In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

'Our presence in Asia addresses a significant enterprise Internet application market need created by the limitations of today's Web technologies,' said Brian Murphy, SVP worldwide sales and services of Nexaweb Technologies as the company today announced the opening of Nexaweb Japan K.K., a wholly owned subsidiary that will service existing customers and partners and support Nexaweb's rapid expansion into Asia.

It can be difficult for developers, architects, and managers to keep up with new software packages and releases. This can be especially true with fast moving technologies like Web services. This article provides an overview of the main technologies that comprise the Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP). For more in-depth knowledge of the WSDP, simply download it and walk through the examples or complete the Java Web Services Tutorial. In an effort to standardize XML and Web services-related technologies, Sun Microsystems has developed implementations of popular standards and published them under the umbrella title of the WSDP. The toolkit's stated purpose is to simplify the development, testing, and deployment of secure and interoperable Web services. Version 1.5 is the latest release of the WSDP and contains many updates to existing technologies, new features, and a collection of bug fixes. This article will examine the main technologies provided in the WSDP and review their purpose and status.

Last week I had lunch with the application manager of a local customer that just completed their enterprise rollout of Office 2003. We had decided to meet and discuss possible ways his team could begin to utilize this deployment. As we sat down he explained that he had been talking to his team and had been investigating a project that he wanted to discuss. He explained that they had a variety of independent business processes that all ran within various Microsoft Office applications. He wanted to know if it were possible to connect these together using XML and the features of Office 2003. He explained that he had discovered Office natively supports XML, which had gotten him to think about ways his developers could take advantage of this feature. He was hoping leveraging this would enable him to connect these independent processes together and begin to share the various data that was collected throughout the enterprise. In this article I will explain, as I did that day, how you can use not only XML but many of the other associated standards such as Extensible Schema Language Templates (XSLT) and Extensible Schema Definitions (XSD) to build and integrate Office-based applications.

Web Services Journal recently interviewed Theo Beack, Software AG's new Chief SOA Architect. Beack will be heading a new SOA Competency Center, to be based in the Washington, DC area. The Center will draw on the company's 30 years of global experience in developing sophisticated customer solutions in both the mainframe and XML data environments, according to Beack.

Yakov Fain reaches Lesson 11 in his popular 'Java basics' series. This time he deals with how and why Java programmers working on large projects that have lots of classes usually organize them in different packages; and explores the new element introduced in Java 5.0 called static imports.

'Compliance and security are the new Software Quality drivers,' said Dr Adam Kolawa, cofounder and CEO of Parasoft Corporation, talking live on SYS-CON.TV to Sean Rhody, editor-in-chief of Web Services Journal and Yakov Fain, Enterprise Editor of JDJ.

When in October of last year I asked the rhetorical question 'Is Mergermania Back?' (JDJ, Vol. 9, issue 10), there wasn't much doubt that it already was, but it took until last month to truly demonstrate just to what extent. It's not just back; in March we saw it's back with a vengeance.

At the Open Source Business Conference taking place today in San Francisco, Sun's President and COO, Jonathan Schwartz emphasized that 'free' equates not to 'no revenue' but instead to 'more opportunity to create revenue.'

Now that Yahoo! Mail has matched the Gmail offer of 1GB storage to its free e-mail customers, Google is doing the obvious thing and pulling ahead again, reopening 'the one-gig gap' between its Gmail service and all-comers.

Although some folks were predicting a 'bloodbath,' the App Server Shoot-Out at Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston did not result in any serious injuries. Instead, Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director at Burton Group, brought together representatives from a wide assortment of application server vendors for a lively panel conversation.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

Carly Fiorina has stepped down as Chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard. CEO since 1999, Fiorina is being replaced by Robert Wayman, HP's current CFO, while Patricia Dunn, was named non-executive chairman of the board, effective immediately.

'Microsoft has been working with the industry to advance a new generation of software that is interoperable by design, reducing the need for custom development and cumbersome testing and certification,' wrote Bill Gates yesterday in an 'executive e-mail' sent to all subscribers to executive e-mails from Microsoft, outlining the company's work 'to make its products interoperate well in a diverse IT environment.'

eBay, The World's Online Marketplace, has more than 114 million registered users, 10,000 developers, and over 700 live, third-party applications.

Jim Bole, Infravio vice president of products and services, will present at the Web Services Edge International Web Services Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts. Bole's presentation will examine 'Best Practices in Web Services Security, Service-Oriented Architecture Policy and Governance.' The conference will be held at the John B. Hynes Convention Center from February 15-17, 2005.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors improve Web services performance for customers: XML-binary Optimized Packaging, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism, and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that the first branded blogging community, www.blog-n-play.com (TM), will go beta on February 15, 2005, to coincide with the opening day of the Web Services Edge 2005 East International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edg e2005east).

Up to 5,000 Oracle/PeopleSoft employees are about to be fired. 'What's not known,' write Roger Strukhoff and Matt Vande Voorde, reporting direct from Pleasanton, CA yesterday, 'is how many of those jobs will be plucked from the sprawling PeopleSoft campus, which dominates the Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton and is a major employer and economic driver in this region.'

Bill Gates has been trying to neutralize the shock waves he sent through the open source community when in a press interview he made an analogy between 'communists' and people who advocate a less restrictive IP environment, such Creative Commons licenses and things like that. 'No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.'' Gates insists.

Although Larry Ellison has promised Oracle will be supporting PeopleSoft's products for the next 10 years, that hasn't blunted his determination to dispense with a huge number of its employees. When the stock market closes today, Oracle will announce the casualty figures, certain to be 'several thousand' according to rumors and likely to be as many as 4,500.

Did the geek-fest just finished in Las Vegas, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005, herald the return of technology and the beginning of the 'post-PC' world?

Last month Microsoft purchased anti-spyware maker Giant Software, which further fueled speculations concerning its anti-spyware and anti-virus products. How and when Microsoft will release these security devices is not known.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3.5M - as the wider Internet community joins the fund-raising effort.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i-technology professionals are expected to participate this year including the show expo floor, making it the largest Web Services event of the year. The following is the official announcement of the keynotes, sponsors, conference tracks and sessions, tutorials, and the Web Services case studies to be presented during this year's three-day event.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will happen next if Big Blue truly goes ahead and sells the division to the Chinese company Lenovo.

'The OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux,' according to Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, the industry's First Blogger Extraordinary.

Application integration comes in many forms, whether it be integration between components of a single software system or integration between systems. Making use of a common communications protocol between disparate systems allows for the creation of an integrated suite of applications whereby the combined benefits exceed those of each of the stand-alone applications.

Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise.

Spare a thought for a poor suppressed CEO. Scott McNealy has told reporters that the reason Jonathan Schwartz has become Sun's unofficial blogger-in-chief is that McNealy himself is not being permitted to start one. 'They won't let me start a blog,' he said, referring presumably to Sun's legal advisers. 'It would be very well-read, but I have to play a little bit more like Switzerland,' he added.

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by WebSphere Journal, TMC has managed to blow itself up all over again!

The way XML has been positioned over the last several years - namely, as some type of savior for companies that have invested in myriad systems with numerous incompatible data types - it makes you wonder why organizations aren't adopting any XML solution they can get their hands on.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the 'Application Server Shoot-Out' due to take place at its upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge) - in which leading application server providers are expected to participate. The Shoot-Out, with a particular focus on interoperability, resiliency, security, and ease-of-use in terms of development, deployment, and management, will be staged under the auspices of Burton Group; Web Services Edge 2005 East is to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005.

After an OpenOffice team and a Microsoft team were invited to present to the European Commission on the relative merits of their XML-based office document formats, it looks as if 'the Open Office XML Format will probably become an ISO Standard,' according to Sun's Tim Bray.

Late Friday night, Scotland Yard released a statement officially confirming the arrest of a 20-year-old-man in connection with the hacking of Cisco's network that resulted in the theft of 800MB of its primary operating system. The code found its was onto servers in the Netherlands and Russia. News of the arrest heightens corporate security concerns.

For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, and coedited 'Namespaces in XML' (1996-1999).