Valtteri Halla, the Nokia member of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group recently attempted to allay the concerns of the open source community by underscoring the importance of openness in the development of the MeeGo operating system.

In a blog post last week, the veteran Nokia executive who has been working to get Linux onto Nokia phones since 2000, announced that the MeeGo repository will be opened by the end of this month. The source and binary repo will provide a raw baseline for building MeeGo on the Nokia N900 and Intel Atom-based netbooks.

What’s more interesting is the flurry of debate surrounding the details – or lack thereof – related to the processes that will enable the open source development model to flourish around the MeeGo platform. So far, Halla has said little about the decisions made by the technical steering group to choose RPM rather than deb as the package manager for MeeGo:

While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch and as we expected, kicked off a few small avalanches of debate! These selections were, of course, pre-agreed and I can assure you that the amount of effort spent in resolving these was not small. After all, these are the points driving most of the investment cost and transition pains for Nokia, Intel and the Moblin and Maemo communities. Further selections are mostly still under discussion and beyond a few obvious ones (X, connman, ofono, gstreamer, dbus,…) can be considered as working assumptions for MeeGo 1 release. Now that the internal responsibilities within Intel and Nokia are becoming clear I expect that the people behind these selections and assumptions will start appearing in meego.com pages, mailing lists and wikis during the coming days.

This has generated some concerns that developers are being left out of the conversation, thus increasing their skepticism of the purported “openness” of the MeeGo platform. To be fair, it was necessary for the steering group to make some hard decisions at the beginning of a big open source initiative that merges two existing platforms. Otherwise, we could argue till the cows come home and nothing will move.

But what is the process that governs these decisions? Are we talking about a process similar to JCP (Java Community Process), where there are clearly defined procedures for the development and revision of the Java’s technology specifications?

Other tough questions that need to be addressed: driver support from hardware and device manufacturers, DRM support that is compatible with operators’ content business and application support for potentially different variants of MeeGo that could emerge. The technical steering group should address these issues early on if it wants to seed a rich developer ecosystem that is crucial for the success of any mobile platform.

Linux users are often at the mercy of hardware vendors when it comes to device drivers. The open source community often needs to turn to reverse engineering to churn out drivers from proprietary ones. As long as the majority of hardware is made for Windows and OS X machines, Linux users will need to wait until the community figures out the nuts and the bolts of a piece of hardware before a Linux driver can be written.

Take Nouveau for example. The open source project started in 2006 with the aim of building high quality drivers for Nvidia graphics cards. Although Nvidia provided a Linux driver several years ago, it was a basic driver with no 3D support. The Nouveau project gained momentum and a year later, its driver soon outperformed Nvidia’s in 2D performance.

While some Linux drivers can be as good as proprietary ones from hardware vendors, others only allow basic functionality with sometimes abysmal performance. My interest in Linux was rekindled recently when I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my three-year-old Macbook. The basic hardware like the keyboard and graphics worked right out of the box after the installation, with the exception of the iSight webcam which only worked after I installed a software that reverse engineered the right driver out of Apple’s proprietary iSight driver.

Driven by commercial interest through a stranglehold over the unique features of its hardware, it is not in Apple’s interest or any hardware vendor to release open source drivers. A recent feature in Linux Magazine on the Nouveau project pointed out that Nvidia “still gains far too much advantage by keeping their driver closed. They get support for brand new models, extra performance, better power management, extra features like VDPAU, and certain technology components can remain a company secret”.

Meanwhile, Linux users have to continue tinkering with their boxes to make things work, but with the support of the community through hundreds of thousands of forums and interest groups on almost every Linux distro, there’s bound to be a workaround out there. But hey, it’s also what makes computing fun isn’t it?

By now, few people in the IT industry would dispute the benefits that the open source development model brings to businesses: flexibility and to some extent security, though it isn’t always the cheaper option if you do your TCO (total cost of ownership) sums.

The best open source software, notably the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack, is commonly used by enterprises large and small, with many businesses running mission-critical applications such as sales transactions on Linux.

Yet, the merits of open source software should not be judged based on its “open source” label. While there are a handful of stars like the LAMP stack, there are thousands out there that will never gain the prominence of Linux and remain difficult to use and maintain.

After four years since its inception, Project Fusion, Oracle’s next generation suite of enterprise applications will finally be ready to enterprises in 2010.

At the closing keynote of this year’s Openworld conference which saw about 50,000 attendees throng the city of San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the code base for the Fusion applications is ready, and customers have begun testing the products.

According to Ellison, Oracle will continue to support J.D Edwards and PeopleSoft applications under its Applications Unlimited program, along with its lifetime support policy.

The first version of the brand new Fusion Applications, built from the ground-up with its own technologies and those acquired from other companies, will include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement Management as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Techgoondu will be livecasting Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s closing keynote roday around 6.30am SGT. Ellison is expected to share more details on the state of technology, right after an address by Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan. Stay tuned!

Update: If you didn’t manage to catch the livecast, we have a recorded video of Ellison’s closing keynote, featuring a guest appearance by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who hailed technology as the solution to the climate issues facing us today.

With more workers Twittering and connecting with one another through Facebook and other social networking sites, it is hardly surprising that enterprise technology vendors are starting to notice the potential of social media in business applications.

I caught up with Anthony Lye, Oracle’s senior vice president for CRM products who shared about the company’s Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems. The portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign and Sales Library, which allows sales reps to share information with one another, seek out sales leads by combining external information sources with internal customer data, as well as manage sales campaigns.

“Customers want to talk to other customers and these conversations are happening in Facebook and other social media,” Lye said during a media briefing at Oracle Openworld 2009. “It’s important for enterprises to listen to these conversations and take action.”

What social CRM does is to expose the structure of customer relationships within the CRM system through conversations. “For example, if I sell to telco A, can I see what telco B, C and D are buying, because people usually buy what others are buying.”

Techgoondu caught up with Ron Weiss, Oracle’s director of product management, on the business value of Exadata, which combines storage, Oracle database and servers in a single hardware appliance. Oracle claims that this set-up improves database performance, particularly in datawarehousing and online transaction processing where on-the-fly responses to database queries are paramount.

In this video, Weiss also shared his views on the upcoming “Exadata killer”, dubbed the DB2 Pure Scale by IBM, which also happens to be a Gold sponsor of this year’s Openworld confab.

In the world of enterprise technology that has become dominated by an increasingly smaller pool of players, company leaders often swing between taking potshots at their rivals and singing praises next.

When Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy slammed Oracle for its software pricing policy in 2004, he probably would not have known that five years later, his legacy now lies in the hands of Oracle, the enterprise software behemoth that has now cast its sight on IBM with the Oracle-Sun merger.

During the Oracle Openworld opening keynote, which was clearly aimed at reassuring Sun customers over the future of their investments, McNealy expressed confidence that Oracle would take care of his legacy. “Our technology will find a nice home,” he said, adding that Oracle will continue to innovate on the Sparc and Solaris more than what Sun is doing now.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun’s Scott McNealy are expected to take the stage at the opening keynote of Oracle’s annual business technology conference. Those who are closely following the developments of the deal, including the European Union’s investigation over the competition concerns and Oracle’s roadmap for Sun’s products, will be watching the two industry bigwigs closely as they shed more light on their union.

Techgoondu will be livecasting the Ellison-McNealy keynote from the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Monday, Oct 12 at 8.45am SGT. Check out out Ustream channel at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/techgoondu, or watch the embedded stream here:

Last week, the European Commission announced that it will launch an in-depth investigation under the EU Merger Regulation over Oracle’s impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The controversial move, which has caused a stir among industry watchers, could potentially derail the deal.

Already, IBM and HP have been riding on the uncertainty over the Oracle-Sun deal with campaigns to win over Sun customers. Their efforts are bearing fruit: Sun’s second quarter server revenues falling 37 percent to US$981 million compared to a year ago – the steepest decline among major vendors according to market numbers from analyst company IDC.

The rationale for the EC’s investigation stems from its initial market investigation, which “indicated that the proposed acquisition would raise serious doubts as to its compatibility with the [EU] Single Market because of competition concerns on the market for databases.”