Last summer, Microsoft said that February 27, 2008 would be the single biggest day of releases in its 30-year history, promising major updates to its server operating system, developer tools and database.

Those enterprising folks at Game Cube Linux (GC Linux) claim to have developed a proof of concept version of Linux running natively on the best-selling Nintendo Wii games console.

VMware continues to barrage customers with more and more management products.

The software maker has used its European user conference this week to start early discussions around VMware Lifecycle Manager and Site Recovery Manager. These packages will join the Manager family that already includes Lab Manager and Stage Manager. All we need next is Manager Manager.

The venerable S. Jobs said it would be out in February, having declared it unnecessary - now it seems the Software Developer Kit will be even later to the party. Business Week - who were right about the SDK itself last time - report a delay of another couple of weeks, though rumours suggest an alpha-test version might be launched so that Apple can deny the slippage.

Adobe Systems has confirmed it will help sponsor the work of the SQLite database project, joining a new consortium alongside Mozilla and Symbian.

SQLite, which is an embedded SQL database engine with core source code in the public domain, has been built into the firm's newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software.

Project Watch: Microsoft 2008 The next task in rolling out our 1TB SQL Server 2008 application using Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Server 2008 is to import signed spatial data into the spatial data type. This is the code:

Once more unto the void...

Adobe Systems and Microsoft are jockeying for attention with pronouncements on new and planned software for the development of online content, applications and hybrid desktop applications.

The WS-* stack was conceived and driven forward by IBM and Microsoft, with other vendors cooperating on specifications where they had relevant expertise (Verisign on Security, BEA Systems on transactions and so on). The design philosophy was for a relatively simple and efficient basic mode of operation, with optional features added independently of each other.

More recently, though, something else has taken root among developers building distributed applications: Representational State Transfer (REST). As ever with technology, the debate over WS-* and REST has settled on the death of one technology and the rise of the other. The truth, though, lies somewhere in between.

While databases have proved adept at holding vast sums of really useful information, they have lagged when it comes to serving up data in a way suited to human consumption.

AMD and Microsoft should take note that open source strategies bring painful problems. Sun Microsystems knows this all too well.

JBoss seems to be undergoing some generational pains as it strives to morph from an open source products company to an enterprise open source products company. So its recent formal announcements covered the enterprise tack: something called Enterprise Acceleration that performs the basic blocking an tackling to show enterprises, ISVs, and systems integrators alike that nobody will get fired for buying JBoss. And then there were the pronouncements to the faithful that, while JBoss is trying to go enterprise, that it won't forget its roots.

In the battle for gaming supremacy, Microsoft has finally deployed the big guns against the Playstation and Wii: Web 2.0 and the Zune.

Microsoft today flung open its software APIs and protocols to all comers. Is it enough to persuade the European Commission to drop anti-trust investigations of the company? In a word, no. The Commission today noted that Microsoft has issued four statements in the past promoting interoperability, and it wants to see if a) the new pledge conforms with EC competition law and b) if Microsoft actually walks it like it talks it.

Bloggy Thing 8:32 - So, here we are early in the morning in California, waiting for Microsoft's top brass to divulge all the meat on their Openness Festival. The Great Beast of the Pacific Northwest has finally capitulated and agreed to free its APIs for developers. In addition, Microsoft will publish most of its major protocol data and license the protocols at a reasonable fee.

In an apparent bid to calm still feisty regulators, Microsoft has agreed to publish application programming interfaces (APIs) for its major software products and provide free access to those interfaces. In addition, Microsoft will free up protocols around its client and server software and has vowed not to sue open source companies that create non-commercial versions of these protocols.

Microsoft later today will present itself as a kinder, gentler software maker. The company is expected to announce a broad change in its development policies.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement.

Hands on Microsoft's deal with US media giant NBC Universal to stream this summer's Olympic Games online using Silverlight represents a major demonstration of the potential of Microsoft's emerging browser-based runtime and streaming service.

Adobe has been getting ahead of itself, hinting at features in future versions of its is Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) development environment while claiming its yet-to-launch platform is now feature complete.