Our next installment of the "In the Trenches" series introduces us to someone that I know very well, Martin Musierowicz of Alfresco. Martin works for me and has been exceptional. He came to Alfresco with ~eight years of open source experience and has put it to work for the company. Martin is proof that while I stink at most things, I hire very well.

Martin grudgingly agreed to talk for The Open Road once a month's salary was withheld. Martin fits this Series' profile perfectly: someone of which you may not have heard, but who has added significant revenue and expertise to the company. Martin is the best open source partner person I've met. JBoss taught him well to request value for value. Indeed, as he says below, open source companies can't afford to partner cheaply...

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Martin Musierowicz, Senior Director of Channels...responsible for Strategic Alliances and OEMs (i.e., …

I thought it would be a good idea to shift gears a bit to talk with the CEO of an open source startup that has Europe in its veins, especially one with Finland coursing through it. So I caught up with Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent, which provides database high availability software (for MySQL and PostgreSQL).

I've known Eero for some time (though, in my ignorance, I once asked if Eero is a Greek name. He replied, "No, Matt. I come from the land of open source." Finland, in other words. :-)

Name, position, and company of executive

Eero Teerikorpi, CEO, Continuent.

Year company was founded and year you joined it

I founded Continuent in 2004. (Continuent?s predecessor, Emic Networks, was founded in 2001.)

Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested …

Last year at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference I hosted a BoF (Birds of a Feather) about memcached.  It was a popular event.  So, this year, I decided to broaden the scope to caching in general.  Its titled Caching for fun and profit.  It will be Wednesday, July 25 from 8:30-9:30pm in Room E141.

Anything goes. We can talk about memcached, Tugela, basic file caching… whatever.

More and more web sites are finding that they need to uses caching to increase their performance. There are those of us that have solved some problems. Others that are new to these techniques have a lot of questions. This BoF is an opportunity for …

One of these years I will finally get a talk accepted for OScon and actually be able to attend. I always hear good things about the conference and it seems like my company almost has its own track this year.

For those of you who are attending, be sure to attend some of the great talks being delivered by my friends and colleagues:

Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications
Next-Gen Interaction with Ajax, Comet, and PHP
Advanced Production Troubleshooting
Scalable Internet Architectures …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …

The sky is not falling for Microsoft, but it's sure starting to look cloudy. No wonder the company keeps trying to make thunder about patent infringement. The US Supreme Court under Justic Roberts has become less activist than in previous decades, as the WSJ reports: let's hope that the courts won't be the last bastion for market share in the software world, either.

Evans Data, as reported by Paul Krill at Infoworld, just completed a survey of North American developers and found the following:

A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago. Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 …

First off, I'm changing the title of the series to "In the trenches with..." because I'm finding that the best people are often not keen to sing praises to themselves (i.e., "Unsung heroes"). At any rate, while these people are, in fact, the heroes of open source, the series is designed to glean their expertise and provide a "trenches" view of commercial open source.

Hence, a new name.

Nowhere is super-capable humility in more abundance than MySQL. I love that company. I've yet to meet anyone there that I wouldn't enjoy sitting next to on a long plane ride. Mostly because they're somewhat quiet, and I hate talking to people on planes. But... :-)

I asked Zack Urlocker to suggest an "unsung hero" at MySQL and he suggested I chat with Gary Whizin, senior director of …

Vadim and me will be speaking on OSCON 2007, taking place in Portland,OR July 23-27.

Our talk will be about Open Source Transactional Storage Engines meaning Innodb, Falcon, Solid and PBXT.

We’ll look into architecture of these storage engines as well as compare performance in number of Benchmarks.

If you will be visiting OSCON please drop by, if not we’ll share presentation and some other notes here after the conference.

We’re also planning to visit Jay’s both on MySQL.. Initially we were thinking to organize yet another BOF on MySQL Performance but as this conference is not MySQL focused single MySQL BOF is probably enough and Performance related questions could be taken care of on it.

We’re also organizing …

I've been talking the last few days with Oracle, Novell, and SAIC about how open source figures into their product plans and, in SAIC's case, how open source affects the company's services strategy. Each of these companies has obvious things to gain (and perhaps to lose) from open source.

Today I wanted to talk with a company that has not traditionally been known for its open source work. BMC Software. I have been talking with the open source group at BMC for over a year, but I rarely heard much open source noise emerging from the company. That is, until BMC hired Will Hurley from Qlusters, and then suddenly I heard a lot more.

I caught up with Will late last week to find out what open source secrets BMC has been hiding from the world. As it turns out, open source is alive and well at BMC, and growing. Funny that: I've yet to talk with a company for whom open source doesn't figure …

Mehlam Shakir, CTO of RippleTech, discusses a practical approach for auditing MySQL databases to meet security and compliance regulations. Hear real-world cases and see a live demonstration of how RippleTech?s Informant solution compliments MySQL by adding a security layer without any performance impact.

For more information on RippleTech?s INFORMANT, visit http://www.rippletech.com/

I have to say, I was a bit worried this would be a typical vendor presentation where every other word is marketing speak for how great the product is. It actually just ended up being ?here?s how Informant works, and here?s how auditing, security and compliance needs can be met,? presented in a way that?s useful and valuable to anyone who is interested in auditing or security. …