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Oracle Corp Chief Executive Larry Ellison shook up Silicon Valley last month when he made a surprise move to enter the hardware market by acquiring computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. Some analysts speculated that Oracle, the world's largest database software maker, actually wants Sun's software assets and that it might eventually sell off the hardware business. Below are Ellison's comments on his rationale for buying Sun and strategy for turning around the struggling company. Ellison supplied his answers to Reuters questions via email.

The announcement a few weeks ago of the preliminary plans for GNOME 3.0 catapulted the GNOME Shell and GNOME Zeitgeist into the spotlight. Previously little-known, these programs are now identified as the basis of a new user experience in GNOME 3.0. Meanwhile, both are in their early stages, and few have tried them, with the result that they are surrounded by question marks. What exactly are these programs? What vision do they share in common? Most importantly of all, are they capable of bearing the expectations placed upon them? Any answers to these questions must be tentative, because both projects are in rapid development, and certain to change dramatically by the time GNOME 3.0 is released. All the same, those in search of preliminary answers can find them with a bit of quick compiling.

Settlers on a long-forgotten Sun-Microsystems middleware island are expected to turn to open-source in greater numbers rather than stick with new master Oracle. News of Oracle's potential acquisition has acted as a catalyst for early users of the Sun ONE application server to finally review their increasingly dated web and back-office systems and to move rather than risk a licensing hike. Red-Hat services firm Freedom OSS, which has already been migrating Sun ONE customers to JBoss, told The Reg it expects a four-fold increase in business as a result of such reviews. The company currently moves between 10 and 15 organizations a year off Sun ONE to JBoss.

AMD ended out last year by releasing basic R600/700 3D code that allowed the rendering of open-source triangles, but not much in the way of usable OpenGL acceleration for end-users. Just last month AMD had then pushed out new R600/700 code that plugged into the Mesa stack and is being used as the groundwork for the providing open-source OpenGL acceleration on the Linux desktop with newer ATI graphics processors. In between December and April, AMD had also released extensive documentation covering the 3D engines on the R600 and R700 graphics processors along with the R700 instruction set architecture. While the open-source 3D support is still emerging for the Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series, AMD has released some more documentation. This time around they have a programming guide for those developers interested in understanding the latest ATI GPUs.

Cute but astute: the new minor version of OpenOffice can do more than ever, such as cast shadows, position chart axes and provide structured conversations through comments.

There seem to be more arguments over usability in Linux than efforts to improve usability. Mark Shuttleworth doesn't argue, but pushes ahead. Some critics think that Ubuntu's relentless forward pace is too unilateral, not cooperative enough, and essentially a fork of Gnome. Bruce Byfield takes a look at the controversy.

We began talking about Intel graphics regressions in Ubuntu 9.04 back in January but for the most part that went under the radar at Canonical up until Ubuntu 9.04 was nearing release. At that point it was then explored whether greedy migration heuristics improved performance as the UXA acceleration architecture was still too problematic to enable by default. We had found that using some of the latest kernel code had improved the performance some, but still there were major regressions within Intel's new Linux driver stack.

For most people in The Netherlands, an Operating System means Windows. If it's not Windows, it can't be a computer. So if a new version of Windows comes out, it is major news. Consequently, even now there are people who still think Linux is a toy. Fortunately, I read German. If you happen to drive a Mercedes or a BMW, you know these guys know what engineering is. Linux is big over there. You know that SuSE was a German firm?

Novell is swearing its oath of fealty to the Moblin variant of Linux for mobile computing devices, based on Intel's Atom low-powered processors and, soon with the Moblin 2.0 release, netbooks. Intel launched the Moblin project back in July 2007 and got Moblin 1.0 into the field in April 2008, concurrently with the launch of the Atom processors. These are cut-down variants of the old Pentium-style processors that consume very little electrical power (4 or 8 watts in the current 1.6 GHz single-core and dual-core chips) and yet provide enough computing power to be useful in many kinds of devices.

The TomTom case exposed a long-simmering problem resulting from the combination of patents, proprietary software companies and open source. Andrew Tridgell recently patched Linux’s VFAT implementation, but the cult of silence that surrounds intellectual property will bedevil open source projects for some time to come.

Fedora 11 Xen hypervisor package contains pv_ops dom0 kernel support, ie. it is able to boot bzImage format dom0 kernels, and pv_ops sysfs memory ballooning support is included as well. These features/patches are backported from Xen 3.4 development/unstable version to Fedora’s Xen 3.3.x. Our current target is to add two more change sets from Xen Unstable as patches to F11 xen-3.3.1-11.fc11.src.rpm to provide Xen 3.3.1 Dom0 support for OpenSolaris and Nevada PV Guests with images utilizing the most recent Sun ZFS

UC Berkeley Extension will start offering a course (1 credit) titled "Open Source Fundamentals and Strategies". LJ contributing editor Ibrahim Haddad developed the course for UCB and will be teaching it.

There are awards, and then there are awards. The Oscars may hold audiences captive for a night, but the Nobel Prize is an award forever. The Open Source community has its share of awards as well, and award season would appear to be upon us, as two of the largest have opened nominations.

The popular Linux Desktop Environment KDE is now upgraded to version 4.2.3. This release contains several bugfixes & enhancements.

XBMC (“XBMC Media Center“) has been updated to version 9.04, codename Babylon, available now for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Apple TV, the classic Xbox, and bootable CDs or USB drives. XBMC is a cross-platform open-source software available for Linux, Mac OS X (Leopard, Tiger, and Apple TV), Microsoft Windows operating-system, as well as the original Xbox game-console. With translations to over 30 languages for a worldwide audience. All versions of course completely free of any adware or spyware. It supports a very complete spectrum of of audio and video multimedia file formats and codecs right out-of-the-box, and include features such as playlist playback, audio visualizations, picture viewing, slideshows, and weather forecast functions, RSS feed scroller on your home screen, together with a ever expanding array of community driven third-party add-ons and plugins.

The Python developers have released the first beta of Python 3.1. The new version of the free scripting language is a development version, not for production use. The developers plan this as the only beta and aim to release the final Python 3.1 in June.

Thanks to netbooks, 2009 will be "The Year of GNU/Linux," says blogger Robert Pogson. A netbook running Android has been spotted in the wild -- the Skytone Alpha 680. Though its specs may be somewhat anemic and its price may be somewhat high, it's stirring up a lot of excitement in the Linux community as the harbinger of netbooks to come.

This tutorial shows how to prepare an Ubuntu 9.04 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

As they did in the past with Java and HTML (just to cite two cases), Microsoft has now invested at least 12 months of work to try to fragment the ODF in the IT market: A shame.I swear I was ready to publish this week a post praising Microsoft for finally released SP2 of Office 2007 with native support for ODF, but unfortunately after the initial tests of various users, what we see is an absurd attempt to mislead consumers (who payed for the software) and fragment ODF in the IT industry.

When Google released the first version of its Chrome web browser, many eyebrows were raised over the fact that it updated itself automatically and silently, in the background, without user intervention or even so much as a notice. As it turns out, this has been a brilliant move by Google, as Chrome users are the most likely to have up-to-date installations of their browser, followed at a respectable distance by Firefox users. Safari and Opera trail behind significantly.