There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

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This option, currently available only for Linux, if set enables the usage of large pages by MySQL. Many operating systems/system architectures support optional memory pages bigger than the default size (4 KB). Usually the large page size is 2 MB, this …

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

The 451 Group’s Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service now has a podcast (iTunes or RSS feed).

A month or so ago, I was having a conversation with The 451 Group’s Vice President of Research Services, Simon Carruthers, about ways to expand the offerings of the CAOS Research Service. The CAOS Research Service includes aspects that are public (such as this blog), but the majority of the work that we do is accessible only to our paying clients, namely our research articles and reports, as well as our advisory service.

We made the decision to add a biweekly conference call …

As you probably know, or at least heard, we are currently porting Workbench to Linux. Generally speaking the porting process is split in several stages. The first one is to compile non-GUI Back-End which represents about 80% of the total application code. The next stage is to ensure that unit-tests are run correctly for the ported stuff. The third is to create user interface and to bind it to the back-end/core. After that we will have alpha version of Workbench for Linux.
Regarding tests, actually a portion of unit-tests are already passed. These are 121 of 122 going well. At the moment we are working on non-GUI back-end, and core part is compiled and run, so now the modules and plugins are in progress. I must admit that process of porting is pretty smooth, most of the code has already been prepared with Linux/OS X ports in mind. I will be posting our progress on the porting efforts frequently, please keep checking our blog.

As promised, after individual presentations at last week's CommunityOne I brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel.  (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!)

Although the panel itself wasn't recorded, immediately after it concluded, the five of us headed to the make-shift podcast studio we had set up at the event …

When we write about investors on this blog we are normally referring to angel and VC investors and the funding they provide to open source start-ups. There is a small, but growing, list of VCs that clearly understand the open source development and distribution models and the long-term profit potential of open source software vendors.

Can the same be said of individual and institutional investors buying and selling shares in publicly traded software companies? Not according to the analysis of Oliver Alexy, a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Technische Universität München TUM Business School in Munich, Germany.

Oliver has analyzed the impact that releasing software under open source licenses has on a company’s share price. Details have been published this week in the …

If you’re an advanced MySQL person, you might already know these, in which case, please read anyway, because I still have some questions. On the other hand, f you’re someone who launched an application without a lot of database background, thinking “MySQL Just Works”, you’ll eventually figure out that it doesn’t, and in that case, maybe these tips will be of some use. Note that I’m speaking specifically about InnoDB and MyISAM, since this is where most of my experience is. Feel free to add more to this content in the comment area. 

InnoDB vs. MyISAM

Which one to use really depends on the application, how you’re deploying MySQL, your plans for growth, and several other things. The very high-level general rule you’ll see touted on the internet is “lots of reads, use MyISAM; lots of writes, use InnoDB”, but this is really an oversimplification. Know your application, and know your data.  If all of …

Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program

The downsides of rdiff are:

…

Sun advances GlassFish. Red Hat announces JBoss momentum. Mandriva releases Linux update. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Red Hat Continues Middleware Industry Momentum, Red Hat (Press Release)

Mandriva presents its latest distribution: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, Mandriva (Press Release)

Hyperic Announces MySQL …