I was talking with someone the other day about my Lineo experiences, and it recalled to my mind just how insane the dot-com boom was. Lineo was on a strong path to IPO - we had almost no revenues (a few million dollars), were grossly unprofitable, had no differentiating product (embedded Linux, which customers were happy to buy consulting around, but not pay for the software itself, and wouldn't pay anything for support), and had a massive burn rate.

This was IPO material?

To be fair to us, a large reason that we had the burn rate was because our investment bankers (very respectable, big-name bankers, mind you) told us that we needed a large employee base to justify a high valuation. Think about that for a minute. Not revenues. Not profits. Employees. And so we acquired 6 companies, went from 40 to 440 people virtually overnight, and completed our S-1. …

ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared is back again -- this time with some analysis of different types of big company reactions to open source.

Open source has definitely challenged the business models of existing infrastructure software players. Following is an ontology of different types of big company reactions to open source, and an example of each type of behavior pattern.

Join the Party - IBM
"Join the Party" open source players contribute extensively to existing open source projects, even those that are competing with their proprietary products. IBM has regularly made major contributions to open source technologies that compete with their own products. Examples include IBM's support of Linux, which competes with their AIX UNIX operating system, and Geronimo and PHP, which compete with its WebSphere business. IBM is clearly the most sophisticated large player in the open …

Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
…

Here are some steps involved. Using the current MySQL defacto engine InnoDB. Of course, Falcon, PBXT and others will enable alternative engines to be used.

Convert Table Storage Engine Types

$ mysql -u[user] -p[password] [database] -e "SHOW TABLES" | grep -v "Tables_in" | sed -e "s/^/ALTER TABLE /" | sed -e "s/$/ ENGINE=InnoDB;/" > upgrade.sql
$ mysql -u[user] -p[password] [database] < upgrade.sql

NOTE: This may not work for all tables, for example those with FULLTEXT indexes will fail.

For the introduction of Referential Integrity we need to ensure the following.

• Each Foreign Key column should have an index. Prior to 4.1 I think this was a requirement, however it’s a good general practice regardless for SQL performance.
• The datatype must match between Primary Key and Foreign Keys. The most obvious oversight is normally UNSIGNED, however you also for example have INT …

Following my implementation of UltimateLAMP, read heaps more at this thread, I undertook to provide customisations of a MediaWiki Installation. Here is the first lesson that you can undertake if you wish to beautify the default MediaWiki Installation.

For the purposes of this demonstration, I am going to help out Jay & Colin and propose a restyle the MySQL forge to fit in with the default Home Page. Hopefully you will see it there soon!

For the full lesson Read More Here

Lesson 1 - Updating the default Monobook.css

There are several different ways to make style changes, the simpliest is to customise the system …

SNORT developer Sourcefire closed a $20 million Series D round of venture capital led by late-stage specialist Meritech Capital Partners of Palo Alto, Calif., to boost its balance sheet and position the company for an initial public offering as early as the end of this year.

Will Sourcefire IPO before MySQL?

Link: Sourcefire gets second wind

Jose Mourinho is quoted today about how pleased he is that the best striker on this planet - Thierry Henry - turned down two record offers of nearly $90M from Barcelona and Real Madrid to stay with Arsenal. Why would the coach of the world's most competitive team (in the transfer market, anyway) be happy that Arsenal will be stronger next year?

Because competition is good.

Who cares if Chelsea wins if they have no competition? Indeed, Mourinho has bemoaned this fact lately - no one takes him seriously as a coach since he has billions to spend on buying up every good player on the planet.

It's the same in the open source world. First, it's becoming a bit distressing to me that the proprietary players have come up with such anemic rationales for why IT buyers should choose them. Innovation? Open source has that in spades. Or how …

As I discussed earlier in A picture can tell a thousand words, I outlined briefly what the intention of UltimateLAMP was for. Let me spill the beans so to speak.

What is UltimateLAMP?

UltimateLAMP is a fully functional environment allowing you to easily try and evaluate a number of LAMP stack software products without requiring any specific setup or configuration of these products. UltimateLAMP runs as a Virtual Machine with VMware Player (FREE). This demonstration package also enables the recording of all user entered information for later reference, indeed you will find a wealth of information already available within a number of the Product Recommendations starting with the supplied Documentation.

My executive punch line with the “right” buzz words is:

You have heard of all the hype in …

I’m a keen advocate of MySQL. However, while I use it and promote it within my limited IT circles, I often wonder how MySQL can get better traction and exposure, especially within both the industry sectors and physical locations where I am presently.

This presents a dilemma, it’s almost like the term that has been used in Venture Capital, and in the well named book, Crossing the Chasm. I see and believe that MySQL already has good penetration within certain industry sectors, specifically Internet Based, Startup Based, or Small Based segments. However, I’m sure within other commercial sectors, MySQL has either a token exposure or little to no exposure at all, at least in the circles I mix with.

So how can MySQL the product and MySQL AB the company get both better exposure and …