I came across this opinion piece by Paul Barton, an attorney at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP today. I wish he would have attended the Open Source Business Conference before writing his piece. (OSBC includes, among other things, two full days of legal education on open source.) He could have saved himself the embarrassment of misinformation. (I won't call it malpractice. :-)

(Btw, I am an attorney. I don't play one on TV.) (Unfortunately.)

First off, Paul is clearly talking about "in the wild" open source, whereas most enterprise open source adoption is of commercial open source (Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc. etc.). It's true that Red Hat doesn't own the code (or most of it, anyway) that it ships, but this is emphatically not true of virtually every other piece of commercial open source …

If you’re interested in looking at what goes into the MySQL documentation, there’s a new and kind of cool gizmo we’ve just installed that makes browsing the docs sources a breeze. Fisheye lets you browse by project, directory, author, date, and other criteria. It also provides an easy way to get to the complete changelogs, and even provides a customisable changelog RSS feed — for example, this feed has commits for just the NDB API documentation, and this is a feed of (all) my commits to the mysqldoc repository.

The …

The results are in, and MySQL came out on top. C't just did a comparison of different databases and found that MySQL is the "fastest database application." The magazine's editors held the contest to evaluate database performance in real-world business use by creating a standard online inventory system.

From the announcement:

"The DVD shop created by MySQL is the hands-down winner of the performance crown. It clearly demonstrates the capabilities of a carefully configured MySQL/PHP application.”The MySQL DVD online store was able to process 3,664 orders per minute (opm). If a second computer had been used, the figure would have gone up to 6,000 opm, indicating that MySQL is business ready. No more of this silly nonsense about it being a low-end utility database. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

(You can see the full results from the contest …

I'm reading an interesting research paper (to be blogged later) that mentions a fact that I find pretty compelling:

In 2001 Debian included more than 55,000,000 lines of code, with an estimated (COCOMO) value of $1.9 billion.That's just Debian (and, as Wheeler notes, it grew to 230 million lines of code by 2005, putting its COCOMO price at $8 billion).

What number would we get to if we added MySQL (2M+ lines of code, I believe), JBoss, etc.? I can't even begin to come up with a rational number, but I'm guessing we're north of $50 billion. $50+ billion worth of free (as in cost and freedom) and open source software.

Priceless.

(Keep in mind that there's more to good software than code size. …

I'm reading a research paper [PDF] by Nicholas Economides (NYU) and Evangelos Katsamakas (Fordham) called "Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms." Long title, but the conclusion of the paper is relatively brief:

In our model, firms and developers invest to improve the quality of the platform or the application and expand the demand by users of these software products. When the operating system is proprietary, the platform provider and the application provider invest only in their own product to maximize their profit. When the operating system is open source, there is no platform provider firm, but the users invest in the platform to maximize their user surplus and their development reputation, which depends on the success of the platform measured by its …

The 451 Group is calling for change in the business models of the so-called "stack providers." (OpenLogic, Spikesource, Sourcelabs, etc.) Dave and I have seen this coming for some time, and the vendors, themselves, have, too, as each has been tweaking its model over time.

(Dave has never been a big believer in Spikesource (here is his first assessment), though I've been more sanguine, and I've also skewed pro OpenLogic and BitRock.) …

I had need to goto the Wikipedia this morning to review the terminology of something, and on the front page in Today’s featured article is Mercury. Being a tad curious given I’d heard only on the radio a few hours ago that Pluto was no longer a planet in our Solar System, I drilled down to the bottom to check references to other planets (quicker then searching). So at the bottom I found the following graphic and details of The Solar System Summary.

Well blow me down, they didn’t waste any time there. Pluto is no longer a planet in our Solar System. It is now categorised as a …

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting interview over on his blog with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL.

Here are a few gems, with my commentary:

In response to the question, "How do you make money with an Open Source product?":

We start by not making money at all - but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business.

Then we sell an enterprise offering to those who need to scale and cannot afford to fail. The enterprise offering consists of certified binaries, updates and upgrades, automated DBA services, 7x24 error resolution, etc. You pay by service level and the number of servers. No nonsense, no special math. Enterprise software buyers are tired of complex pricing models (per core, per cpu, per power unit, per user, per whatever the vendor feels like that day) - models that are still …

I went through elementary school in the 1980s. As such, I was taught that there are winners and losers. My kids learn that "We are all SPECIAL!!!" but I quickly disabuse them of that notion at home. Kill or be killed. Eat that hamburger or your wily 15-month old sister will. The Asay house is quintessentially Hobbesian as we live out our nasty, brutish, and short lives. :-)

I'm kidding, but my 80s mentality has me wondering: with all the open source momentum (and it is real), who is losing? See, it's not possible for everyone to win together all the time. It's not exactly zero sum, but in a relatively finite market, my success may well correlate to your failure.

So who is losing?

Apparently not Oracle. Not yet, anyway. Jason Maynard of CSFB has ORCL at an "Outperform" rating, writing this morning:

For Q1, we are estimating $3.47B in total …

So, FireFox have come up with a novel idea to promote it’s product. Check out Firefox Day.

The official blurb: Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you?ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.

You can even choose how to link your names together on the “Firefox Friends Wall”. Examples like ‘my name’ Informed ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Empowered ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Liberated ‘your name’.

Perhaps MySQL can leverage this idea for some what to promote future download!