I will be hosting a webinar on May 7 about how companies like Wikimedia and Smugmug are using Open Storage and MySQL to deliver rich media (photos, videos) to their users. You can view the webinar live or on demand here.

I will be hosting a webinar on May 7 about how companies like Wikimedia and Smugmug are using Open Storage and MySQL to deliver rich media (photos, videos) to their users. You can view the webinar live or on demand here.

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …

Sun continues to take a performance pounding, and the rumors of replacements, layoffs and revamps are beyond swirling and now perpetuating skepticism of the company. It strikes me as odd that Sun, which has embraced open source and is also the defacto leading corporate open source software contributor, is continually dogged by doubts about its transitions and tenures despite well-respected technology and participation in open source. Part of this lies in the company’s continuing dichotomy in strategy — a reference to tepid support for Linux and continued preference for and focus on Solaris. This is a large part of Sun’s ‘handicap,’ IMHO when it comes to Linux and open …

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 longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

Hello, I’d like to announce my new website that I’m building right now. FindInArticles.com. This site is about articles, it crawls all known article directories, article publishing sites and gethers articles from them. It has a really extensive categorical index. currently I have about 1000 articles but the number is growing daily. I used Php / Mysql / Apache [...]

MySQL's Marten Mickos is probably my favorite CEO. He is a great leader for his company and the OSS movement. I can only hope to be half as good a CEO as he is. **Please note I am not being sarcastic.**

Check out this Q&A with MM--lots of insight into MySQL and the overall OSS marketplace.

Mårten: This is a great question. First, I think closed source vendors are proving the hypothesis incorrect, because they are the ones who have un-friendly products although they have a licence revenue stream. And open source products, which typically lack a licence fee, are the ones with the best user friendliness. Why is that? I think the reason is that popularity is worth more than the marginally improved fees you could get for a …

At a user conference in London, MySQL announced MySQL Enterprise, a departure from their existing business and development models.

Essentially MySQL will have two versions of the core product: Enterprise and Community. This is very much like RHEL and Fedora—an approach that I support. I will let Matt dive further into the business aspects, but I am in the camp that it's OK to make money from open source, at least if you are paying for the development. I would expect a bit of squawking from the community about the MySQL change, but the community version remains good news. Marten Mickos said "we'll have many things that will make the Community version have features and functions that may or may not ever make it to the Enterprise version."

MySQL Enterprise is available as an annual subscription in four different tiers (Basic, Silver, Gold, Platinum.) Existing (and new) subscribers gain access to new management tools which Marten …

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It's basically the OSS version of Basecamp, a tool I like but would love to customize. I have a developer installing activeCollab right now...it's all PHP/MySQL so should be straight ahead development.

Also today I saw Coghead, which offers a very interesting drag and drop project management as a hosted tool. Screenshots are available, but no demo...the website contains arguably the best marketing fluff/BS web copy I have read in a long time. I love when Web 2.0 empowers me.

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As Sun continues to debate just how they will open-source Java and deal with things like forking and perceived loss of control they would be well served to take a look at how successful open source projects are managed and developed. In the majority of cases there is a company or organization that acts as the Shepard of the project and manages the development roadmap. Case in point: the MySQL database is managed by MySQL AB, Apache is managed by the ASF, and Spring is guided by Interface 21. There are exceptions where the community takes over either and self-governs (like PHP) or creates fissures that result into multiple iterations of the base code (like Linux) which likely …