- Red Hat (RHT) just got into the S&P 500 stock index! This is yet another indicator pointing to the growing importance that open source is gaining across industries.

- On July 29th Yahoo! and Microsoft inked a 10-year deal and joined hands in the ongoing search engine battle with a revenue sharing deal. Under the agreement, Microsoft, with Bing, will provide the search technology for Yahoo! search, while Yahoo! will focus on search engine advertising. Yahoo! also gets guaranteed revenues for the first 5 years of the deal. The move enables MS-Yahoo! to garner a greater search engine market share and slightly narrow the gap between them and rival (and market leader) Google.

- Google is releasing a preview build of a new Web-based communication and collaboration tool by late September. Called Google Wave, the open-source tool will initially be offered to about 100,000 people who have volunteered to provide feedback. Google Wave — based on the new HTML 5 markup language for building Web pages — is already available to developers via a “sandbox” version of the tool’s enabling APIs. The tool will let individuals communicate and work together on “waves” — collaborative communications containing richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets and other elements. Each wave is formulated as a “tree structure of messages” within which conventional e-mail and instant-messaging capabilities are combined and delivered in almost real time on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis.

References: http://www.cmswire.com/events/;  http://ossg.bcs.org/; http://fossevents.org/?m=200908&cat=7

•  PostgreSQL has released version 8.4 of the popular open source database. Features include faster recovery from backups, per column permissions for more granular control of data, faster upgrades from v8.3 and semi-joins and anti-joins, among others.

•  Mozilla has launched Firefox 3.5. It’s faster, and has features of IE8 and Chrome.

•  Red Hat is offering the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand the adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers. It enables industry leaders in cloud computing to become certified to offer Red Hat technology solutions. Amazon Web Services became the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provide Partner.

•  In a survey of 104 Global 2000 companies, 30% of respondents said they were already using the cloud, and another 20% said that they would be moving their applications to the cloud in the next year. However, the remaining half said that they had no plans of using the cloud in the near future, citing lack of awareness, security concerns, cost, and not enough technical expertise.

A quick look at Google Trends for PHP Frameworks brings up some very interesting interpretations.

If we take worldwide search frequency as a proxy for new adoption, Zend is getting stronger with every passing day. Other popular PHP frameworks are also gaining momentum but Zend seems to be clearly ahead of the pack. News reference volume, another solid indicator of media and adoption interest, also marks Zend as a clear winner.

Now, why is this important for the PHP Community?

Historically, one of the biggest challenges for early adopter companies has been a lack of commercial platforms that back a technology or framework.  Zend has changed this situation.  As a commercial operation, it has been able to create a solid infrastructure of framework, tools and certifications to create momentum around the platform.

This clearly means: more power to Zend and more power to PHP open source adoption.

Sources: news.zdnet.co.uk; joomla.org; press.redhat.com; dev.w3.org; ca.news.yahoo.com