I received an invitation in my email today for an upcoming CIO-only MySQL webinar. I thought it was interesting because of the audience for MySQL (not to mention the fact that MySQL is clearly cutting into my OSBC territory :-).

Open source is proven in the enterprise. Many of the world's largest organizations, including Yahoo!, Sabre Holdings, Cox Communications, The Associated Press, Google, Nokia, and Nortel, are realizing significant cost savings by using open source products to power web sites, business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software.

But, it’s not just the largest enterprise companies that are implementing open source. Many companies are evaluating an open source stack as an alternative or complement to proprietary solutions from companies like Microsoft, …

Oh, MySQL. That little database that just isn't quite as good as the Big Important Proprietary Incumbents....

Except that, apparently, enterprises aren't getting this message. In fact, 40% of them strongly disagree with the feeling above, as Stephen Shankland reports:

You now can discard any lingering traces of doubt that the open-source MySQL database competes with the incumbent proprietary products from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Data released Thursday from an Evans Data Group survey of database usage among developers shows MySQL use increased from 32 percent in 2004 to 40 percent last year. The survey tallied real production use in corporate environments, not just tire-kicking or pilot projects

Reality bites if you're DB2 or Oracle. Because while I would think much of MySQL's gains are coming at the expense of no one (meaning, MySQL is …

Charlie Babcock's GPLv3 story hit this morning. It's an interesting and thoughtful read, and goes to the heart of one of the big disagreements in open source: how far can a license go in seeking to ensure freedom?

There's a rift developing between camps within the free software movement over the next version of the most popular open source license, known as the General Public License, or GPL. And while that infighting might appear to be little more than a family squabble, its ramifications could be significant for how companies use open source software in the future.

A new version of the GPL, the third overall and the first revision since 1991, was supposed to be released this month. But controversy over several new provisions--and the authors' ambitions to thwart Microsoft's Linux pact with Novell--have delayed it until later …

I'm so excited right now, because I just got Eben's abstract for his OSBC keynote this May 22, 2007 (San Francisco). Eben will be joining Matthew Szulik (CEO, Red Hat), Marc West (CIO, H&R Block), Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL), Rob Curley (VP, Product Development, Washingtonpost.com/Newsweek Interactive), and Lee Thompson (Chief Technologist, E*Trade) as OSBC keynotes, but Eben always stands apart in any crowd.

Here's his session:

Copyleft Business Models: Why It's Good Not To Be Your Competitor's Free Lunch

Abstract: Now that the GPL wars are over, and we have two good GPLs to choose from, it is time to re-ask some fundamental questions about business models and software licenses. In this talk, I explain why smaller software-focused businesses will soon be deserting Apache- and BSD-style permissive licenses for GPL[2 3] and their …

Want to know where the US Navy, Flickr, United Online, NASA, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Google, and others are going to be hanging out April 23-26 in Santa Clara, CA? The MySQL Conference & Expo. I'm not normally one for conferences (which sounds strange, given that I started one), but this is one of those foundational events that it's important not to miss. (I'll also be at the Red Hat Summit for the same reason.)

When Tim O'Reilly is on the board, MySQL must be doing something right. What it's doing is making lots of money, providing lots of free downloads, to lots of mission-critical applications. And if you want to grok how and why, it's good to be …

Let the open source IPO market begin in earnest! With MySQL gearing up for an IPO, and this Sourcefire offering set to go [PDF], life continues to look good for open source exits. Sourcefire is issuing 5,770,000 shares at the price of $15 (which I'm hearing floating around) at a $350M valuation. Not bad.

But one thing that has me concerned is how Sourcefire apparently treats open source. LIke something to be exploited, but not replenished and fed. (I stress "apparently" because it may well be that the company does a wide range of things for the community. I'm just going off the prospectus.)

In the prospectus, Sourcefire cites the open source community as one of its primary strengths:

The Snort user community, with over 100,000 registered users and over 3 million downloads to date, has enabled us to …

And so last night Arsenal's Champions League season ended in a brilliant match which ended the completely wrong way. Arsenal's problem is clear: it's incredibly slick passing and footwork results in too few goals. (Stay with me here - this really is an open source post.)

But that doesn't really tell the story. The real story behind Arsenal's problems sounds eerily similar to Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. And, hence, Arsenal's problem is much like the software industry's problem.

Arsenal has dominated (off and on) English football for nearly 100 years. In 2004-05, the team went 49 games without being beaten. At the heart of its recent success is Thierry Henry, the world's best forward. In years past, Henry put in more goals than anyone else in the league, in striking and beautiful fashion.

This year? Not even a …

Open Source software is often being referred to as commodity products. This is particularly true for OSS databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Developers of such systems can heavily make use of defined standards. In this case, it’s the various SQL standards. These standards define the general functionality set your product should have. They help you define the commodity features of your software.

The question is: where do you get your software requirements from if the OSS product you are developing cannot rely on any or only a few standards?

Let’s take a look at two other types of OSS products: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and collaborative software. I used to work for an Open Source ECM vendor until recently and just …

At last month’s Vancouver PHP Conference, local journalist Bruce Byfield gave me a quick interview about how I got involved in Free Software and Open Source. We chatted for a while about my time at MySQL, my bits of work in the PHP community and what I am currently up to. The interview turned into a profile for Linux.com that was published a few days ago.

I was a bit surprised to find that there have been a few anonymous trolls for the profile - I didn’t think that there would be any comments on the profile.

The Linux.com profile: …

Matt Casters has been around the open source business intelligence, ETL, and data warehousing scene for quite some time. He is the original developer of Kettle, an open source Java tool now packaged by Pentaho as Pentaho Data Integration. He's also doing a couple a couple of absolutely dynamite sessions at the MySQL conference in April, which I asked him recently to comment on.

Our own Roland Bouman is a huge Pentaho fan, and is also doing a session called …