I don't get it. I understand that Red Hat is a threat to operating systems companies everywhere, but I continue to find it highly ironic that its competitors proclaim cost savings for their customers...by shaving pennies from the least expensive part of the stack (the operating system).

Oracle did it with its "Unbreakable Linux." (Just picked up this shirt today, btw. Zack had it up on his blog and I thought it was too cool not to buy.) Oracle conveniently overlooked the fact that its database costs orders of magnitude more than the Linux the database runs on. If …

I had dinner with Fabrizio, a good friend and CEO of Funambol, the leading mobile open source company. He was in Salt Lake to ski and was kind enough to call me so that we could hang out.

Fabrizio said some things about open source that rang true with me, which I had not considered before. I'll list two principles he mentioned, and will discuss each in turn:

1. Don't upsell your community, and

2. Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source.

At first glance, Fabrizio's principles fly in the face of most open source businesses out there. But when you scratch the surface of his thinking you see that it actually undergirds the most successful open source businesses. Let me explain.

Fabrizio's first principle - …

From Rishab's excellent report came a few graphics that I thought worth calling out separately from the report itself. It's interesting to see how Europe's adoption and usage of open source compares with the US'. Here are a few slides (from IDC and Optaros - its report is here [Registration req'd]) that depict the differences.

First, here are the open source applications most prevalently used in Europe:

Compared to the US, first large ($1B+) enterprises:

And then mid-sized companies ($50M - $1B):

LinuxWorld Magazine ran this article yesterday about open source's move up the stack. (Thanks, Russ, for pointing me to it.) Rather than wondering whether open source has arrived (it has), the article asks, "Where?":

“Open source has won the first battle: It is now listed among the default platform decisions,” says Dave Jenkins, CTO at online outdoor sporting goods retailer Backcountry.com in Park City, Utah. The next step, open source users agree, is moving up the stack and figuring out which open source tools are ready for enterprise deployments.

“Infrastructure open source products are essentially a no-brainer at this point, but the adoption of enterprise applications has been slow,” says Curtis Edge, CIO at The Christian Science Monitor, which revamped its …

...is by going to work for an open source company. I get people asking me all the time for career advice (Not sure why they ask me - it's not like I have a "career." I think that's what older folks have... :-). My advice is always the same:

"Work for an open source company."

The reason is simple economics. The market will basically pay you what it thinks you're worth, and your worth goes up exponentially when you have open source expertise. Open source, according to Gartner and nearly every sane person on the planet, continues to be one of the top three trends in technology. Consequently, if you're an enterprise (i.e., IT person) or an ISV, you want open source people.

And thus, if you're a would-be employee, you want to be wanted. You want open source experience.

It's an fact that every person I hire has their salary rate go up …

Matthew Aslett is reporting on MySQL's mostly unnoticed licensing change. As he notes, it's not really a change, so much as putting a stake in the ground to keep MySQL on GPLv2 for the future. As Kaj (VP of Community for MySQL) notes on his blog:

MySQL has today refined its licensing scheme from “GPLv2 or later” to “GPLv2 only“, in order to make it an option, not an obligation for the company to move to GPLv3.

Specifically, this means that copyright notice in the MySQL source code files will change from referring to “either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version” to “version 2” only, in the MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 code bases.

This is not a once-and-for-all decision, but rather gives MySQL breathing room to wait …

Ismael at IT Redux claims an 83% success rate on his 2006 predictions and I like his picks for 2007. Besides the love for Mule, his notion that "the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 applications for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase" is dead on. The legacy burden of SAP is monstrous. The OSS vendors that figure out how to make things work with SAP (in addition to trying to displace it) have a huge market opportunity.

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I'm still plowing through Richardson's biography of William James, and came across a comment on Hegel that really struck me. Hegel, in a gross oversimplification, believed that history is a series of conflicts, directed by the Geist (spirit) inentrixably toward freedom - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. All conflicts lead toward a positive end of global freedom. As Hegel wrote, "The history of the world [Zeitgeist] is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."

Very nice. What's not to like?

Much, if you're William James. The problem with seeing all conflict as mere disagreements that lead us ever onward toward freedom is that, unfortunately, …

As 2006 nears its close, Dave and I decided to try to do a "Year in Review" sort of post or two. You can find Dave's here.

This has been an exceptional year for open source (and for me, personally, though Arsenal didn't contribute much to that). I was with Alfresco all year, as well as the advisory boards for SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Specifix, MuleSource (sort of - still waiting for my paperwork, Dave :-), Intoto, and Bungee Labs, as well as the board of OSI and the Open Source Business Conference. These gave me a bird's eye view into different sectors of the industry, so as to separate hype from reality in open source.

Guess what? All signs are positive for open source, no …

I just received great news today. Eben Moglen has agreed to keynote the conference. He joins Matthew Szulik (CEO, Red Hat), Marc West (CIO, H&R Block), Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL), and one other IT executive (that I can't name just yet) as our distinguished keynotes for the conference. If you haven't heard Eben speak, you're in for a treat. He is masterful, and will seriously challenge a lot of conventional thinking about what "open source" means, and how freedom contributes to capital.

This complements a speaking faculty that also includes senior IT executives from Activision, AIG, Bank of America, Davis Polk Wardwell LLP, US Department of Defense, E*Trade, H&R Block, and others, as well as senior executives from leading industry players like MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Oracle, Microsoft, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray & Cary, Intel, Olliance Group, Red Hat, Matrix Partners, Mayfield Fund, and a range of others.

This is, hands down, …