Oracle claims that the European Commission's public policy against Oracle's takeover of MySQL runs counter to open source freedom and the growing database market.

Matt Asay, CNET New's columnist on the business and politics of open source, takes new comers and the nostalgic among us on a retrospective of just how far the FOSS community has come over the past few years, paralleling his own introduction to and involvement in the community. A good introduction to FOSS for beginners and a good indicator of how far we've come and what we've yet to accomplish.

While "open source" refers to software's underlying license and its adherence to the Open Source Definition, there are numerous examples of open-source projects that offer an open license but a relatively closed development process. But is it open enough? It's been called "fauxpen source" and worse, but we may have to get used to it.

Today, Yahoo moved its open source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own trafic and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing stacks.

Collecting money from customers should be the easy part of your business, but an billing system that underperforms can make life unnecessarily difficult for CIOs.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save.

Reader reaction to our coverage of new Defense Department guidance that puts open-source software on equal footing with proprietary software has ranged from cheers to questions about whether the move will change anything.