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Liferay is a company you do not hear a lot about yet they have a very interesting product based in a enterprise ready open source portal technology. In they latest release 4.2 they add some more sleek stuff:

The latest version offers added back-end enhancements to workflow and content management via integration with ServiceMix JBI, jBPM workflow engine, and Alfresco, as well as new features such as chat and other user-interface enhancements that further improve end-user experience and collaboration.

New upgrades in Version 4.2 include integration with the ServiceMix JBI (Java Business Integration) engine, which acts as a single point of connection for disparate enterprise applications. ServiceMix simplifies the integration, upgrade and substitution of siloed applications such as CRM, ERP, and ECM, reducing development time and lowering maintenance costs.

Earlier this year Liferay announced their partnership with Colorado-based Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC, to certify Liferay Portal on the Geronimo open-source application server.

A couple of our very smart people have been retrospective and predictive about Open Source this and next year. Check out our webinar by Dave Gynn, and our German blog with articles by Bruno von Rotz looking back to 2006 and predicting the future for 2007.

My personal Web 2.0 prediction of the day was that Google will buy ZYB/ or something very similar before Q4 2007.

Google has started his long awaited patent search for patents filed with the US patent office. At the same time they have been granted (yet another) patent them selves interestingly enough on the layout of their homepage “The ornamental design for a graphical user interface, as shown and described”.

I think its generally a good thing to apply tools that have proven to work (google search interface) for other ares like searches for patents in this case. It remains unclear to me how much of an improvement this is for the average internet user interested in US patents as the is offering a public search already.

Definitely worrying is the patent on the ornamental design of the homepage. After the nice open source move with the GWT I feel somewhat betrayed. Not that I would not concede them their logo, algorithm, PageRank etc, but the design of the one input field one button search? I assume that it will be difficult to claim any charges for copying if you do not reproduce a 1:1 copy, but is elgooG for instance in trouble now? What about sites that do the same and look similar - like metacrawler or very similar - like Altavista (logo, input field, category links)?

Another question I have is: “How do I find this freaking patent through the Google patent search interface”? This one does not work. :)

After announcing their membership to the eclipse Foundation recently Google does now provide its Java development environment for Ajax applications “Google Web Toolkit” (GWT) under the Apache license. The available source code is released as release candidate 1.3 with now functional changes compared to the 1.2 version.

The Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) and the Eclipse standard widget toolkit (SWT) remain under their old proprietary licenses.

Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media, held a speech on Sunday at the Youth Forum, ITU Telecom World in Hong Kong, China on how Web 2.0 services and technologies like blogs, wikis and P2P will change the information society.

Social networking is of course not just for the young, but it is the young that consider it their domain. They are growing up with the assumption that the internet is alive.

Reding points out that social networking’s openness does not automatically make it neutral and refers to the latest discussion about the reliability of for instance wikipedia. As she admits that there are some “governance and quality control issues”, she at the same time states that “the internet is free and should remain free”.

With all this freedom we should not forget that “On-line piracy is today the plague of the content industry in the broadband age”. Moreover

<..> it is clear that our system of intellectual property protection has not kept pace with progress. Content production based on the reuse of existing materials – such as sampling or mash-ups - is also creative and should not be penalised per se. Open source software developers should not face excessive, criminalising measures when they unintentionally infringe software IPRs rights hidden away inside of the systems that they use. Governments should also look more positively at the social, creative and economic benefits of the Linux movement.

Around the topic of DRM Reding questions whether “consumers are really at the centre of such business models?” when, the “Microsoft Zune will not be compatible with iPod”.

One of the key challenges that you will have to work on, as young people growing up in the wave of Web 2.0, is to find a workable balance between the protecting the legitimate interests of both creators and consumers of intellectual property.

With Web 2.0 being “a powerful tool for connectivity, communication, collaboration and creativity” she refers to the need of education, infrastructure and broadband not only in third world countries to get closer to her admitted dream of

<..> the next wave of the Information Society is about dismantling barriers to access, not just going for the technological frontier. This means getting rid of regulation that does not serve its purpose any longer and which is holding back progress. This is about making sure that competition is effective so that markets deliver. This is about tackling market failures so that everyone can get the benefits of participation, health and learning from the new technologies. And most importantly, this is about ensuring that the Internet is an open and democratic market of ideas in which everybody can take part.