It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders

The future of open source licensing. OpenSolaris governing board quits. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Glyn Moody asked which open source software licensing is best for the future?

# The OpenSolaris Governing Board has collectively and expectedly resigned.

# OpenBravo has updated its rapid implementation ERP offering for small and mid-sized businesses, Openbravo QuickStart.

# Red Hat has

Funding for Eucalytus and Moodlerooms. SkySQL offers support for MySQL. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Eucalyptus Systems raised $20m in a second round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates.

# Moodlerooms reportedly raised $7.15m in equity funding.

# SkySQL announced its intention to provide support & services for the MySQL ecosystem.

# StatusNet launched the open source StatusNet Desktop Client.

# Rhomobile released Rhodes 2.0 under the MIT

600 new customers for SugarCRM. James Gosling leaves Oracle. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# SugarCRM added nearly 600 customers in the first quarter of 2010.

# James Gosling resigned from Oracle.

# VMware’s SpringSource acquired Rabbit Technologies and its RabbitMQ messaging software.

# EnterpriseDB hired Sun’s former MySQL VP Karen Tegan Padir as vice president of products and marketing.

# Xen.org

One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management

Marten Mickos joins Eucalyptus. Novell rejects Elliot. Perspectives on OSBC. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Mårten Mickos was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

# Novell’s board rejected Elliot’s takeover proposal as inadequate, will review other alternatives.

# North Bridge Venture Partners published the results of its Future of Open Source survey.

# Rob Bearden was appointed executive chairman of the board of Pentaho.

# The Eclipse Foundation

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS. The UK’s updated OSS strategy. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS
# Oracle’s MySQL strategy slide.

# eWeek reported that database thought leaders are divided on Oracle MySQL.

# Savio Rodrigues and Computerworld on Oracle’s plans for MySQL, other open source assets.

# Zack Urlocker is leaving Oracle/Sun/MySQL.

# Red Hat’s Mark Little

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order. Part one, below, takes us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections. We will continue to update part two

Funding for Engine Yard and DataSync. Red Hat and Microsoft joint support. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Engine Yard raised $19m in Series C funding from the likes of Benchmark, DAG, Presidio and Amazon.

# Red Hat and Microsoft are now providing joint support for virtualization interoperability options.

# DataSync raised $1.2m and announced a partnership with SugarCRM.

# Simon Phipps began building a scorecard to assess “open source businesses”.

Patents. M&A. Adoption. Business strategies. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

This bumper edition of 451 CAOS Links is brought to you courtesy of the Open World Forum’s temperamental wireless connection.

Patents
# Red Hat urged the Supreme Court to to make clear that it excludes software from patentability, while the SFLC and the FSF also filed briefs with the US Supreme Court arguing against software patents.

Investment and M&A
# The WSJ reported

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.”

The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that MySQL executives began citing it themselves.

It is also a comparison that explains how the two products could potentially co-exist within a single company, as they seem likely to do following the announcement that Sun has agreed to be acquired by Oracle.

Much of the MySQL-related coverage of the impending

Some weeks ago Luke Kaines stated his observation that “requiring copyright attribution is a greater sin than providing commercial add-ons”.

His perspective was based on the theory that requiring copyright assignment restricts the developer community, a theory that was apparently repeated by Dave Neary during the recent OSBC event (I missed that session due to our CAOS client lunch).

Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree provided some evidence of Dave’s perspective and also the contrary view that the assignment of copyright is critical not just for vendor-dominated projects but also for community projects such as The

All change at Sun. A new CEO at Zend. Ingres enjoys revenue up 32%. Purple Labs raises funding. Is open source a danger to Microsoft or will Danger bring open source to Microsoft? (Not) open source food. And more.

It’s a good week for business card printers
There was a rush of new appointment and departure announcements this week. As already noted today, Sun has confirmed the departure of Marten Mickos as Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Earlier in the week Monty Widenius confirmed

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans

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 news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.

?As I?ve