There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and …

One of the significant benefits of MySQL is it’s ease of use. Generally already installed on most Linux systems, MySQL can be installed by a single command if not yet present. On Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 you can use the following commands to check for MySQL, configure your yum repository and install MySQL.

# Check if already installed
$ rpm -qa | grep -i mysql

# Configure yum repository on new server
$ su -
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo
$ sed -e "s/enabled=0/enabled=1/" public-yum-el5.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo

# Install MySQL
$ yum install -y mysql-server mysql

# Start and test MySQL Instance
$ /etc/init.d/mysqld start
$ mysql -uroot -e "SELECT VERSION"

+-----------+
| VERSION() |
+-----------+
| 5.0.77    |
+-----------+

You can find more …

A lot has been written for and against open core now. Yet in the end, a couple tweets can catch all that is needed:

scurryn @h_ingo -- So as long as 'an open core vendor' doesn't call themselves 'an open source vendor' then everything's fine?

h_ingo @scurryn: pretty much. I think I owe everyone one more blog post to answer that question with a few more details.

(Twitter)

This is that blog post.

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My ongoing dialogue with Matthew Aslett inspired me to read more of his recent writings. An excellent piece Do not sell anything to your community is based on a blog post by Stephen Walli.

Inspired by Stephen, I also looked into a set of slides I recently created and will try that style for this post...

Aslett and Stephen make a great point:

the conversion of community users into paying customers has long been a concern for open source-related vendors. It has also long been a source of friction, with vendors that offer proprietary extensions being accused of “bait and switch” or otherwise undermining the value of the open source software in an attempt compel community …

There’s lots of buzz lately about the so-called “open-core” business model of Marten Mickos’s new employer. But this is nothing new. Depending on how you define it, InnoDB is “open-core,” and has been for a long time. The InnoDB Hot Backup (ibbackup) tool was always closed-source. Did anyone ever cry foul and claim that this made InnoDB itself not open-source, or accuse Innobase / Oracle of masquerading as open-source? I don’t recall that happening, although sometimes people got suspicious about the interplay between the backup tool and the storage engine. Generally, though, the people I know who use InnoDB Hot Backup have no gripes about paying for it.

What is the difference between open-source with closed-source accessories, and …

The Maatkit article on Wikipedia was removed some time ago, after being deemed not notable. I believe this is no longer the case. It’s hard to find a credible book published on MySQL in the last few years that doesn’t mention Maatkit, there’s quite a bit of blogging about it from MySQL experts and prominent community members, and the toolkit is certainly in wide use — it’s important enough that notable companies are supporting its development. It’s available through every major Unix-like operating system’s package repository. On Debian, it’s actually part of the mysql-client package, so if you install MySQL, you automatically get Maatkit too. I believe it’s probably the second most important set of MySQL command-line tools; the most …

Oh my. I was outside painting my house for a few days, and when I return back online I discover that now everyone is having an opinion on the open core business model. Since some participants are still trying to promote it as a valid open source business model, let's see what everyone is saying and highlight any pitfalls being offered...

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A longer version of this story is published at www.opensources.com

Last week, Barnes & Noble announced they would cut the price on their wireless Nook eReader, from $259 to $199 ($149 for a new WiFi-only edition.)  Many thought this was a good opportunity for the third place contender to gain market share.  But within a few hours Amazon beat Barnes & Noble's price by $10, marking down the Kindle …

1. Membase -- an open-source (Apache 2.0 license) distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput. (via Hacker News)
2. Sergey's Search (Wired) -- Sergey Brin, one of the Google founders, learned he had a gene allele that gave him much higher odds of getting Parkinson's. His response has been to help medical research, both with money and through 23andme. …