On Eweek it has been reported that:

“Engine Yard has delivered JRuby on its cloud platform to enable Java developers programming in Ruby to innovate faster and scale their apps.

Engine Yard has announced the general availability of JRuby on the Engine Yard Cloud.

With JRuby support, the Engine Yard Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS) brings together the combination of Java performance and Ruby agility. JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, is a popular open source package that enables Ruby applications to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby allows Java developers to use Ruby to efficiently expand the capabilities of Java applications or create new applications that leverage existing Java software.

“We are thrilled to announce that customers can now use JRuby in Engine Yard Cloud and leverage the power of Java on the Engine Yard platform.” said Dr Nic Williams, vice president of technology at Engine Yard, in a statement. “This is huge in that it is the first truly threaded implementation of Ruby to have full production support. Customers can get the performance benefits of real concurrency in an enterprise-grade environment. Engine Yard is the first platform to make available all stable, production-ready Ruby implementations, including JRuby, MRI, and Rubinius.””

On Thursday, September 29th, 2011, the Asterisk community services listed below will be undergoing maintenance (software upgrades and updates). The services will be shut down at approximately 7:00 PM CDT (12:00 AM September 30 UTC), and will return no later than 8:00 PM CDT. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

The affected services are:

code.asterisk.org
wiki.asterisk.org
issues.asterisk.org/jira

On Slashdot:

“A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government’s request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies (PDF) to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing.”

The Asterisk Development Team is pleased to announce the second beta release of Asterisk 10.0.0. This release is available for immediate download at
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

With the release of the Asterisk 10 branch, the preceding ’1.’ has been removed from the version number per the blog post available at
http://blogs.digium.com/2011/07/21/the-evolution-of-asterisk-or-how-we-arrived-at-asterisk-10/

All interested users of Asterisk are encouraged to participate in the Asterisk 10 testing process. Please report any issues found to the issue tracker, https://issues.asterisk.org/jira. It is also very useful to see successful test reports. Please post those to the asterisk-dev mailing list.

All Asterisk users are invited to participate in the #asterisk-testing channel on IRC to work together in testing the many parts of Asterisk.

Asterisk 10 is the next major release series of Asterisk. It will be a Standard support release, similar to Asterisk 1.6.2. For more information about support time lines for Asterisk releases, see the Asterisk versions page: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions

A short list of features includes:

* T.38 gateway functionality has been added to res_fax.

* Protocol independent out-of-call messaging support. Text messages not associated with an active call can now be routed through the Asterisk dialplan. SIP and XMPP are supported so far.

* New highly optimized and customizable ConfBridge application capable of mixing audio at sample rates ranging from 8kHz-192kHz

* Addition of video_mode option in confbridge.conf to provide basic video conferencing in the ConfBridge() dialplan application.

* Support for defining hints has been added to pbx_lua.

* Replacement of Berkeley DB with SQLite for the Asterisk Database (AstDB).

* Much, much more!

A full list of new features can be found in the CHANGES file.

http://svnview.digium.com/svn/asterisk/branches/10/CHANGES

For a full list of changes in the current release, please see the ChangeLog:

http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-10.0.0-beta2

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

From Slashdot:
“Ars Technica analyzes the recent commercial additions by Oracle to MySQL Enterprise and the additional unrest it’s added to the community. Oracle may be throwing itself out of the community as it pushes more customers to look at fully open-source alternatives.”