Best of the blogs: What with all the recent zero-day bugs in IE and anti-virus updates that quarantine AOL or Excel, one might wonder whether the quality of software products is actually deteriorating. “Judging from the everyday complaints the GripeLog hears about software that just doesn’t work, I’d say you need wonder no longer,” Ed Foster writes in Is software getting worse? “Software is indeed buggier than ever.”Storage: Jon Udell continues the Amazon storage service discussion from his column in the blog post Toward politically neutral infrastructure: Amazon’s S3. “Sure, it’s a silo, but one that happens to include all of us — or easily can. While we’re waiting for federated identity to sort itself out, we could do a lot of useful work with this kind of model,” Udell explains. The news beat: IBM expands its SOA governance offerings by adding products and services, including a Rational tool, as well as a set of best practices. Oracle rolls its database, Fusion middleware and analytics software into three suites as part of a strategy to bulk up its business intelligence offerings. And Yahoo delivers a Net phone feature in its U.S. IM client. Quoteworthy: Freedom of code actually matters. There’s something about a free system that does nothing more than lead me to an expensive, proprietary version that…doesn’t work. And there’s little reason that you should make your product free without also opening up the code and particularly for the high-end version: No one is going to run a massive Oracle database, with sensitive, critical data inside, without paying for support. — Matt Asay, Revising Oracle 10g Express Edition: Is ‘free $’ enough? Software Development