Open Enterprise Interview: Bernard Dalle, Index Ventures

On Open Enterprise blog.

What Can We Learn from the MySQL Saga?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Denis Lussier

On Open Enterprise blog.

Has MySQL Forgotten All It Learnt?

On Open Enterprise blog.

MySQL's Disappearing Anti-Patent Page

Here's a troubling observation:

Go to the MySQL Web site and try to click on the MySQL anti-software patent page, and you won't find it. It's the other shoe dropping as MySQL today became part of Sun Microsystems, which like the rest of the commercial software and services industry, considers software patents a necessary evil.

Let's hope this isn't part of a larger trend at the new MySQL....

MS-Yow!, not MS-Yahoo! for Open Source

The Microsoft-Yahoo merger meme has been out and about for ages. It's not hard to see why Microsoft finally decided to jump: the decline in Yahoo's share price has been pretty precipitous in the last three months, and it's obviously reached a too-good-to-refuse level.

And I have to say that were I in Microsoft's position, I'd do the same: the fit looks good, and it would give the company a chance of fighting back against Google - something that looks hopeless, currently.

But as I wrote when I considered this idea last year, I have this feeling that if the deal goes through, Microsoft won't be looking very kindly on the open source software that Yahoo owns - such as Zimbra - or uses - like MySQL.

Why not? Well, one of the areas where Microsoft is getting whupped by free software is in top-end clusters. Moreover, the open source world continually throws in its face that Google, the very acme of computer power, runs on GNU/Linux, albeit a customised version. So what better way to show that Windows is fully the equal of the latter for extreme computing conditions than to turn Yahoo into a high-profile advertisement for the power of Windows (and SQLServer) on clusters?

To be sure, that would be more expensive than sticking with Yahoo's current choices, but Microsoft is playing for high stakes, and willing to gamble accordingly - as this $45 billion proposed acquisition of Yahoo demonstrates only too clearly.

Is MySQL's Fate the Future of Open Source?

On Linux Journal.

Nokia Buys Trolltech

On Open Enterprise blog.

'L' is for 'Linux', Not 'Looney'

On Open Enterprise blog.

Trendy Open Source M&A

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Politics

One sphere where openness is generally acknowledged as indispensable is politics: true democracy can never be opaque. In the past, providing that transparency has been hard, but with the advent of Web access and powerful search technologies, it has become markedly easier. Despite that, there are still very limited resources for searching through the raw stuff of politics.

A new pilot project, called Hansard Prototype, may help to change that:

This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative. Material on this site falls under Crown and Parliamentary Copyright. Within these copyright constraints, you are encouraged to use and to explore the information provided here. We would be especially interested in requests for functionality you have.

Even though it's still limited in its reach, playing with it is instructive. For example this search for "genome" not only throws up various hits, but also shows graphically when they occurred, and ranks the names of speakers.

It's also got the right approach to code:

What technology has been used to build and run this site? Code: Visible Red, Moving Flow. Hosting: Joyent Accelerators. Server OS: OpenSolaris. Database: MySQL. Web server: Apache. Application server: Mongrel. Code framework: Ruby on Rails. Source code control: Subversion. Search engine: Lucene, Solr. Backup: Joyent Bingodisk. Development and deployment platforms: Mac OS X, Ubuntu.

The source code for this site will be made available under an open licence.

More please. (Via James Governor's Monkchips.)

Beaten to the Blog

News that IBM was buying Solid Information Technology, a company with close ties to MySQL, set off a distant bell ringing in my head in connection with something I'd written a while back, but I didn't have the time to pursue it.

Now, it seems, I don't need to:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

MM: I was getting more aware of it, and I was getting excited about it. At Solid, I drove an initiative of not open-sourcing the product, but making it very popular on the Linux platform--and that was why I was an advertiser in Linux Journal, because we were the leading Linux database in the world in 1996. We gave it away free of charge, so we had taken a step in that direction.

Then Solid decided to cancel the project and just focus on high-end customers, and that's when I left the company. So in that sense, when I got to MySQL, I had some unfinished business. By that time, I had completely bought into the notion of code being open.

Thanks, Matt, for beating me to it....

Are Closed Source Databases Doomed?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Oracle Users (Heart) MySQL

The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) recently surveyed their members about open source and has now published their findings. A few highlights:
-More than one third of the respondents reported that they have deployed an open source database in production, which is a higher rate than for open source tools, frameworks or applications.
-Nearly three-quarters of that group have MySQL installed

Three-quarters? Wow. Bear in mind that MySQL, just like Linux before it, will become more powerful, nudging Oracle from underneath. Classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff. Maybe time to worry a little, eh Larry?

The Penguin Goes to Redmond

Well, to Redmond Magazine, that is....

Plugging in to Asay Power

I met up with Matt Asay (pronounced "ay-see") recently. I learned from this that he's had what amounts to the perfect career in open source business: training as a lawyer (including some work with Larry Lessig), then stints with Lineo (a pioneering embedded Linux company) and Novell (during which time he founded the Open Source Business Conference) before joining Alfresco, an enterprise content management company that is one of a whole new generation of businesses that collectively make up the open source enterprise stack.

My meeting also confirmed something that I had suspected for a while: that he is the most astute commentator on the open source business scene, bar none.

He has a new outlet for these insights in the form of the blog "The Open Road" on C|net (which means, unfortunately, that the URLs are totally opaque), where he is churning out posts at a rate that puts mere professional writers such as myself to shame. To make matters worse, he's come up with a blindingly obvious and brilliant wheeze for both generating lots of interesting copy and also providing what amounts to a grand conspectus of the entire open source business scene: an emailed survey of top CEOs there. Now, why couldn't I have thought of that?

The results are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of free software in the world of business today - and where it's going tomorrow. Here's the list of interviews:

Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource

Javier Soltero, Hyperic

Marten Mickos, MySQL

John Powell, Alfresco

Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol

Boris Kraft, Magnolia

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta

Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra

Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork

Dries Buytaert, Drupal

John Roberts, SugarCRM

Toby Oliver, Path Intelligence

Danny Windham, Digium

Bill Karpovich, Zenoss

Mark Brewer, Covalent

Gianugo Rabellini, Sourcesense

Bob Walter, Untangle

Paul Doscher, JasperSoft

Pete Childers, Zmanda

Rod Johnson, Interface 21

Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies

Eero Teerikorpi, Continuent

Will Microsoft Be Assimilated?

I knew that I knew nothing about aQuantive. Here, for example, is something rather important that I didn't know I didn't know:

Information available from Atlas' Web site indicates the Internet software company employs extensive use of open source software including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Solaris.

Software engineers at Atlas' Raleigh office do client/server development in C and C++, software maintenance and "scripting", and developing and maintaining custom reporting capabilities.

Other sought after skills include Unix development, JavaScript, and those for Windows software administration like SQL Server and IIS.

The use of open source is not confined to Atlas with the second significant business unit Avenue A Razorfish boasting "we also frequently utilize open source technologies".

There was a similar situation when Microsoft bought Hotmail, which was running on Apache and FreeBSD for a long time after acquisition. Since aQuantive is much bigger, we can presumably expect Microsoft to have even more difficulty assimilating it.

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.

MySQL's IPO: Hot News - or Maybe Not

Amazing news - MySQL is planning to go public:

after years of rumo(u)r the company is finally preparing to go public, joining a select group of open source vendors that have made it to the publicly traded markets.

Or maybe not quite so amazing, since Marten Mickos had already told me this last July during an interview for Linux Journal (page 74, January Issue, if you're interested, published in December 2006):

We're aiming for an IPO. We're actually aiming for an independent existence and to do that you need to do an IPO, but the IPO is not the aim, the IPO is just a step. People say: What is your exit plan? and we say that we're not going to exit.