While Microsoft’s focus on its making its applications (almost) exclusively available for its own software stack is understandable, I have often thought that in the systems management sector the strategy had the effect of restricting Microsoft’s potential market and increasing opportunities for its rivals. The company’s decision to offer cross-platform extensions for System Center therefore [...]

It is perhaps fitting that the last word on the recent MySQL licensing row should belong to Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz. In a twitter Q&A with Web 2.0 Expo attendees, courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, he states that: “we have no plans whatever of ‘hiding the ball,’ of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun [...]

Agenda: * The state of open source venture funding * What’s up with MySQL? * Desktop Linux troubles * Qlusters stepping away from open source * OSI Board election * Open source social – centralized or distributed? * The Open Source Census iTunes or direct download (37:31, 8.6MB)

Red Hat changes executive roles. Concurrent announces quarterly results. SnapLogic launches product update. (and more)

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I really thought I was done writing about MySQL for a while, but I attended a Sun/MySQL event in London today and have some shocking news to impart. It seems we’ve got MySQL all wrong. At the event, MySQL co-founder David Axmark talked through some of the history of the MySQL project and company, confirming [...]

I’m starting to see some big potential for symbiosis between two Linux and open source leaders: Red Hat and Ubuntu. Red Hat’s departure from the consumer desktop Linux market comes at the same time Ubuntu continues rolling in the same market with the release of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron this week. The latest Ubuntu also [...]

I’ve already taken a look at MySQL’s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn’t dive into was the impact on the company’s development model. This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole’s initial take on the [...]

Dana Blankenhorn yesterday called the OLPC project a failure for its inability to mass market a low-cost Linux laptop. Dana’s definition of failure, in this case, seems to be based on the quantity of XO laptops distributed. Like the commenter I am not sure that is fair given the interest OLPC has generated in low-cost [...]

Microsoft and Novell extend collaboration to China. IDC sees open source growing in importance with end users. rPath to use SUSE Linux for appliances. (and more)

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Fair play to SugarCRM for landing a reseller deal with BT, the incumbent telephone services provider in the UK. According to the announcement, BT “will offer its 1.2 million business customers SugarCRM’s commercial software solutions” including both the Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions, in both on-premise or SaaS deployments. It’s deals like this that [...]

I was just reading Fabrizio Capobanco’s take on the MySQL excitement (“this move is clearly into the right direction”) when it occurred to me that the situation is related to the comments recently made by the former CTO of Kaplan Test, Jon Williams, at the recent OSBC conference. As I wrote at the time: “Another [...]

Standish Group says open source costs vendors $60 billion. OpenLogic launches Open Source Census. Novell annnounces SUSE Appliance program. (and more)

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I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. [...]

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”). So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you [...]

Given the role the Open Source Initiative plays in protecting the open source brand and reviewing and approving licenses as conforming with the Open Source Definition, it is somewhat surprising how little interest there has been in the recent election of the OSI board. As the OSI’s announcement explains, just two out of ten seats [...]

Marketcetera obtains funding. Microsoft posts additional protocol docs. Sun announces MySQL 5.1. (and more)

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The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well. Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there [...]

That has emerged as the question, or at least a major factor in determining whether open source software works in the enterprise systems management market. The three open source players that have managed mid-market and enterprise customer growth — GroundWork Open Source, Hyperic and Zenoss — all base their products, both community and enteprise versions, [...]

“The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source,” wrote Matt Asay earlier this week. It was a throwaway point but one that I think deserves more attention. It occurred to me that “how” rather than “why” is the most significant question that open source vendors and projects should [...]

And then there was three? Qlusters, the former(?) open source systems management vendor has handed the development of the openQRM project over to the open source community and announced that it will no longer be involved in the project. According to an announcement on SourceForge, openQRM 3.5 is the last release from Qlusters. Matt Rechenburg, [...]