Today, it's just JBoss that is a formal partner with Microsoft. (And maybe MySQL? I don't know....) But tomorrow, many more?

So says Bill Hilf, Heir of Matusow (no, it's not quite the same as being the Heir of Slytherin ;-) in this eWeek article:

Expect to see a lot more interoperability work between Microsoft Corp. and some of its open-source competitors over the next year-like the agreement struck with JBoss Inc. last year-as well as more participation by the Redmond, Wash., software maker in preventing interoperability problems earlier in its product cycle and providing potential fixes when issues arise.

"We have been successful in identifying popular open-source software applications that our customers are interested in using on the Microsoft Windows Server platform and working with those companies or projects to ensure that solution is …

This post is based entirely on unsubstantiated rumor. Word on the street is that SpikeSource is making the move to a new channel focused strategy. I don't want to gloat, but I told you that the existing business model was not sustainable. Unfortunately, I don't see how a channel model would work either.

There is no channel when it comes to software services. SIs won't give up the revenue to another services partner, it's an inherent conflict. And while channel deals are great for distribution (HP with JBoss or MySQL) there is no precedent on how much revenue can be derived from such deals. SIs will just build their own stack, or get a complete solution, including the OS from a big player like RedHat.

People are hell-bent that open source is all about services, but take a look at the companies that are doing well and you'll see that they also have products. …

Niklas Vainio, researcher at the Hypermedia Laboratory of the University of Tampere in my native Finland, is doing a survey on free/open source software (FOSS) communities. He would like MySQL contributors, including developers, bug fixers, documentation writers, testers, packagers and coordinators, paid or not, to participate in the survey at http://hiisi.fi/survey/mysql.

The survey has six pages and a total of 63 questions. It brings up a lot of interesting questions.

Niklas hopes the survey will increase our joint understanding of the structure of FOSS communities and company participation in FOSS. The research is part of the project Managing Open Source Software as an Integrated …

The Google Video for the MySQL Backups presentation stops after about 13 minutes, so I’ve put it up as a download at:

http://www.sheeri.com/movies/2006/BostonMySQLMeetupJanuary-mp4.mov

Many of the questions brought up by the discussion of the summary slide are answered in the presentation.

As always, I encourage feedback — both technical as well as presentational (ie, the slides were not understandable, you talk to fast, etc).

The slides are up at:

http://sheeri.com/presentations/MySQLbackups.swf — 125 Kb flash
or
http://sheeri.com/presentations/MySQLbackups.pdf — 2 Mb PDF

While it may not be a great thing to admit but some of my best lessons have come at the result of initial failure, taking a backup before deleting all the data in a table comes to mind. When I first started this blog and even more so when it was added to PlanetMySQL I made a decision that not being 100% sure about something wasn't a reason not to post it. Don't get me wrong I always make every effort to check my facts and in the Tom Kyte mode I'll always (or at least try) and give real world examples to prove my point.

But there are often times when I'll post something which is inaccurate or just plain wrong. There are broadly two things you can do in such circumstances when people correct you (and believe me they will), you can accept you made a mistake, correct any errors and learn from it. Or you can just give up and never post again for fear of looking a total fool. The fact I've made mistakes and I'm still blogging will give you …

I can't say whether Steve Martin's book "The Real Story of Informix Software & Phil White" is the real story or not, but it is an interesting read for those who are curious about the rise and fall of Informix.  Steve Martin was one of the bright shining lights at Informix helping to propel the company to revenue growth from $100 million to over a billion and a market cap of five billion.  However, as almost everyone knows, Informix unraveled in a series of blunders ranging from the acquisition of object-database technology Illustra to allegations of fraud, …

I can't say whether Steve Martin's book "The Real Story of Informix Software & Phil White" is the real story or not, but it is an interesting read for those who are curious about the rise and fall of Informix.  Steve Martin was one of the bright shining lights at Informix helping to propel the company to revenue growth from $100 million to over a billion and a market cap of five billion.  However, as almost everyone knows, Informix unraveled in a series of blunders ranging from the acquisition of object-database technology Illustra to allegations of fraud, …

One of the great benefits of Open Source, it’s Free, and you can get great support, sometimes even from the developers directly (rather then 5 levels of paid customer support for a commercial product). One of the greatest banes of Open Source, if you have a problem, and nobody has experienced and documented in a forum etc the problem you have with the same OS, libraries etc, you could be totally up the creek without a paddle, boat and for that matter water. (luckily you still have oxgyen)

Well, I’m having this problem with MySQL Workbench. A product promising so much, but if you can’t get the binary working on Linux to even start, where do you go.

You will see via the Forums, I’m not the only person. This is the current …

• alias skedit='open -a skEdit' is highly useful. Now I can do skedit foo.php and it opens it up. What joy with such simple things.
• Great to see Mono go into Rawhide, meaning FC5 Test 2 will have it. Now I can’t hardly wait. On PPC, if we had Xen working (upstream), life would be the ultimate breeze.
• I will not be making it to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand. Despite all good attempts to get a flight leaving KL, I can’t. Well, affordably (hello coach class). Registrations however are still open. There’s a Red Hat/Fedora meetup, and Joshua Wulf would be a useful person to contact if you’re rocking up for it (email discussion still has dates
• Is there a reason Fedora disabled updatedb running by default? Now users actually need to specify yes, in /etc/updatedb.conf. Why? Was this for laptop users?
• FreeBSD ports has this nice advantage that …

OSCON 2006 has opened its call for papers. The event will be July 24-28, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.
There is a dedicated database track, and reps from various OSS databases are on the program committee. So it's up to us to make sure that there are fab MySQL sessions and tutorials!

Naturally, a number of people from MySQL AB will be there, and we're already thinking about sessions and fun events. There are also many community people who have new, funky, funny, quirky or just geeky applications and insights in MySQL, uses for MySQL, etc. This means YOU. Sure we have the MySQL Users Conference, but we also want to be visible everywhere else!

Let's get cooking: spread the word, come up with a session, submit an abstract: Submit …