Stephen O'Grady, analyst over at RedMonk, has a good posting on how open source companies are coming up with new revenue streams based on automated services. As Stephen points out, we've gone from "How can you make money from open source?" to "How do you make more money?" With companies like Red Hat, MySQL and others, the first question has largely been answered. But there are many ways to skin a cat, so it's worth considering what additional ways open source companies can make money. Stephen gives examples of value-added services including Red Hat Network, Red Hat Exchange, MySQL Monitoring... READ MORE

A buddy of mine from Borland days, Ben Riga, is helping to drive the content for Microsoft's Mix '08 conference. He's looking for input on what would make Mix attractive to startups and venture capitalists. To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of startups using the Microsoft stack in recent years. I'm sure there are plenty, but it seems at least at first glance, there's far more innovation happening over on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and with other emerging languages like Ruby on Rails, Scala, etc. Still there's no reason that Windows as a platform couldn't... READ MORE

Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle) can be used for ETL but it can also be used in EII scenarios. For instance, you have a report that can be run from a customer service application that will allow the customer service agent to see the current issues/calls up to the minute (CRM database) but also give a strategic snapshot of the customer from the customer profitability and value data mart (data warehouse). You’d like to look a this on the same report that with data coming from two different systems with different Operating Systems and databases.

Kettle can make short work of this using the integration Pentaho provides and the ability to SLURP data from an ETL transform into a report without the need to persist to some temporary or staging table. The thing that Pentaho has NOT made short work of, is being able to use the visual report authoring tools (Report Designer and Report Design Wizard) to be able to use a Kettle transform as a …

I?m having a lot of difficulty understanding the debate surrounding MySQL?s decision to make their enterprise binaries and source less available than before. I was hoping that a few days into it I would get a better sense of the debate and why I was seeing the positions that are popping up. I realized, though, that the context of the discussion is deeply entrenched within the traditional software business model. Furthermore, it is complicated by MySQL?s IPO plans. I?ve seen people argue that MySQL is not as open, that MySQL is technically adhering to the GPL, that this is all... READ MORE

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the "Open Source Community's Double Standard on MySQL." I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me. Part of the issue is that often discussions about the business of open source is seen as a "zero sum game" between community users and paying customers, meaning that in order... READ MORE

There has been some discussion about MySQL's recent moves to clarify the targeting between MySQL Community Server & MySQL Enterprise Server. Essentially, MySQL wants to make it clear(er) that Community Server is free and for those of us who are willing to "spend time to save money". Community Server is the version that will be made available to Linux distros and passed on to customers that use MySQL inside of their Linux distro without support. Enterprise server is for paying customers; those of you willing to "spend money to save time". The source for Enterprise Server will no longer be... READ MORE

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By now, word has gotten around that MySQL has made some more changes to their process around MySQL Community Server. The changes primarily focus on:

• acceptance of community contributions (5.0 and 5.1 are now locked for contributions, so any contributions won’t be available until 5.2 or later)
• release schedule of community server (”Mature GA”, meaning 5.0, will have approximately 4 source builds per year and 2 binary builds; new GA, meaning 5.1, will have a binary build once per month)

These refinements of the community server [process] are detailed in Kaj Arnö’s blog. Not everyone is happy about the new plan for acceptance of community contributions, because it means that community enhancements have to wait a long time to see the light of day. Jeremy Cole has talked about the frustrations that this causes and calls the …

I met with some of the folks from Hyperic up at LinuxWorld San Francisco yesterday. They have just released the latest version of HQ 3.1, and won an award for best systems management software at the show. HQ is used at a growing number of companies including the likes of eHarmony, Ogilvey advertising and we also license their SIGAR technology at MySQL. What's unique about HQ is that the SIGAR technology is fully extensible so its easy to add new types of resources that can be monitored. The latest version adds the ability to manage ColdFusion, Jetty, TomCat6 along side... READ MORE

Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse.

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in …