Recent announcement of Microsoft and Novell pact covers the following grounds:

• Support in virtualization of each other OS to coexist on same hardware.
• Patent covenant so that buyers do not have to worry about patent infringement and related legal issues.
• Better working together of MS Office and Openoffice suites.

Sometime back I had blogged on release of google finance beta. Recently, I searched for an Indian company on google and found a result pointing to google finance in search list. Intrigued, went to check out the stuff and here is the deal as I see it:

IBM recently announced a free version of DB2 database server called DB2 Express-C. This follows after both Oracle and Microsoft had announced free versions of Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005 respectively few months back.

Software Licenses used by software buyers are broadly of two types: Commercial and Open Source. Commercial licenses are more common for full applications like Outlook, or infrastructure software like database server. Open source licenses are commonly used for operating systems like Linux, and application servers like Apache, Tomcat, as well as database servers like MySQL, Postgresql etc.

Open source licenses for applications do not constrain the number of seats, no of connections or users etc. However, they may constrain the user of license in other ways. This article discusses commercial licenses in more detail below with regards to their benefits, maintenance, and selection of appropriate license.