In response to my previous post, Matt Aslett aptly asks: Does open source have a glass ceiling? In a word, yes. But it doesn't have to be this way. The "OSS business model" is a misnomer as there are many variations. But the business model that the majority of large and leading OSS vendors utilize has one common aspect. These vendors are all selling support and "other stuff" (indemnification, additional testing, better management, and so on) around a product that is indistinguishable from what a user can get freely from the related open source project. Giving away all the value... READ MORE

I've been doing some sales calls to prospects and customers in the midwest the last week or so. I like to do this periodically to make sure I'm not just drinking the open source koolaid, but really hearing from customers, prospects and the sales reps in the field. One advantage of MySQL being a part of Sun is we are now able to get appointments with CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 500 companies more readily than before. These are large accounts that have significant scale and expertise in IT, but are usually more conservative than most of the west coast... READ MORE

At last night’s event, a lot of the questions were really implicitly asking, “Is open source better? Why?”

The first answer everyone comes up with is that it’s free, and that’s better.

However, that is neither necessary nor sufficient to deem it “better”.

If MySQL did exactly the same tasks Oracle did, but was free, there’s still a huge amount of money involved when migrating. Merely staffing the migration costs a lot of money.

Companies using open source technologies because they are free are (probably) making the right software choice for the wrong reason.

Firstly, open source does not have to be free — MySQL proves that. Their Enterprise source code is free to paying customers (and whoever paying customers distribute to, but that is not the issue).

Secondly, open source’s benefits far outweigh mere license costs, though the license cost is definitely the most tangible …

I wrote this a few weeks ago and held it back until now. I decided to publish this somewhat in response to Roberto's post. While Roberto is trying to find a band-aid to the problem, I think we need to rethink the root cause of the problem. I've been blogging about OSS for nearly 2 years now. My in-the-trenches experience with OSS goes back to early 2004. The constant drumbeat of "proprietary software is dead, open source is the only path forward" has been deafening at times. I'll admit that I too used to espouse similar words. But, I am... READ MORE

Former VP and GM of North American sales at Red Hat, Ed Boyajian, has been named CEO of EnterpriseDB. Current CEO, Andy Astor, will be shifting roles to lead EnterpriseDB's business development as EVP. Very interesting that EnterpriseDB was able to attract Ed. I'd guess this move speaks more to the potential at EnterpriseDB than anything amiss at Red Hat. A quote from Dave Power, a member of EnterpriseDB's board, and from Ed both point to taking EnterpriseDB to the next level. For instance, Ed states: "The Postgres open source community is active and robust, and the company has a... READ MORE

Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover have put together an excellent survey which is already doing good (seeing the numbers they have been clocking). Survey results will be out in the summer issue of MySQL magazine. I feel this is a "must take" survey for everyone in the MySQL community. And do not forget to mention my blog in the "top 5 favorite MySQL blogs" ;-). Just kidding!

Overall, this is the best survey regarding MySQL that I have ever taken, don't miss it. It will hardly take 10 minutes of your busy schedule. A busy man has the time do anything, right?

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Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer “SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a …

In recent years, the software tools business has been a tough one. While Borland was a high flyer in the 80s and early 90s, the tools business was commoditized by and large by Eclipse over the past few years. The company is a shadow of its former self and recently sold off its development tools business to Embarcadero. But Borland isn't the only casualty in the tools space. There's been ongoing consolidation in tools for years. And we've seen other tools companies suffer, too. Agitar, which by all accounts had impressive testing tools and a great pedigree, recently decided to... READ MORE

I haven't really followed SourceLabs for a little while now, and yet, strangely enough, they've been doing new and interesting things even without me watching ;-). SourceLabs "Self-Support Suite for Linux and Open Source Java" caught my eye, so I thought I'd learn more about it. I watched a demo that began with the slogan: "We're IT people...we don't call support". Made me laugh out loud... The useful thing about the Self-Support Suite is that it adds diagnostics to your applications. When developers have a support issue, the diagnostics results are used to search for the similar problem *and* the... READ MORE

See http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ for details.

I'm working on a project that needs cross-platform use, through a browser. Pondering whether to just "standardise" on FireFox since it runs on all.... that way development focus can go towards actual functionality rather than hacks to make all different browser brands behave... your thoughts?