Topics for this podcast:

*Hadoop v1.0 and year ahead
*Oracle-Cloudera deal for more Hadoop
*Oracle’s ‘Sun spot’ with Solaris
*Open Source M&A outlook for 2012
*Our new MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey

iTunes or direct download (28:49, 4.9MB)

451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but non-clients can find a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding, over at our Too Much Information blog.

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

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Topics for this podcast:

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

InternetNews.com yesterday published an article based on an interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asking the question “Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?”

In truth there was no real need to ask the question, as Whitehurst’s comments made it pretty clear that Red Hat is interested in the database market, and specifically the NoSQL database market.

“When I say I don’t want to be a database company, I’m saying that I don’t want to be a SQL database company,” Whitehurst said.

In case the implications of that statement were not entirely clear, he later added:

“But we would be very interested in a NoSQL type database or Hadoop type thing,” Whitehurst said. “Those are interesting as they represent net new.”

The article adds that Whitehurst would not …

There was another acquisition involving open source software recently when Consona bought Compiere, but what is perhaps most striking about the deal from an open source software perspective is how little it and the Compiere community mattered in the deal.

By most accounts, including that of fellow open source ERP player xTuple CEO Ned Lilly, who offers an interesting and accurate depiction of Compiere’s changes, acknowledge the movement away from community that occurred over the last few years at Compiere. As discussed in our own recent report on the deal, we are also somewhat skeptical over the fate of what is left of Compiere’s open source community, even though Consona plans to …

I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. Our fabulous panelists were Danese Cooper, open source diva, knitting machine and present to give perspective from Intel, Stuart Cohen of OSDL fame and current leader of startup CSI and …

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).

So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have to weave together a number of posts and comments from a number of sources. First the article behind the Slashdot headline:

“Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise,” states Jeremy Cole, which is a much more accurate description of the state of affairs. “MySQL …

While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).

IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given how rare it is for the company to make venture capital-style investments and also given the dynamic between IBM, Sun and Oracle. IBM usually chooses to support startups indirectly through its …

I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.

If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based on either the L/GPL or the MPL. Certainly, taking Tim’s central point about M&A valuations for open source vendors as the yard stick, then the largest open source M&As have all involved copyleft licenses (although Ian Skerrett …