There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, 

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining

How do you build one of the busiest websites on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You download some free software and hack  it”…Actually  the question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites that will scale affordably? You use open source software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards

I have been a little bit stubborn on my concession that cloud computing is really going to be the wave of the future. Though lately I have been playing with a lot of cloud related technologies and am hooked. Spin up 10 (or 100) Linux servers in a minute from a web page with no real systems management skills and then you

Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion)

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer “SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn’t need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft’s open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft’s open-source charade is not about customers. It’s about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness.

Hence, Microsoft “opens” up its protocols (i.e., lets everyone read but not touch…without forking

Last year open source analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk coined the term Little Four to describe four up-and-coming open source management vendors and as a foil to the Big Four of systems management.

In the open source space, the 4 names that come up each time ? usually from people I?m talking with even before I say anything ? are: Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks, and

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent

Apparently the role of community managers is one of the coolest jobs around. Jono Bacon’s one for Ubuntu, and Jeff Waugh did an awesome job before that. Jay Pipes does a nice job for MySQL. Dawn Foster is the community manager that "powers" community managers at Jive Software who makes wicked-cool collaborative software. 

Glyn penned an article about the proliferation of

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder

And on goes my fascination with open source companies and their valuations…

I was reading Stephen O’Grady’s commentary on open source companies and their valuations prompted by the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. He quotes Jeff Gould who logically questions whether Sun can make the acquisition pay-off.

Stephen also quotes a piece from Knowledge@Wharton on the myth of market share.

It is a common practice of many companies to focus their attention on grabbing market share from their competitors. But such efforts

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do