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 …

I spent some time with Chris Marino, CEO and Co-founder of SnapLogic, a sparkling new (pre-VC funding, I believe) entrant to the open source business ecosystem. The company is positioning itself between the EAI and ETL markets, and has an approach that could prove to be quite successful. As I've argued before, the Application Integration space is ripe for open source.

Here's the problem, schematically, that SnapLogic is trying to resolve:

And here's the problem, in prose:

First off, some context is needed. I asked Chris who his competitors are, and he noted a few of the big-name EAI vendors, including Tibco, Informatica, WebMethods, Vitria, IBM, etc. But the competition tends to have …

Event Information

Topic:
Backup and Recovery of MySQL Clusters

Date and Time:
Thursday, April 12th , 2007 10:00 am
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

Panelist(s) Info:
Shailen Patel - Professional Services Engineer,
Paddy Sreenivasan - VP, Engineering,
Ram “TK” Krishnamurthy - VP, Services and Support

Duration: 1 hour

Description:
Zmanda Recovery Manager [ZRM] for MySQL provides a simple and easy way to backup and recover MySQL clusters. Zmanda Engineers will provide an overview of ZRM for MySQL and demonstrate its ability to backup and restore MySQL cluster.

I was reading through some old Jeff Nolan posts and came across this one, and it opened a sore. Jeff comments on this CNET article about Oracle's response to Microsoft's per-CPU/socket pricing. Microsoft made the decision to charge per-CPU/socket, not per-core, which throws a bit of a monkey wrench into Oracle's attempts to price per-core, and has the potential to discount Oracle's database pricing by as much as 87%, as Stephen Shankland reported.

I feel for Oracle on this, because customers derive real, tangible value from software running on improved hardware. Customers don't necessarily see it this way, but it's true. Why shouldn't a customer pay for wringing more value out of its software (through improved hardware)?

Jeff sees it very differently, and writes:

…

We’ve been working on automatic master promotion for MySQL using lbpool and I’m reminded of a few ideas we had after reading about MMM.

The MySQL Master-Master replication (often in active-passive mode) is popular pattern used by many companies using MySQL for scale out. Most of the companies would have some internal scripts to handle things as automatic fallback and slave cloning but no Open Source solution was made available.

Few months ago we were asked to implement such solution for one of the customers and they kindly agreed to let us release things under GPL2 License, and we gave them reduced rate for being Open Source friendly.

We actually considered a dual master approach but abandoned because it was non …

Jonathan Schwartz said something very interesting on his blog today. (I wish he blogged more, and with fewer happy Sun employee faces in his blogs, but this one was good.) He was talking about Sun's licensing of its Neptune ASIC to Marvell, and made this comment:

For years we were called proprietary - a moniker that did more damage to Sun than any market downturn. And frankly, we've spent years recovering. But at this point, my hope is we've completely turned that slur on its head, that we've come to define open - more open than any other vendor, more open than open itself. From silicon to systems, software to storage and services.I get a lot of grief for being an open source bigot. Few that make that claim seem to understand that I spent my years in the "hybrid" wilderness. It didn't work. That's why I've increasingly opted for a pureplay open source view. …