Tim has written another insightful piece on where technology is going, based on the technology books people are buying.

With this in mind, take a look at the tree map for programming languages. (Keep in mind, as Tim notes, that "the size of a square indicates the relative size of the category, and its color indicates the rate of change. A category that is bright green is up significantly. One that is bright red is heading strongly in the other direction.")

What are the takeaways?

• Ruby has continued to grow apace, although its 255% growth rate is off last quarter's torrid 687% increase! Interestingly, PHP also picked up some steam, up 11% vs. last quarter's 6% YoY increase. Python's 27% YoY gain, up from last quarter's 6% gain, shows even more strength. In short, while Ruby has become the …

Jimi Hendrix once asked, "Are you experienced?" The new song, however, is "Are you assimilated?"

Assimilated into what? The Borg, of course. :-)

What is The Borg? It's the ever closing world of the large, proprietary ecosystems. Such ecosystems deliver a lot of value - greater integration between components, improved (theoretically) ease of use, etc. Microsoft has been the master of this, and Oracle is mounting the most formidable challenge to Microsoft (perhaps one reason for the Linux announcement, and clearly a reason for its announced …

If you've followed this blog, you know that I feel Microsoft's Sharepoint is the future of Microsoft's enterprise lock-in. Intriguingly, an open source company, SocialText, has joined forces with Microsoft to help them achieve that goal even faster. Ross and company are even providing an easy migration from JotSpot (acquired by Google), just in case you wanted to expedite the lock-in. :-)

Ross is a smart guy and understands that open source is still too young to be linking up solely with open source companies. Microsoft, for its part, recognizes the future, and so has partnered with …

Christof Wittig, CEO of db4o, and former student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, has written an excellent follow-up to his original MySQL case study.

Christof does a great job of tracing the challenges facing MySQL, as well as the way the company has successfully responded to many of them. He also identifies an interesting, parallel trend to how Linux spread:

The first enterprise-wide users of MySQL were Internet-enabled start-up companies which turned to free open source software stacks such as LAMP to get their business off the ground. These companies not only saw the lower cost advantages of open source, but also valued the ability to modify parts of the underlying software to differentiate themselves in …

Using freely available ZRM for MySQL , you can set up a solution to backup and restore your MySQL database, within minutes. This article has all the details.

In a dramatic twist on Oracle's news yesterday that it will be offering support for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, word on the street is that MySQL is considering offering support for Oracle's venerable database.

The hitch, however, is pricing. Early estimates suggest that MySQL would need to charge 1000% the cost of Oracle's typical pricing to make a profit on the support, given the persistent bugginess of proprietary databases compared to MySQL.

/tongue in cheek :-)

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Walmart.com is relaunching, and has open source at its core. MySQL? Well, probably (that's a given these days), but this news is even more significant, because it's OpenLaszlo from Laszlo Systems. OpenLaszlo is a great way to add rich media functionality to your website. WalMart agrees.

The real question, given WalMart's reputation for driving down vendor pricing, is how much lower than free did it require? :-)

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It was my pleasure to work with Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL for about a year during 2005 and 2006. I was astounded by how involved he is with the employees and how well he keeps abreast of the goings-on in the company. He seems to be of the rare set who are not only strong supporters and evangelizers of the company and software, but are also technically familiar with it. With great folks like Mårten, Brian, Arjen, Zack and Ulf, MySQL AB has been and continues to be one of the most important Open Source companies that exists.

Go read the slashdot article here:
…

Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL is a robust and intelligent solution for live backup and recovery of local and remote MySQL databases. In case you are not familiar with it, take a look at ZRM for MySQL project page.

Key features in 1.1 release
- Backup images can be compressed and encrypted using platform tools
- Custom plugin interfaces for
- Backup encryption
- Pre backup actions
- Post backup actions
- Flexible scheduling
- Binary log parser
- Secure file transfer
- Automatic HTML and Text backup report generation
- Backup reports are available as RSS feed

This is an open source community project. Feel free to check out the project wiki, go to …

MySQL today announced that it has become a truly community-driven company. This will sound funny to those of you that think MySQL announced its Enterprise product today. Yes, it did that. But the real news in MySQL's move is its efforts to continue to bolster its already vibrant community.

Savvy users and developers of open source software already know that community is in short supply - there simply is not a large global pool of developers that are anxiously waiting to contribute code to your (or my) project. Therefore, good community developers (and users) are golden, and companies and projects work hard to find them.

In MySQL's case, the company has had to worry …