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Displaying posts with tag: Arjen Lentz (reset)
451 CAOS Links 2009.02.13

The open source vendor definition debate rumbles on. How open source could save the US government $3.7bn. Red Hat plans MASS migration to JBoss. Open source content management invades the US. Exploiting the attribution loophole in the GPLv3. And more.

Definition debate rumbles on
Roberto Galoppini joined the open source vendor definition debate, with a perspective looking at the impact on community engagement, and also caught up with David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, about the company’s strategy, noting that not all open source core vendors are created equal.

Meanwhile Tarus Balog of OpenNMS, who …

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Christensen’s law in the context of open source business models

I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …

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What is it like to write a technical book?

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

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Death of MySQL read replication highly exaggerated

I know I’m a little late to the discussion, but Brian Aker posted a thought-provoking piece on the imminent death of MySQL replication to scale reads.  His premise is that memcached is so cool and scales so much better, that read replication scaling is going to become a think of the past.  Other MySQL community people, like Arjen and Farhan, chimed in too.

Now, I love memcached.  We use it as a vital layer in our datacenters, and we couldn’t live without it.  But it’s not a total solution to all …

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More progress on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition

Whew! I just finished a marathon of revisions. It's been a while since I posted about our progress, so here's an update for the curious readers.

Coming soon: High Performance MySQL, Second Edition

We've begun writing the second edition of the now-classic High Performance MySQL. "We" means co-authors Arjen Lentz, Baron Schwartz, Vadim Tkachenko, and Peter Zaitzev. O'Reilly is still the publisher, and Andy Oram is still the editor. With a team like this, I think the second edition will be a book you don't want to miss. Though in theory we're revising the first edition, the truth is we're starting from scratch and re-writing the book, and significantly expanding it at the same time. A lot has changed since Jeremy and Derek wrote the first edition. Today's MySQL deployments push the limits further than many people thought possible a few years ago. We'll teach you how they do it.

Showing entries 1 to 6