His paternity leave having developed into eternity leave, Marc Fleury is quitting Red Hat.

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com) announced today that AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West (www.ajaxworld.com) willtake place on September 24-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Centerin Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 2,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of everystripe who will be converging in Silicon Valley to attend the most comprehensive meeting on the West Coast, covering the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Apps & Web 2.0.

Open sourcing Java won't matter - it's a non-event. Ruby and Ruby on Rails won't make it in 2007 either. I still do not see a compelling reason to switch. AJAX hype is stronger than I thought mainly because of the life support offered by frameworks like GWT. But still, I'm not going to recommend enterprise IT shops make any serious investments in AJAX.

the Oracle Management Pack for Linux provides Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program customers with comprehensive Linux server lifecycle management, helping to reduce the complexity and cost of managing their Linux operating system environments.

'The Linux Foundation helps in the next stage of Linux growth by organizing the diverse companies and constituencies of the Linux ecosystem to promote, protect, and standardize Linux,' said Jim Zemlin, former executive director of the Free Standards Group, and now leader of The Linux Foundation, as it was announced today that the two leading consortia dedicated to the advancement of Linux - the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) - have signed an agreement to merge and a new combined organization.

SmartGRAPE (http://www.sm art-grape.org), an open source collaborative community working to improve predictive recommendationsystems for online buyers, announced the launch of its community codedevelopment system and the seeding of starter recommendation algorithms.

In an attempt to elbow past the competition, Penguin Computing has put out a dual-Opteron compute node that's priced to start at $1,499, about 25% below rivals like IBM, HP and Dell, according to senior vice-president of product development and management Pauline Nist. Penguin claims it's the cheapest price available. To get to the price point Penguin cut the number of internal SATA hard drives from four to two and trimmed the number of PCI Express slots from four to one while upping possible memory to a maximum 64GB, reportedly the highest memory capacity available in a 1U form factor. Nist said the features jettisoned are unnecessary in an HPC cluster environment and are only there to begin with because the enterprise has dominated rack-mount design. Canning them reduces the cost of clustering, she said, without sacrificing performance or efficiency. The widget is called the Altus 600 and can be fitted with two dual-core Opteron 2000 chips.

SYS-CON Events announced that it will launch a new online chat program called 'Ask The Faculty' which will allow AJAXWorld Conference & Expo delegates to chat with conference faculty members before and after the event. AJAXWorld 2006/2007 faculty has more than 200 distinguished members.

Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

The Marena Group in Lawrenceville, Georgia, has always followed its own path and bucked convention. A maker of compression garments for athletic and post-surgical use, the company exports approximately half of its domestically produced goods to overseas markets - a true exception in the garment field. The company has also followed its own instincts in the area of information technology and has readily embraced open source products.

Understanding the complexity of AJAX at the browser level is critical to refining and debugging rich AJAX applications that leverage Web technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XMLHttpRequests. Adding a third-party AJAX runtime heightens the complexity and sufficient browser tooling becomes critical when attempting to build a rich Internet application around existing libraries. The Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides both a multi-faceted set of browser tooling features as well as support for integrating and building on existing AJAX runtimes.

Since the beginning of the software industry, nearly every software company in the world has followed the same business model: its own employees develop the software, which is closely held intellectual property, the software is delivered to clients in binary form, and users run the licensed software on their own computers. Today, this model has been challenged by a new paradigm: open source. Developed and maintained by volunteers across the world, distributed to users at no cost, and available as source code, open source software is radically different from its proprietary counterpart. Each of the new characteristics of open source software forces organizations to develop new ways of thinking about how they procure, implement, test, and deploy it.

Terracotta took a major step this month by open sourcing all of our Java clustering technology. We believe that this step will make a powerful clustering option readily available to the Java community and indeed could help make the notion of clustering itself simpler and more ubiquitous. This is an initiative that is many months in the making, and I wanted to share our thinking and motivation for it with you.

This has been an exciting month for proponents of the Linux server. Two of the world's largest software companies have started to provide Linux support and services. As you probably already know, on October 25, Oracle announced that they would be selling their own derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux called Unbreakable Linux. This was huge news. Then, in an even more shocking announcement, Microsoft stated on November 2 that they would be collaborating with Novell for better Windows and Linux interoperability and would even be giving away coupons for SuSE Linux Enterprise collaboration and support. And deeper into the rabbit hole we go...

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

The Free Software Foundation is recommending gNewSense and Ututo as beginners' Linux distributions. Ubuntu user and member Ryan Lortie has written an Open Letter to the FSF raising some big points dealing with the goals of the FSF and how to accomplish them. We bring you the full text.

Scalix Corporation and SugarCRM today announced that their mutual customers can now integrate their Linux-based messaging from Scalix with their customer relationship management (CRM) system from SugarCRM, using multiple versions of Microsoft Outlook, for a fully integrated, server-to-server CRM and messaging solution.

SugarCRM Inc. announced today that it has reached more than 1,000 paying customers since the first edition of its commercial open source customer relationship (CRM) software was released in September 2004. In addition, Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, establishing a worldwide community of users who strengthen the product through contributions, quality improvements, extensions and language translations.

Six months into his $350 million Red Hat adventure and JBoss head Marc Fleury, middleware's outspoken bad boy, is on three-months a-heck-of-a- time-to-take-it paternity leave - with the usual speculation that he's not coming back - after he mouthed off to eWeek about how 'I went to Red Hat to get an investment in the JBoss R&D division to grow it quickly' and how 'That still really hasn't happened?.We invested in sales, support and marketing, but this is really the operational side. The R&D really hasn't benefited from a huge investment for which I was hoping and was the main reason I went to Red Hat.'

Volanté Systems offers a new Linux POS (point of sale) solution for the hospitality and gaming industries, where the demand for complete reliability and security is critical. Their creative approach to wireless mobile computing makes Volanté the perfect wireless solution for venues such as stadiums, trade shows, casinos, arenas, race tracks and outdoor sales areas where conventional POS terminals aren't practical nor feasible.

The YHGfL network, which runs on a Linux environment to help the not-for-profit organization keep costs down, opted for CRYPTOCard?s KT-1 two-factor authentication keychain token solution because it was cheaper than other products and could run on open source software.

A survey of technology decision-makers shows very strong customer support for the recent agreement between Microsoft and Novell designed to improve interoperability between Windows Server(R) and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Nearly all respondents agree with improving interoperability, having products that work well together, and having tools that make it easier to manage mixed Windows(R) and Linux environments.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and other Linux kernel contributors announced the availability of major Linux serviceability improvements including new kdump and SystemTap features. These enhancements are available in the latest releases of Linux distributions.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance announced a $100,000 sponsorship of the Gelato Federation, a global technical community dedicated to the advancement of Linux on Intel Itanium architecture. The partnership will strengthen the community of support for Itanium 2-based platforms and open source through research, education, development and improvement of Linux on the Intel Itanium processor.

FSMLabs released carrier grade real-time operating system support for the new ATCA telecommunications reference design from AMD. FSMLabs' RTLinux for the AMD Opteron processor-based 64-bit Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA) platform from Pinnacle Data Systems (PDSi) is available immediately and is superbly suited to emerging convergence applications where data plane and management functions need to be tightly coordinated.

MontaVista Software, embedded Linux provider announced a technology preview of its 5.0 products which are scheduled for release in the first half of 2007. The interactive preview will be available to all of MontaVista?s current subscription customers. The technology preview will not only allow customers to experience the new features available in the 5.0 product lineup, but will also provide them with a quality platform for testing current applications in the upcoming 5.0 product environment.

IBM announced that IBM System p5 servers, running the Linux OS, have achieved industry-leading benchmark results that beat HP servers in important measurements of business and scientific performance. The IBM System p5 servers using the Linux OS surpassed HP Integrity and ProLiant systems in server speed according to recent SPECcpu performance benchmarks. SPECcpu, a software benchmark product produced by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.

Availigent, provider of Application Service Management software for Linux-based, dynamic data centers, has joined the Open Grid Forum to accelerate the development of a common set of standards for grid computing. Grid computing is an emerging computing model that allows many networked computers and data resources to be dynamically pooled and shared as virtual resources.

Linux-based server solutions provider Collax announced expanded bandwidth management of the Collax Security Gateway. The UTM solution in Version 4.0.10 prioritizes and guarantees bandwidths in Virtual Private Networks; giving Voice-over-IP (VoIP), and other critical business applications such as ERP systems, priority in the VPN tunnel.

Zi Corporation, provider of intelligent interface solutions, has announced its software is now integrated with Qtopia Greenphone. The Greenphone is the first Linux mobile device tool for application developers. Zi software has been pre-integrated on Qtopia to enable faster handset development and commercial deployment.

Taiwanese systems integrator AR Infotek has built an 'entry-level' 1U rackmount server appliance platform around an AMD x86-compatible embedded processor. The Teak 3258 is based on a passively cooled Geode LX-800 processor, and features soldered-down RAM, and two LAN bypass ports.

Enea plans to market a small-footprint TCP/IP stack add-on for OSEck, its compact RTOS (real-time operating system) for DSPs (digital signal processors). The 'DSPNet' stack should enable DSP farms running OSEck to connect via gigabit Ethernet to heterogenous, distributed systems running Linux and other OSes, according to the company.

Open-Xchange Inc. has said that it has signed a partnership and support agreement with MySQL AB. This partnership enables Open-Xchange to embed the MySQL database into its leading open source collaboration server. Open-Xchange will add MySQL support to its Linux based collaboration solution, Open-Xchange Server. Both companies will work to ensure optimized interaction between MySQL databases and Open-Xchange groupware functionality for joint customers.

Taiwanese pop superstar Jay Chou launched Motorola's thin, Linux-powered Rokr E6 multimedia phone, at the ITU Telecom World tradeshow this week in Hong Kong. The fourth-generation music phone is just over half an inch thick (14mm), and features a 2-megapixel camera and business card reader.

Trolltech has plans to speed up the use of Linux-based cellphones by offering developers a Linux-based OS and applications suitable for mobile phones. Greensuite, built on the Qtopia embedded Linux platform for mobile phones, is a set of applications similar to other mobile operating systems and applications such as Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile that developers and handset makers can use to create rich applications.

SafeNet is shipping an 'integrated IPSec VPN platform' software said to support VPN connections from next-generation mobile devices. QuickSec 4.1 Server and Client Toolkits helps developers incorporate the most current IPSec security standards, such as MobIKE, into carrier-grade security gateways, network routers, mobile VPN devices, and desktop VPN clients, according to the company.

Mandriva launches Mandriva Flash, the first Mandriva Linux Live USB key. Hit the right key with Mandriva Flash. Bringing its long experience with Live CDs, Mandriva aims to offer the best performing live system. All you have to do is plug in the USB key, turn the PC on and the Mandriva Linux 2007 operating system is ready to use in no time, with all you need for office work, Internet and multimedia tasks.

AMD has announced the transition to 65nm process technology, beginning with the immediate availability of energy-efficient AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core desktop processors. The move to 65nm process technology enables AMD to produce more processors on a 300mm wafer, for increased production capacity, while continuing to aggressively scale performance and reduce power consumption.

Technalign, Inc. has announced it has released its new Pioneer Linux operating system to the community. The first release is the 32-bit version to be followed immediately by the 64-Bit Version. The community edition includes many features found previously in Frontier and is available for download. Both Pioneer 32 and 64 include Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird and Kmail email clients, OpenOffice.org, and many others such as K3b for CD/DVD burning.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), vendor neutral Linux certification and Novell announced a series of initiatives to promote Linux professional credentials and the global adoption of open source software. In particular, LPI welcomed the cooperation of Novell on the development of LPI's upcoming enterprise-level certification program, LPIC-3.