has enjoyed a substantial lead for game graphics with D3D. If nothing else, it may spur Redmond to push a little faster; they've gotten a bit lazy.

I was listening to FLOSS 127 with Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper aka FreeBSD Girl. They had on Guillermo Amaral famous not only for his contributions to PC-BSD and KDE contributions but also his work in promoting Open Source in Mexico.

The discussion centered around a variety of topics related to promoting the use of Open Source Software in Mexico, including topics around Open Source vs Piracy, use of OSS in government and university, and lastly the slow adoption rate of OSS in Mexico because of the language barrier. There isn't enough support for Mexican Spanish in open source projects. At best they will get a translation in to "Spanish for Spaniards".

I think I have the solution for this, and it's crowd sourcing of the localization, and I'm ready to partner with a project to see if it works.

Microsoft recently changed the license for the DLR to Apache 2.0. Is this a change of heart for Microsoft?

No, not really. However, they do seem to be more "in tune" with the rest of the industry. For the past few years, they've had to fumble around with a suddenly-changing landscape while relying on good, but not great, technology.

The reality of the market is that a lot of genuinely superior software is free, as in beer and speech. If it can be said that Microsoft is a marketing company, then it can also be said that they're good at it.

Without much fanfare, MS changed the license for their Dynamic Language Runtime to Apache 2.0, as well as the IronPython and IronRuby language implementations which require it.

Conjectures for this change range from compatibility with GPLv3 to purely marketing, and from a broadening appreciation for open source to yet another attempt to crush it.

At OSCON 2010 this week Rack Space Cloud announced a new initiative to bring "open" to the cloud platform with Open Stack. Giving them out of the box credibility to them is NASA, branding the platform in their case as NEBULA Cloud Computing Platform. I think this is an excellent move. My hopes for this is that it will start to standardize the industry a bit and while it will limit consulting dollars I might make arbitraging between the different suppliers, it will also make it a lot easier to move customers from one site to another.

At OSCON 2010 this week Puppet Labs (formerly Reductive Labs) just received $5M in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, following $2M of Series A funding they received just last year from True Ventures.

If these guys sound familiar, you will remember the interview with Luke Kanies on FLOSS 93 with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. As is typical of the show, they got a broad spectrum from uber-technical to the non-technical.