Vyatta raises series C funding. Greenplum launches data cloud initiative. Fedora 11. And more.

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# Vyatta raised $10m in series C round, led by Citrix.

# Carlo Daffara published Horses, carriages and cars an assessment of the shifting OSS business models, and a proposal of what is the optimal model.

# Greenplum delivered version 3.3 of its analytical database, launched its Enterprise Data Cloud initiative.

# Daniel Abadi asked whether betting on the MySQL mass market for data warehousing a good idea.

# Roberto Galoppini …

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

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Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

As mentioned previously, Monty Widenius is starting his new company based on some interesting premises. With Zak Greant they have co-authored a pamflet where they outline a blueprint for Open Source companies. In many ways this could be considered the "Dogme 95" of Open Source businesses:-)

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How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core model?

These are some the questions we hoped to try and address with our Open Source is Not a Business Model report, published in October last year. As I mentioned yesterday, however, without an agreed set of definitions and a common vocabulary it is difficult for a broader understanding the implications of the various models to develop.

One of the ways we might be able to do that is to map the categories we used in our …

It seems January and February were just completely taken up by customer engagements. I don't know if it is due to the recession or what, but we who are selling MySQL are just very busy right now. Towards the end of February I finally got on top of my life again, and on the bright side, I took almost a full week off from work, just to get even with all the overtime I accumulated.

This is old news now, but I still want to make a note of these historical events for my own blog too. If you're like yawn... then don't read it. OTOH, seems like I'm in good company commenting on this this week :-)

So some weeks ago we were hit by the surprising news that Mårten will leave Sun, just a few days after …

I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).

Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email raises a valid point about how we determine which companies are considered “open source vendors” and I wanted to use the opportunity to outline the rules I use to make that decision.

As a technical snafu at our end had prevented Tarus from leaving a comment on the blog I hope he won’t mind me using his words to explain the issue he raised.

He wrote:

“You …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?

Much of the open source blog chatter over the Christmas period was related to open source business models/strategies, largely triggered by a post written by Dave Rosenberg in which he declared that commercial licensing, and specifically open core licensing will be all the rage in 2009:

“Typically we now see an “open core” freely available with “exclusive” or proprietary features only available when you pay. If you are trying to build a commercial business on top of an open source project, this is likely the right answer.”

…

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …