Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, is working with mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.

“Oracle is now apparently backtracking from previous claims that the European Commission has no credible theory of harm. If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. This is another sign of enormous weakness only three weeks after Oracle withdrew its antitrust application in Russia.

One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments. One more week won’t transform a traditional company product like MySQL into a community project that could be developed by volunteers just because it’s open source. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party.”

Mueller said the delay in Oracle’s response means a decision on the merger won’t come from the European Commission until January 27.

Widenius strongly disagrees with mySQL co-founder Marten Mickos on the Oracle-Sun deal. Mickos as written to EC Competition Commissioner Nellie Kroes asking that the deal go through.

My personal view is that Oracle could spin control of the code base into a foundation like Eclipse, with control based on investment, which would also enable money to flow in from mySQL stakeholders like Amazon.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insists the delay in Europe’s approval is degrading the overall value of Sun, which also controls such important open source projects as Java and Open Office.

I do not disagree.

But due to its open source license Oracle is not gaining control of the mySQL code base, just becoming its commercial sponsor. So why not bring free money to support the code base and have something better to sell support on?

It’s reasonable that Ellison resents the interference of European bureaucrats in Oracle’s affairs. But personal feelings should not get in the way of business. This is business.

Business is just business.

But there was some significant news for the community today. Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.

All the code is open and sketches of the design documents are available now. The final version of the cloud-based operating system is expected to ship at the end of 2010, before the holiday season, executives said.

Google also provided an early demonstration of the web operating system, which sports a Chrome browser-like interface that features application tabs instead of web page tab and a seven second bootup time that is expected to be much faster on its release.

For example, users will see the same clean tabbed style interface but the tabs on the upper left hand of the screen are for gmail, Yahoo, Facebook and any other web service or application customers use on a day-to-day basis.  All of the data, of course, is stored in the cloud.

Executives who showed the demo Thursday said the Chrome OS functions more like a TV than a computer. It is entirely solid state and based on Flash memory storage so there’s no latency that comes with using a hard disk.

The OS uses web-based security model. The software offers a verified boot and cryptographic signature keys that check for and ensure there’s no malware impacted the applications.  Like the Chrome browser, it will also feature security sandboxing to isolate one web application from another.

The web operating system will offer auto-updating and synchronization capabilities.

Go To Market

Google is working with partners to specify hardware competence and reference implementations at the hardware level.  That is, Google Chrome OS will support only solid state drives and select wireless cards. This means that customers will have to buy a new next-generation netbook or device that is designed for the Chrome OS.

The initial form factor for 2010 is the netbook. Laptops and desktops may follow in the future.

Google expects hardware devices to fall in same price range as netbooks are today.  Chrome OS netbooks will be larger and feature a full sized keyboard.

“The code is open. We would not be here if it were not for several large open source projects such as Linux kernel, Ubuntu, Moblin and webskit,” said Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager. ”We’ll be a good open source citizen.”

The open source operating system won’t support other browsers natively but third parties including Mozilla and Microsoft can take the code and do Firefox-based and Windows-based versions of the OS.

More Google Chrome OS coverage:

• Microsoft finds security hole in Google Chrome Frame
• Google Chrome OS security overview
• Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
• The Chromium Project
• Google’s Chrome OS: Will you give up desktop apps?

The integration of Quartz into Terracotta’s platform will ease high availability job scheduling and scaling applications to multiple nodes, the company said. Quartz is currently integrated into SpringSource and Red Hat products and counts Adobe, Cisco, Level 3 and Vodaphone as big customers. It eliminates the need for a central database to handle coordination, Terracotta reports.

Terracotta, of San Francisco, intends to support the Quartz open source project and will maintain the code under the Apache 2.0 license.

The job scheduling software will enhance Terracotta’s use in virtualized and cloud infrastructures, the company says.

“Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups,” according to a release issued by Terracotta on Thursday.

“Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments,” Terracotta announced.

I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.

So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?

These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.

It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.

Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.

This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.

All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.

What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.

Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.

What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.

That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.

With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.

Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.

Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.

MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)

Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.

You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.

Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.

Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.

Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.

Microsoft is gaining.

(The little black duck shown is copyrighted, trademarked, and has always been protected by Warner Bros., part of the Time-Warner media empire. He’s 72 but carries his age well. And Wikipedia knows his middle name.)

Microsoft licenses are now used on 1 in every 40 open source projects. That’s more than Mozilla. More than Eclipse. More than even the Lesser GPL.

Of course in the greater scheme of things 1 in 40 isn’t all that many. Nearly half of all open source projects are still licensed under the GPL v.2. Microsoft’s open source license market share is still less than half that of GPL v.3. (That’s why the cartoon duck is here rather than Black Duck’s little quacker. Think of GPL v.2 as being Bugs Bunny.)

But we’re talking about growing from a standing start. I’m impressed.

Much credit needs to go here to CodePlex, the Microsoft-sponsored open source site whose Foundation is headed by former Microsoft executive Sam Ramji.

NOTE: Ramji runs the Codeplex Foundation at codeplex.org, which is separate from Microsoft. The main Codeplex site is at codeplex.com.

In our recent interview, Ramji held out the possibility that the Microsoft licenses, and process, could tease a lot more code out of corporate repositories outside the software industry.

So there is room for growth there.

The Black Duck report also indicates there is room for growth in GPL v.3. There are now over 10,000 projects on GPL v.3, with many projects on Sourceforge continuing to switch over.

It’s this competition, between the Microsoft licenses and GPL v.3, that I will enjoy tracking most over the next year. What will you be looking at?

ChromeOS is Google’s version of Linux for netbooks, much as Android is its Linux for handhelds. It is a version of Bill Gates’ nightmares from 15 years ago, as Netscape was rising, visions that led directly to the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.

Microsoft got through that crisis unscathed in a corporate sense, but its image was transformed from that of a user-friendly upstart to that of “an implacable force for evil,” as one comedy show said recently, exemplified by the famous Boardwatch cover of Bill Gates as a member of the Borg, the Star Trek bad guys.

The fear, old programming hands will tell you, was that Netscape would turn its Mozilla browser into a full-fledged operating system that, because of its dominance of the browser space, could beat Windows in the market.

Chrome is a lot like that. It is centered on the browser, which abstracts the complexity of Linux from the user. And it’s designed to load fast, a real Achilles Heel for Windows on a netbook. An early version could be available for download next week.

When you’re paying $300 for your machine, you don’t want to wait 10 minutes for the thing to start, and you don’t want to be paying a lot for your software, either. ChromeOS is designed to fix both problems, so I am looking forward to it.

The hope is that the industry which supports ChromeOS will make up in services what it loses in up-front fees. And Google will be able to tie all its online services to ChromeOS, increasing its market share in areas like Mail where it is not yet dominant.

So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?

Competition.

Makers of embedded devices have been moving strongly into open source, especially Linux, and Microsoft was at great risk of being left behind. The announcement was made at the company’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

The news comes against the backdrop of falling market share for Windows Mobile, and increasing market share for Microsoft open source, as revealed in the latest Black Duck figures. They’re not being nice here, they’re being practical.

Here is how Microsoft community development manager Peter Galli put it on his blog:

The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices, to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions.

Note that Microsoft is not open sourcing the TCP/IP stack that .NET Micro links to. That’s someone else’s. But the news will let developers create Internet-linked device networks using .NET. It gives Microsoft an in to a technology open source, and Linux, were threatening to run away with.

The handwriting was probably on the wall here years ago, when Linux bought Wind River, and when innovative start-up Cavium bought MontaVista resistance became futile.

It must be noted that software is just a small part of any embedded, Internet-linked solution. It doesn’t mean you’re getting something for nothing, because the chips the software is expressed in are sold as part of larger devices.

It’s all part of a vision I covered early this decade of wireless networks acting as application platforms, using Internet standards to create systems for home automation, medicine and entertainment that are always on and live in the air.

Now Microsoft has a viable play in this game, and this is very good news for .NET developers.

Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.

What could possibly go wrong?

Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:

1. Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
2. Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
3. The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
4. When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
5. Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)

We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)

Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.

A good start is not the race.

But he is one of the grand old figures of open source. He was in the group that coined the term back in the late 1990s.

Larry was Sourceforge, he was VA Linux, back during the dot-boom 10 years ago. He rode the stock to $240/share, then watched it plummet to nearly nothing in the dot-bomb.

Once had had a Web site, made it run. Made it race against time. Once he had a Web site, now it’s done, buddy can you spare a dime?

But Larry kept his hand in. He became an angel investor and adviser, a “go-to” guy for any open source start-up looking for some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number two.)

The news today is that Larry is the permanent CEO of SugarCRM. Appointed on an interim basis in May to replace co-founder John Roberts, he has pointed the software into the cloud, adding a business model to its large community.

What has he learned in that time?

• Influence is not a contest among bloggers. Augustin’s last blog post is dated July.
• Companies grow through teams. The next negative word about SugarCRM’s people I hear from Larry will be the first.
• The future of open source is in SaaS, in the cloud.

Larry Augustin’s story is proof that second acts in business are possible. Most of those who boomed during the dot-boom were never heard from after the dot-bomb. But not Larry.

His story reminds me of the man who was managing my Atlanta Braves when I first moved here in the early 1980s. He won a pennant, got fired, got kicked around. He got a few gigs, did some broadcasting, advised a few people here and there.

Then he got another shot, in New York, and he took it. His second chance made Joe Torre a sure Hall of Famer.

I can’t guarantee Larry Augustin the same success, but after a decade in the wilderness he has a team again. Hard for me not to root for the “old guy.”