Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS.

You remember SeeBeyond Technologies? Rather successful application integration company? Lots of really big customers and $140m in annual revenue? Purchased by Sun Microsystems in 2005 for the knockdown price of $387m.

"The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools." Thus argues John De Goes, president of N-BRAIN, which creates and provides UNA, a source code editor.

Europe's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes delivered a thinly veiled warning to Microsoft Tuesday that the software giant's behind-the-scenes maneuverings to secure industrywide standard status for its document format, Office Open XML earlier this year "risk falling foul of the competition rules."

Neelie Kroes just gave a speech at OpenForum Europe today on standards, "Being open about standards". I put it in News Picks, but I wanted to be sure you didn't miss it, so I am putting it here also.

Several major distributions like Debian or Slackware dumped support for XMMS and no longer include it in their repositories due to the fact that it's old, hasn't been updated for some time and uses the GTK 1.x libraries. XMMS was replaced by the newer Audacious, which uses the newer GTK 2.x libraries. To install Audacious, just type as root apt-get install audacious.

THE UK UNIX USER Group may have to drop its legal challenge to Microsoft's controversial international document standard because it doesn't have the money to see it through.