Canonical has announced a new type of support for enterprises running Ubuntu that need some extra hands-on help: the Premium Service Engineer (or PSE). A PSE Ubuntu expert would working as a single point of contact for Canonical's larger customers, becoming "virtual team members" with the company's IT staff.

Matt Asay has written an interesting post speculating that Oracle might use the delay caused by the European Commission investigation into its acquisition of Sun to drive the price down. Sounds reasonable enough to me.

Imagine the following scenario: You're an integrator that wants to quickly deploy ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications for your small business customers.

Open-source company Red Hat will initially offer its hypervisor management tools for Windows systems only.

Linux distributions designed specifically for use on netbooks is nothing new. Canonical produces the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu for these small-sized devices, Intel has their Moblin distribution that is very fast and offers an attractive interface, gOS has their own netbook distribution, Linpus has QuickOS, and the list goes on.

TomTom, the European GPS company that got into a patent battle with Microsoft early this year, is now launching an open source navigation project called OpenLR.

Open source software developer Red Hat Inc., riding a six-fold uptick in partner membership, recently bolstered its channel program by adding a new top tier, three specializations and a raft of sales, marketing and technical benefits.

Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn't been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we'll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something's missing here: MySQL.