OStatic

With the economy as volatile as it has been, there has been a good deal of speculation (both positive and downright pessimistic) about how open source companies will negotiate the ups and downs to come.

Today, Open-Xchange must be feeling quite optimistic, as it announced it's just closed a round of venture funding totaling $9 million and has four times the number of paid mailboxes now than it did last year. The company is focusing on a decidedly rosy looking future.

Earlier, Lisa talked about Funambol's addition of non-intrusive advertisements to their myFUNAMBOL portal, at least for a few phone models.Being the somewhat reluctant owner of a new Blackberry, and a Linux user, I had heard of Funambol. I knew it was open source software, and I knew that Funambol was one of a few applications that had reasonable success syncing BlackberryOS, and a few other platforms, with Linux.

MyFUNAMBOL portal has a few hiccups to iron out (it is still in beta), but it seems to be truly useful. The operating system used on the desktop could become a non-issue for most.

On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the company?s MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlook?s stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.