At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.

The rumoured acquisition of Sun by IBM makes sense on many levels. IBM has always been a strong proponent of business-friendly open source and is probably more invested in Java than Sun itself. The indirect impact on recently-acquired MySQL is a bit personal for me, however.

Many moons ago, I worked in the IBM software lab in Toronto where DB2 UDB is primarily developed. I learned a great deal there, but something stirred within me, a desire for freedom and flexibility in software. I took a risk and moved to California, working for a number of start ups, believing that open source database technology (and software in general) was the wave of the future, and I wanted to work in companies that were willing to use OSS software.

To say the least, many of my then-current and former IBM colleagues that had taken cushy jobs with big companies to administer …

In the last three updates to this blog, I've tried to set out a clear direction of where Sun's headed. I've talked about our three basic priorities:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting Adoption and Commercial Opportunity.

I'm hoping you've got a clear picture surrounding the first of these two priorities - how and where we drive software adoption, and focus our commercial efforts.

So now I'd like to talk about the linkages - while also addressing one of our biggest strategic challenges, our scale.

Selling Scale

First, why is scale a challenge for Sun? To be clear, I'm not talking about purchasing scale. As I've said before, we use innovation to drive product profitability, not simply bulk purchasing leverage. The scale to which I'm referring is selling and marketing scale. With Sun's current products, we could be selling to twice …