We know that the open source + paid support business model works for software products that have extremely large numbers of users, but does it scale to products with medium or small numbers of users?

Software is often described as a stack (see the simplified version below).

Vertical Applications [Installed base = small]
————————–
Middleware (e.g. Database) [Installed base of MySQL = 12 Million]
————————–
Operating System [Installed base of Windows = 1Billion+]

Companies in the operating system layer typically have large numbers of users with a small license fee per user. This dynamic makes it relatively painless for a company to forgo a small license fee in exchange for a larger userbase, and then make money on support. For example, an open source company might forgo the $100 license fee, but charge $15 a seat for support. With large numbers of users, the …

Seem’s the year Sun had for improving MySQL, and with an entire new 5.4 branch the development team could not fix the autoconf and compile dependencies that has been in MySQL for all the years I’ve been compiling MySQL. Drizzle has got it right, thanks to the great work of Monty Taylor.

I’m working on the Wafflegrid AWS EC2 AMI’s for Matt Yonkovit and while compiling 5.1 was straight forward under Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, compiling 5.4 was more complicated.

For MySQL 5.1 I needed only to do the following:

apt-get install -y build-essential
apt-get install libncurses5-dev
./configure
make
make install

For MySQL 5.4, I …

For the fourth time in a row, I will be speaking at FrOSCon, one of the most charming open source events in Europe.
Hosted in the bright environment of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, this event will get you hooked from the beginning. The organization is done by volunteers, who have always done an amazing job, with even better results than more expensive and famous conferences.
This year, there will be some more action than ever before. In addition to the main event, the organizers have given away a few developers rooms, to let some projects build their own event within the main one. There will be a Java subconference, and, closer to my interests, the European edition of the OpenSQLCamp 2009, which applies to all open …

For any production MySQL Database system, running RAID is a given these days. Do you know what RAID your database is? Are you sure?. Ask for quantifiable reproducible output from your systems provider or your System Administrator.

As a consultant I don’t always know the specific tools for the clients deployed H/W, but I ask the question. On more the one occasion the actual result differed from the clients’ perspective or what they were told, and twice I’ve discovered that clients when asked if their RAID was running in a degraded mode, it actually was and they didn’t know.

You can read about various benchmarks at MySQL blogs such as BigDBAHead and MySQL Performance Blog however getting first hand experience of your actually RAID …

OSCON moves this year from Portland to San Jose.

As one the community panel for Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem I also have a speaker discount which you can combine with O’Reilly having also extended early bird registration until June 23.

Be sure to add the os09fos code for an additional 20% off, and be sure to shout me a drink there.

"An ecosystem is a unit of interdependent organisms which share the same habitat." - Definition: Ecosystem on Wikipedia .

Software comprises a symbiotic ecosystem that functions in much the same way as ecosystems found in nature. The various elements interact with one another, thereby providing a complete solution to users. ISVs and SaaS companies are part of the ecosystem of open source software (OSS), yet some of these companies are referred to as vampires, leeches, parasites and freeloaders because they don’t give back code to the community software.

Pardon my quick digression, but parasites are valuable members of any ecosystem. They do the dirty work of cleaning the ecosystem and turning waste into valuable food and fertilizer for the ecosystem. Consider, for example how your neighborhood …

If you had to configure a Wordpress MU installation without access to any details of your MySQL Configuration, what would you do?

What top five configuration settings would you use?

I asked the community this question, see For MySQL DBA fame and glory. Prize included and a number of brave soles responded for a chance to win a free copy of MySQL Administrators Bible by MySQL Community She-BA Sheeri Cabral.

There is no perfect answer and of course you would want to set more then five options, however the purpose of the competition was to seek what people would do with limited information and a limited choice of …

Lately, there has been some talk about how users who do not feed code changes back into the open source codebase are "leeches " or "freeloaders ". This perspective demonstrates an incredible naiveté. Whether your customers never feedback a single line of code, they are adding tremendous value by the mere fact that they use your product. Let me explain.

First, what is more valuable: (1) a wonderful open source application used by 10 users who all provide code back to the community version; or (2) a closed source product with 200M users (think Microsoft Word)? Users are the most valuable asset a piece of software can have.

Much of this value is driven by the network effect . The more people who …

By now everybody and their neigbour has realized that indeed Everything is a funky dns problem, Frank is giving talks about it at ZooCamp, and Serge figured out the hard way the downtime of planet.geekdinner.be was due to a dns problem :)

But I told you different things before ... and some of you listened others are still reinventing the wheel as we go ...

Matt A. points out that the OpenBravo folks realized that one should try to build on top of Open Source projects rather than modify core code ..

Wonder where he read that before : …

I’ve decided to give people two more days for a chance to win a free MySQL Book — Sheeri Cabral’s MySQL Administrators Bible.

I have had five people so far provide recommendations for a simple MySQL configuration question as stated in For MySQL DBA fame and glory. Prize included. Shlomi Noach the current front runner.

Try your MySQL Performance Tuning skills. This is a good opportunity for new MySQL DBA’s and experienced DBA’s to provide basic input.