Open source @ Novell: Justin Steinman speaks
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Blog: Novell takes a lot of heat for its patent deal with Microsoft, and rightfully so.  But there is much that the company is doing to advance the cause and state of open source in the industry.  In this second installment of the "Open Source @" Series, I talk
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Blog: Open source applications will drive a hefty load of infrastructure purchases in the future.  Proprietary vendors who hide their heads in the sand and try to avoid this trend or make it difficult for would-be open source partners to work with them will fin
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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In a new post to her Oracle blog today, Alison Holloway shares the presentation she gave at this year's Melbourne Opensource Developers' Conference titled "Working with PHP and Oracle".   I don't think the organizers are going to post the presentations, so I wanted to make it available here.   The talk covers things like the free Oracle tools available, the OCI8 extension, connection management, improving performance, and some Oracle resources. You can grab the PDF download here.
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Novell's OpenSuse Build Service now can be used to test software for Red Hat Linux.
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A jury's $1.52 billion judgment against Microsoft hangs a sudden, unexpected cloud over MP3. This could be the opening open-source advocates have been waiting for. By Eliot Van Buskirk and Evan Hansen.
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The folks heading up the Dutch PHP Conference this year (happening in 5 short days) have posted the complete list of speakers for this year's event including:   Cal Evans - "My First Mashup" Gaylord Aulke - "Zend Framework" Stefan Koopmanschap - "Symfony Framework" Derick Rethans - "Test-driven Development"   Unfortunately, if you haven't gotten your tickets already, you're going to have to wait until next year. According to Ivo Jansch, the conference sold out right before the early-bird deadline came around. With such a great showing from developers and a great lineup of speakers for this year, you can almost guarantee that there'll be a conference next year too - so keep your eyes out for it.
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Blog: Novell takes a lot of heat for its patent deal with Microsoft and rightfully so. But there is much that the company is doing to advance the cause and state of open source in the industry.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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(InfoWorld) - The future of Hula, the open-source collaboration server project initiated by Novell,Â is in jeopardy since Novell pulled staff and funding from the project, according to a Hula newsgroup posting. The Hula team examined the opportunities for the project and concluded that it wasn't worth the investment, Peter Teichman, a Novell employee assigned to work on Hula, wrote in the posting on Tuesday. He and others who worked on Hula will take new jobs at Novell. Teichman and other contributors appear to hold out some hope that the initiative won't completely end. "We still really care about Hula ... but I think we're going to need someone from the community to take a leadership role and continue to move things forward," Teichman wrote. Hula is likely just a few months away from a first release, he said. Some of his comments, however, hint that perhaps Novell heard some of the criticism that Hula garnered when it was first announced. Hula, introduced in early 2005, was to be a collaborative calendar and mail server based on open Internet protocols such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). At the time, some experts wondered whether the market needed another mail server. In his posting, Teichman wrote that in his opinion, the work the Hula team has done on the Web interface is the most interesting and noted that while the Hula mail server is strong, "nearly every organization we've talked to already has a mail infrastructure. Bringing Hula in for the Webmail means duplicating their SMTP, IMAP and POP [Post Office Protocol] setup," he wrote. However, some developers involved with the creation of Hula responded to the news on the mailing list with hope that the project will continue because they see a need for an open-source integrated mail platform.
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest podcast in their PHP Abstract series. This time they spotlight a project from Jan Lehnardt, CouchDB.   Our special guest today is Jan Lehnardt. Jan is an Open Source software consultant specialized on internet technologies. He has years of experience building both small and large scale database applications. He has a keen eye for user experience and typography. He co-founded Freisatz, a company bringing typographic bliss to everyone. Jan also contributes to several Open Source projects.   The three usual options are there for your listening pleasure - right on the page, subscribe to the feed or grab the mp3 directly.
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Blog: As an industry we are terrible at working on interoperability.  The open source world should be the one to fix this.
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In the spirit of being at the university, the Microsoft chairman also talked about when open-source licenses make sense. By Aaron Ricadela.
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Paul Jones has posted a very quick note about one of his presentations today:   The slides from my php|works talk are now available as a PDF file. I'm going to try to create an audio version after I get back from the conference.   You can see a summary of Paul's talk (and a list of the others being given) over on the php|architect site.