Mansour Safai, one of the great unsung heroes of the software development tools industry, passed away in the early morning of February 9th.  The picture above is Mansour with his son Nicolai. 

Although Mansour was a private person his impact in the industry was profound.  He created the most successful standalone debugger of the 1980s, Multiscope, the Symantec C++ family of development tools, Visual Cafe, the first Java IDE and finally, M7 a visual development environment …

Alfresco, the leading (or maybe even only!) supplier of open source enterprise content management software has received an additional $8 million in venture capital investment through Mayfield Fund and Accel Partners.  Alfresco is a sign of the growing scope of open source throughout the enterprise.  A few years back people questioned whether open source had a role beyond the operating system.  Sure, a few hackers would run Linux, but...

Now it's clear that open source is not only significant in IT infrastructure, but there's a growing role for open source applications, including content management, CRM, business intelligence, collaboration and email.  More and more companies are building enterprise grade applications on the LAMP stack and that will further drive the adoption of open source applications and infrastructure.

Congrats guys!  …

I got an email reminder message (several actually) from Matt Asay about the upcoming OSBC conference in San Francisco.  For those of you in high tech in silicon valley who want to understand open source, or anyone looking for a fun way to spend Valentine's day, OSBC is the place to be.  It's the first and best business conference about open source.  Two years ago, when Matt started the conference, open source business sounded like an oxymoron.  Now it's practically a mantra in the valley.  Keynotes include the likes of Nick "Does IT matter?" Carr from Harvard, John Roberts from SugarCRM, Bill Hilf from Microsoft, Peter Thielf from Paypal, Jonathan Schwartz from Sun and Lawrence Lessig from Stanford.

Don't think about it, just sign up.

• OSBC: …

After much procrastination, I have set up a domain name with the proper mapping for this blog.  So you can now reach it as www.theopenforce.com.   The blog is still hosted at www.typepad.com and all earlier bookmarks should still work.

Addendum: I have had reports that the RSS feed is not working. However, you should be able to get it at as before, e.g. http://zurlocker.typepad.com/theopenforce/atom.xml 

There's an interesting editorial in InfoWorld about SQL Server where Sean McCown, a noted SQL Server author, says that only "tree huggers" would use an open source database. Maybe he should have checked with the IT staff at InfoWorld since they run MySQL and the LAMP stack extensively in InfoWorld's operations.  In fact InfoWorld's former CTO Chad Dickerson, frequently wrote about their use of MySQL and other open source products. Or maybe Chad really is a tree hugger. 

Maybe Alcatel, Cardinal Health, the Census Bureau, CNet, Evite, Friendser, The Gap, Google, Lufthansa, Macy's, Nasa, Nokia, Orbitz, Sabre, Sony, Suzuki, Tellme Networks, TicketMaster and eight million other MySQL users are all tree huggers.  Hell, we're being over-run by tree huggers.  Ok, Craigslist is a customer too, and they probably are tree …

There's an interesting editorial in InfoWorld about SQL Server where Sean McCown, a noted SQL Server author and InfoWorld reviewer, says that only "tree huggers" would use an open source database. Maybe he should have checked with the IT staff at InfoWorld since they run MySQL and the LAMP stack extensively in InfoWorld's operations.  In fact InfoWorld's former CTO Chad Dickerson, frequently wrote about their use of MySQL and other open source products. I've put a few quotes and links below.  But maybe Chad is just a tree hugger. 

Maybe Alcatel, Cardinal Health, the Census Bureau, CNet, Evite, Friendser, The Gap, Google, Lufthansa, Macy's, Nasa, Nokia, Orbitz, Sabre, Sony, Suzuki, Tellme Networks, TicketMaster and eight million other …

There's an interesting editorial in InfoWorld about SQL Server where Sean McCown, a noted SQL Server author and InfoWorld reviewer, says that only "tree huggers" would use an open source database. Maybe he should have checked with the IT staff at InfoWorld since they run MySQL and the LAMP stack extensively in InfoWorld's operations.  In fact InfoWorld's former CTO Chad Dickerson, frequently wrote about their use of MySQL and other open source products. I've put a few quotes and links below.  But maybe Chad is just a tree hugger. 

Maybe Alcatel, Cardinal Health, the Census Bureau, CNet, Evite, Friendser, The Gap, Google, Lufthansa, Macy's, Nasa, Nokia, Orbitz, Sabre, Sony, Suzuki, Tellme Networks, TicketMaster and eight million other …

Builder.au has selected MySQL 5.0 as the editor's choice in their recent road test of databases comparing MySQL, SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle.  Hat's off to the MySQL development team for making this happen.  We're very proud of all of the new capabilities in MySQL 5.0 and it's nice to see the hard work recognized, especially when compared to some pretty stiff competition.  Here are a few select quotes:

• "Release 5.0 of MySQL is really taking it to the Oracle and DB2 with advanced features such as cluster support and fault tolerance and in most other departments the features run head to head with the competition. Non-SQL junkies can take heart with the GUIs dramatically reducing the reliance on the CLI, bringing administration and configuration within the realms of the novice. MySQL V5.0 is a compelling product and it is hard to argue against its nomination for the …

The Wall Street Journal today, in an article on Sun's recent announcement, reported that MySQL has achieved an estimated 70 million downloads so far.  That's a pretty impressive result and puts MySQL up there with the top products out there, open source or not.  And the momentum is growing with MySQL 5.0.  In the first three weeks we had more than a million downloads.  Thank you to all the MySQL users and supporters out there for making MySQL so popular.  And congratulations to a great worldwide development team!

The news from Sun is that they are continuing in their adoption of open source by offering their Java Enterprise …

Larry Ellison, billionaire CEO of Oracle Corporation, has recently agreed to donate $100 million to charities.  The donation is part of a settlement recently approved by a California judge.  Ellison will have up to 90 days to identify the recipient of the donation and will have up to 5 years to make the donation.  Sounds like a win-win situation for Larry and the charities.

• CNet: …