Truth in advertising: I'm easily swayed by Monica Kumar. Monica is director of Oracle's Open Source Program Office, is very smart, and actually fun to talk with.

(This last thing should not be underestimated. I remain of the mind that people prefer to do business with nice people, not jerks. On that score, I also have to admit mea culpa for casting Oracle with a broad "jerk" brush. The funny thing is, everyone I know there now, I like. So, maybe Oracle isn't a mean, bullying company after all.... :-)

Anyway, I bumped into Monica at Novell's BrainShare conference this week in Utah. She gave me a few CDs for the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and suggested I actually try it out, instead of …

As the open source business ecosystem grows and matures, I'm finding it increasingly important for me to not only pitch my company's paid version, but also others'. Were I true Adam Smith, I'd argue that

...every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to …

I'm pretty excited about my next few weeks. I suppose one of the perks of my job is getting to attend and sometimes speak at a variety of conferences in the open source development world. Next week, I will be in Santa Clara for EclipseCon 2006. At this conference, I plan on filling in the large gaps of knowledge inside my brain regarding the Eclipse platform and IDE and meeting with a number of key Eclipse Foundation folks and Andi Gutmans from Zend. Stay tuned for some very important announcements tyhis week from MySQL AB and Eclipse.

I will be at the conference from the 21st through the 24th of March, so find me when I am there if you will also be at the conference. I want to meet as many Eclipse users as I can, so that I can get a better picture of how developers use the platform, what they see are the key …

I will be attending EclipseCon 2006 in Santa Clara, California, next week. It's an exciting thing for me for a number of reasons:

• MySQL Has Become a Member of the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider

  Yes, that's right. MySQL AB has officially become a member of the Eclipse Foundation this week. We will be devoting development resources to participation in 2 Eclipse projects that will be of great benefit to the MySQL Community.

• The Eclipse Data Tools Project is wickedly cool

  Basically, the DTP is developing Visual Database Tools like TOAD and DBArtisan. You will get all the familiar database tools (e.g. SQL Editor, SQL Debugger, SQL Browser, etc.)

  We will make sure that all the excellent tools from the DTP …

Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. Specifically it provides complete support for database testing via JDBC.

Some References: Homepage http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/  ·  Wiki Page  ·  User Manual

Initial Installation Steps

$ su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://apache.planetmirror.com.au/dist/jakarta/jmeter/binaries/jakarta-jmeter-2.1.1.tgz
$ wget …

Some recent posts regarding Oracle (See Smart moves by MySQL AB and Larry Ellison still doesn’t understand open source) leads me to put in my 2 cents worth.

My background I’m sure like a lot of experienced MySQL people is in Oracle, and indeed in Ingres before that (starting in 1988). I have also worked for a number of years at Oracle Corporation. Ironically I started as their resident Ingres Specialist, in an international research project of DMS (Design & Migration Services) of re-engineering Ingres applications into an Oracle Designer Repository some 10 years ago in 1996. I of course moved into a number of other Oracle roles for clients following that. I still retain some …

Mr. Ellison spouted off on open source yesterday and showed that he has a very sophisticated understanding of open source...as it existed circa 1998. What Ellison doesn't seem to understand is that open source hasn't been about free love and free beer for a long, long time. As such, no one is particularly surprised (at least those that read this blog shouldn't be) to find out that Linux, for example, had a huge chunk of it contributed by Intel, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc.

Hence, he says,

"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open-source project. Every open-source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from …

Sebastian Bergmann writes:

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in free software and open source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their own program.

FrOSCon is organized for the first time in 2006 by the department of computer science in collaboration with the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin, the student body and the FrOSCon e.V., and aims to establish itself as the largest event of its kind in Rhineland.

Projects

Successful …

When I set out to develop the content for the OSBC panel "Marketing to Dilbert: Marketing Methodologies for the Open Source Crowd" I was fairly certain that something would get lost in translation. The topic itself is just so broad that I tried to refine it to what I considered the most important aspects. Therefore I focused on market research, communicating with developers and learning from other marketers. The thing I think most people continue to forget is that marketing is much more than brochures and websites. It's also pricing, brand positioning, communications and more.

In the presentation, the slide that I thought could easily make me less friends was the one about what companies are doing a good job and what companies are close but not really succeeding. Oddly there wasn't much disagreement from the audience though at …

CIO Magazine's Christopher Koch has a great matrix of Open Source business models in this month's issue as part of the cover story Free Code for Sale: The New Business of Open Source. The text is pasted below for posterity's sake. All credit to Chris and CIO Mag.

Open Source + Service
What it means: Companies sell support and services around open-source software.
Who’s doing it: Compiere (ERP), JBoss (middleware), Red Hat (Linux)
Advantages for CIOs: You pay only for support, not software. The cost to switch providers is relatively low because the source code is available to anyone.
Startup challenges: Difficult to build businesses because switching costs are low, …