Hugh MacLeod is at it again. He asks the question, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires (as if that is the right way to gauge the success of the software)? Never mind that we could ask the same question of proprietary software: "Where are all the proprietary billionaires?" There just aren't that many. There aren't even that many proprietary software companies that do over $1B/year in revenues.

Will open source pass the $1B barrier? Yes, it will. But just as with the proprietary old world, it will take open source's new world a few years.

But I fundamentally disagree with MacLeod on this, as well as with Jeff Atwood, who …

We spent today working on the last minute details for the mySQL conference. The important things: T shirts, pens, mugs, etc….

Seriously, I’m pretty excited about the conference. I think conferences have transmogrified since the days of Interop and Internet World ‘97-’00 and many have reemerged as events actually worth going to.

Back before the Internet, most people would go to conferences to actually learn about new products, trends, etc. Companies typically sent their best developers and product managers to meet with attendees. But sometime around ‘98, many attendees learned that they could find all the info they needed on the net and didn’t have to send anyone. Attendance dropped, and exhibitors stopped sending their best and brightest. The attendees at subsequent conferences were greeted by nit wits that didn’t know anything and attendance dropped further. The …

The value of data stored in LAMP applications is increasing at an exponential pace. Indeed, the LAMP stack fuels an economy of its own - with its own currency, lingo and players. While e-commerce is the clear and present evidence of the LAMP powered economy, the currency for this economy is by no means just monetary. Value is manifested in many factors other than financial gains: personal reputation and legacy, karma points, creativity etc. The LAMP stack fires up innovation by enabling new ideas - you can quickly and cost-effectively prototype a concept which other’s may find bizarre.

User generated content (UGC) is one key currency of the LAMP stack. UGC, even votes (ok, diggs) on other’s UGC store tangible and lasting value. While naming “You”, a proxy for UGC, the Time’s Person of the Year 2006, The Time magazine said: “It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the many …

Zmanda is a Diamond sponsor of MySQL users conference. Come Visit us at booth 415.
Various membes of our team are also presenting at the conference. If backup of MySQL databases is
of interest to you, you do not want to miss any of the following presentation:

Zmanda Speakers

Keynote: Data Protection for the LAMP Economy
Presenter: Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2007
Time: 9:50am-10:20am
Location: Ballrooms E-H

Track: Security & Database Administration
Topic: MySQL Backup: Roadmap & Vision
Presenters: Paddy Sreenivasan, VP Engineering, Zmanda
Lars Thalmann, Replication & Clustering Technology, MySQL
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007
…

Summary

A good week - we made progress on the Internet as Public Good Symposium, which is the major task on my Mozilla plate right now. However, an unexpected event at another client meant that my Friday was a bit messed up. Will work on reviewing bugs and other missed responsibilities over the weekend.

Activities

• Worked with Berkman and Harvard Business School teams to help plan and present the Internet as Public Good Symposium.
  • Event wiki now online, but still private. - started putting in content. Will make public after panel participants have a chance to review.
  • Conf. call with available IPG team members to sort out logistics, invitations and distribute tasks.
  • Set up database to store info on who’s invited, who’s coming and so on.
• Minor bits of work helping Mozilla Corp. team plan their OSCON presence …

I was flying back from Helsinki yesterday and was in line at Heathrow Customs behind an earnest young man. The Customs officer asked him,

"What nationality are you?", referring to something the teenager had written on his Customs declaration."Jewish."was the response."That's not a nationality. That's a religion."I rudely snickered with the men in line behind me, but it occurs to me well after the fact that the teenager was simply replying according to a different definition of nationality. (I wish I could ask the boy's pardon, though I'm not sure he heard me.) If asked what we are at our core, we're almost certainly something else before we're Americans, Nigerians, Lebanese, etc.

In like manner, and this will sound trite in comparison to the above, but I'm not in the software business. I'm in the open source business. Open source software business, if you like, but open source is the foundation and core of my interest in software. …

What a perfect day. I'm in London today, and went to the Arsenal vs. Bolton match with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. Mark isn't a big football fan, but he indulged my Arsenal fixation and even treated me like a rational human being, which I decidedly am not when it comes to football. Arsenal won 2-1. All is right in the universe.

But where the day got really interesting was over dinner at Tamarind, one of my favorite restaurants anywhere. I've long respected Mark, but over dinner I found him engaging both as a person and as a technology visionary. Here is a very real, good person who has happened to be phenomenally successful as an entrepreneur, without letting it turn him into an obnoxious Muppet.

Some of the insights I gleaned throughout the course of our dinner:

• Mark has the potential to fundamentally change the …

InformationWeek's Charlie Babcock has stumbled on a great truth--the only way to build a business is to have customers. This is something that Matt and I have stressed a number of times. Revenue solves all problems :>

Says Rod Johnson of Spring/Interface21:

Instead, open source products "should be funded by their customers," the only way to ensure they that have a future, Johnson says. It's no accident that the best known enterprise open source programs, such as the MySQL database and the JBoss application server, have companies with paying customers behind them.

Link: What Makes An Open Source Project Successful?

…

Tim O'Reilly, ever a few steps ahead of the rest of us, has some thoughtful musings on what's behind Google's new 411 service. Tim doesn't cast this as an open source move, but rather a Web 2.0 move designed to build up a treasure trove of data against which to build better speech recognition:

But it also seems to me that there's a hidden story here about the speech recognition itself. I was talking recently to Eckart Walther of Yahoo!, who used to be at Tellme, and he pointed out that speech recognition took a huge leap in capability when automated speech recognition started being used for directory assistance. All of a sudden, there were millions of voices, millions of accents to train speech recognition systems on, and much less need for the individual user to train the system.

This is reminiscent of a comment that Peter Norvig, Director …

I'm finishing up my presentation for the upcoming COSS.fi event next week (4/19/07), and was exploring an idea - how do you compete when the code is open? - when two things happened in quick succession.

One, I was reading the Bible and came across this interesting verse from Genesis:

...Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.... [Genesis 3:17-19]

In other words, it's good to have to wade through difficulty. That's where growth comes from. There are no magic shortcuts to prosperity.

Second, I read Mike Olson's response to some criticism that I and Stephen O'Grady had heaped upon his …