The latest from the MySQL community

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

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MySQL's Marten Mickos is probably my favorite CEO. He is a great leader for his company and the OSS movement. I can only hope to be half as good a CEO as he is. **Please note I am not being sarcastic.**

Check out this Q&A with MM--lots of insight into MySQL and the overall OSS marketplace.

Mårten: This is a great question. First, I think closed source vendors are proving the hypothesis incorrect, because they are the ones who have un-friendly products although they have a licence revenue stream. And open source products, which typically lack a licence fee, are the ones with the best user friendliness. Why is that? I think the reason is that popularity is worth more than the marginally improved fees you could get for a …

At a user conference in London, MySQL announced MySQL Enterprise, a departure from their existing business and development models.

Essentially MySQL will have two versions of the core product: Enterprise and Community. This is very much like RHEL and Fedora—an approach that I support. I will let Matt dive further into the business aspects, but I am in the camp that it's OK to make money from open source, at least if you are paying for the development. I would expect a bit of squawking from the community about the MySQL change, but the community version remains good news. Marten Mickos said "we'll have many things that will make the Community version have features and functions that may or may not ever make it to the Enterprise version."

MySQL Enterprise is available as an annual subscription in four different tiers (Basic, Silver, Gold, Platinum.) Existing (and new) subscribers gain access to new management tools which Marten …

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It's basically the OSS version of Basecamp, a tool I like but would love to customize. I have a developer installing activeCollab right now...it's all PHP/MySQL so should be straight ahead development.

Also today I saw Coghead, which offers a very interesting drag and drop project management as a hosted tool. Screenshots are available, but no demo...the website contains arguably the best marketing fluff/BS web copy I have read in a long time. I love when Web 2.0 empowers me.

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As Sun continues to debate just how they will open-source Java and deal with things like forking and perceived loss of control they would be well served to take a look at how successful open source projects are managed and developed. In the majority of cases there is a company or organization that acts as the Shepard of the project and manages the development roadmap. Case in point: the MySQL database is managed by MySQL AB, Apache is managed by the ASF, and Spring is guided by Interface 21. There are exceptions where the community takes over either and self-governs (like PHP) or creates fissures that result into multiple iterations of the base code (like Linux) which likely …

I often wonder if commercial open source applications, things like MySQL, EnterpriseDB, SugarCRM are underpriced. Open source companies tend to start out as low-cost then as they mature that low-cost remains while the features and quality grow which then (in theory) moves to a differentiation strategy.

But would the market bear a higher price? It seems like the answer is starting to be yes...but how much higher still remains to be seen.

HBS suggests low prices aren't always the best strategy in this article Low Prices = More Customers? Not Always

You should not overindulge your customer. Instead, make sure that you extract fair value for what you deliver. Aggressive and acquiescent actions hinder your own efforts to pursue higher profits. [C]ustomer giveaways, value attacks, and aggressive price cuts represent a huge …

There is a huge market for storage products, backup and recovery, data protection and such. In the open source space, only Zmanda seems to be making any progress with the open source approach to this problem. I spoke with Ken Sims and CEO Chander Kant about their new offerings.

Zmanda network launched yesterday and is offering certified versions of Amanda, and support and services similar to the RedHat network model. The pricing will be much lower and easier to understand than traditional storage software. Roughly ~$50-250 per server or workstation. Linux is the primary platform for the solution, but they will be adding more operating systems to the mix over the next year or so.

Amanda has been out since 1991 so its battle tested already and the company has been pleasantly surprised by the number of people using it. "We think our market is the MySQL market. We're adding enhancements …

Back in October when Oracle announced it was acquiring InnoDB I pondered the impact and decided that while irritating, it wasn't that big of a deal for MySQL. I even suggested that MySQL switch the InnoDB functionality to Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB. But now that Oracle is in allegedly in talks to buy Sleepycat as well it adds a new level of complexity.

A few people are starting to make the argument that Oracle is buying up the components of MySQL to put some kind of stranglehold on the non-internal IP. But I think that's merely a by-product of the bigger picture.

By acquiring JBoss and Sleepycat, Oracle automatically positions itself as the owner of two very broadly used products. (NOTE: Since Zend doesn't technically own PHP I can …

Oracle's latest pricing scheme is one that even Rube Goldberg couldn't have designed. Why do I always feel like major application vendors punish buyers for moving to new technologies?

I am a big believer in multi-core chips, and I appreciate that Oracle is discounting for Sun's new chips, but this doesn't make me want to move to multi-core. It appears that it would be cheaper to simply scale hardware. I guess we have to wait to see how much performance boost the multi-core gives you in relation to the cost upgrade.

While Oracle will continue to recognize each core as a separate processor, the processor definition has been amended as it relates to counting …