Andy Updegrove, a lawyer and founder of ConsortiumInfo.org, says Microsoft has created with CodePlex a rigid foundation that has almost no wiggle room and a poorly crafted governance structure that concentrates authority at the top and leaves little power to others that might join the foundation.

The CodePlex foundation, funded with $1 million from Microsoft, includes four Microsoft employees among the six-person Board of Directors. Microsoft funded and helped found this foundation during the same week in which it was revealed that they were allegedly trying to unload anti-Linux patents.

“Microsoft has to try harder to convince people its heart is in the right place because so often it hasn’t been there [with open source],” says Updegrove. “Microsoft can’t control [the foundation].”

So it is time for you to be the judge – Do you think that CodePlex will be a valuable asset to the Open Source community?

Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, “Handelsblatt” reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM’s in-house Lotus software.

I think this makes complete sense – why use something else if you manage and create something yourself.  IBM started the Symphony project back in 2007 – and it is about time they practice what they preach.

The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past.

For those of you who don’t know – Lotus Symphony is an office software that incorporates huge chunks of customized Open Office without a databank module. The free software download provided by IBM is an attempt at luring customers away from Microsoft.

With 330,000 IBM workers already using Symphony it appears the motive is not financial -but rather a clear notion to support open source standards.

Kudo’s IBM !

Red Hat earlier this past week announced their new  DeltaCloud Interoperability API Framework.

Many for the longest time thought Red Hat was going to be content sitting on the periphery of the cloud without taking a dive.   The surgance of the DeltaCloud API framework solidifies Red Hat’s  goal of building up developers with tools, scripts, and applications which can work together across the clouds – both public and private.

DeltaCloud SOA diagram

What I absolutely love however – is that Red Hat has released this as OPEN SOURCE using Ruby as the agent to drive the api onto clouds like EC2 as well as private offerings like VMWare and KVM (which comes as default now in RedHat and other Linux kernels).

RedHat was also the team behind Libvirt – a toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes) – also Open Source.

While the initiation of a new open source project within Red Hat is certainly not news something of this caliber is great news for the entire Cloud community. DeltaCloud Demo