Open Source Here to Stay, Says MySQL CEO
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Marten Mickos knows the role open source software can play in business and personal computing.
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Nice!  MySQL 4.1 final is now available   "MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced the general availability of MySQL 4.1. Certified by the company as production-ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, this significant upgrade to the MySQL database server features advanced querying capabilities through subqueries, faster and more secure client-server communication, new installation and configuration tools, and support for international character sets and geographic data. MySQL 4.1 can be downloaded now at http://dev.mysql.com/."  ""Our user community has been testing MySQL 4.1 for many months, and hundreds of businesses have already deployed  ...
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In deciding to buy MySQL last month, Sun was attracted to the open-source database company's very rapid growth rate and its revenue model, Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in a keynote presentation Wednesday at SugarCRM's SugarCon 2008 conference in San Jose, Calif.MySQL was driving real value, innovation, and choice, Schwartz said. Sun agreed to buy the company in a $1 billion deal."What was attractive was how profound their distribution was," Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.Asked if Sun planned to scale the MySQL database to compete with Oracle, Schwartz said Sun will not compete with Oracle but "will scale MySQL to extraordinary heights."The future lies in open source, innovation, and freedom of choice, according to Schwartz. Open source, he said, represents choice for CIOs. Developers, meanwhile, are making decisions about what runs in data centers, something that used to be the sole domain of the CIO, said Schwartz.Schwartz also stressed the importance of communities. "With every mainstream asset at Sun, we're investing to create a community," of developers and users regardless of whether they pay any money, he said.Schwartz's being a keynote presenter at the conference presents a bit of irony in that the open-source Sugar CRM package is written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) rather than the Java language created and promoted by Sun. But Schwartz noted the Java Virtual Machine is being expanded to accommodate other languages. The JVM enables Java applications to run on platforms supporting the JVM."I think what you'll see from Sun is that we're just going to take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM," Schwartz said. He cited Sun's Da Vinci Machine project, which is an effort to expand language coverage of the JVM.In other developments at the conference, SugarCRM laid out a roadmap of Sugar product releases planned for 2008.Due in April or May, the 5.1 edition of Sugar focuses on SMBs. It will feature improvements in reporting, including about 20 pre-canned reports, as well as a new systems management console via the company's DCE (Data Center Edition) 1.0.Wireless and tracker enhancements also are planned. The tracker will be able to tell who and how many users are online. Also, it will reveal the CRM usage level for a particular team and what modules are being used the most.The 5.2 edition, expected in July, is to feature real-time and global grid capabilities.Sugar 6.0, due in December, will be geared to large enterprises. Included will be portal-enabled partner relationship management and a new calendar with an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) UI and a recurring meeting capability. Users also can create Web services-based mashups.A Java layer in version 6.0 will link Sugar to other applications, such as the Lucene search engine. DCE 2.0 will debut with advanced resource and systems management.In a morning keynote presentation, SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts touted a new era in "commercial open source.""We are at the end of the beginning in commercial open source these last four years, and open source is clearly in the mainstream now," Roberts said.SugarCRM founders in 2003 started questioning the proprietary lock-in of software, he said. They left their jobs in 2004 and began SugarCRM, Roberts recalled."We founded [the] Sugar open-source project before we even incorporated the company," Roberts said. The founders, who also include Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, decided to post code in an effort to write software in a public venue, said Roberts.Roberts cited five forces shaping technology: ideas, willpower and the Internet; belief in the intelligence of crowds, consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and the global language of sharing. "It's exciting, and for me, it's clear that this journey we started on four years ago is real and there really isn't any stopping it," said Roberts. "The best thing I like about it is its focus on innovation," he added.A user of SugarCRM, Eddie White, director of Mania Technologie UK, which makes manufacturing equipment, uses the product as a database for marketing, customer care, and field service support."The investment was very cost-effective in terms of overall license costs," White said."We've been able to create a global database of customers and contacts," he said.Mania is looking to integrate its Sugar installation with its other systems, such as stock control and sales order management systems, White said.The biggest hurdle to deploying Sugar has been getting users to embrace it who had been used to doing things another way, according to White. "It's been easy to use; it's just a question of getting people to change their work practice," he said.While Mania did examine the source code of SugarCRM when doing administrative-level customization, it did not make any changes to the code. The company may do this when it expands use of the product for customer care.SugarCRM announced on Wednesday stack installers that provide a simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition for Solaris and OpenSolaris.
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Analysis: Sun broadens its open source stake, while MySQL enjoys Sun's standing and budget.
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Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.
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(InfoWorld) - A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun's interest in serving the open-source community, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces. "I wanted you to hear this from me directly," Schwartz wrote in an entry on his blog. "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner." Schwartz was defending Sun against comments Torvalds made in a post Tuesday on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds suggested that Sun is keeping some of the more interesting features of its OpenSolaris open-source project -- such as ZFS, a file system in Sun's OpenSolaris Unix OS that is generating a lot of buzz -- close to the vest because the company doesn't want to help Linux, which has hurt Sun's position in the market. Schwartz begged to differ that Sun is punishing the Linux community for how commodity servers running the OS trumped Sun's Solaris-based hardware after the dot-com bust, a phenomenon that eventually led Sun to release Solaris as an open-source project. "Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work," Schwartz wrote. "I draw a very sharp distinction -- even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture." Torvalds also took issue with the fact that Sun has not released OpenSolaris under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2), which currently governs Linux. The license for OpenSolaris is the Community Development and Distribution License, which Sun created based on the Mozilla Public License. However, Schwartz is leaning toward supporting GPLv3 (GPLÂ Version 3), which should be released in its final version in the next few weeks as an option for OpenSolaris and other Sun open-source projects before GPLv2, which Torvalds prefers. In fact, the differences between GPLv2 and v3 have caused a public rift between Torvalds and other key members of the open-source community. "We love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed," Schwartz wrote. He cited a "variety of mechanical reasons" why it would be difficult to license OpenSolaris under GPLv2 and insisted it has "nothing to do with being afraid of the community. "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate," Schwartz wrote. "Indulge me when I say it's different than starting from scratch. I would love to go faster, and we are all doing everything under our control to accelerate progress.... It's also a delicate dance to manage this transition while growing a corporation." Torvalds in his post seemed unlikely to buy such an argument. "To Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," he wrote. As to whether Torvalds would accept Schwartz's offer, he joked in an e-mail Wednesday that while he does not get to the San Francisco Bay area very often, "free food is a big draw." Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. He also said that though his post was not strictly meant for Schwartz, he appreciates the executive's response, especially his assertion that Sun would not seek patent fees for ZFS, as some in the Linux community wanted to port the file system to Linux. Still, Torvalds' mistrust of Sun's motives in the open-source industry is deep-rooted, though he remains optimistic that Sun and the Linux community still can come together on common interests. "I'll just have to say that I still have the old Java licensing mess fresh in my memory, and I'll take a 'wait and see' attitude to what actually comes out of Sun," he wrote, saying he is the kind of person who "would rather be pleasantly surprised by people's (and companies') actions, than expect too much and be disappointed." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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Open source doesn't necessarily automatically translate into better paid support for customers.  But it does offer a lot more options and aligns customers with vendors more tightly.
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We all have a Mr. Hyde in us. Open source helps to protect the world (and ourselves) from that side.
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Oracle is now seeing the MySQL database user base as an opportunity, unlike two years ago, when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said users of the open source product are not the people who would buy Oracle because they did not have any money. Â
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New Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst pledged that his company will continue to follow the open-source business model it has used in the past, calling Red Hat a "mission-based company."
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Blog: MySQL is relentlessly pushing its way toward an IPO, as BusinessWeek reports, which makes the entire open source ecosystem that much more valuable.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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(InfoWorld) - The pace of change in the open source software business is likely to accelerate in 2007 as developers climb up the software stack from the operating system and databases to applications. Proposals to invest in open source-based software companies increased by a factor of two or three in 2006 over 2005 at Index Ventures, said Bernard DallÃ©, general partner at the venture capital firm. Index Ventures invested about $10 million in open source companies in 2006. These include investments in MySQL, a provider of database management software, and Pentaho, which delivers business intelligence software. For a variety of reasons, software companies are increasingly looking to add value on top of base open-source platforms. The main Linux distributor, Red Hat, is a case in point. The move in October by OracleÂ to undercut Linux distributor Red Hat on price for servicesÂ shows that an open source company is vulnerable if it relies primarily on platform support for revenue. Red Hat made its own move beyond the operating system in June with itsÂ $350 million acquisition of Java application server vendor JBoss. Although JBoss is considered open source software, JBoss, now division of Red Hat, has more control over the source code for its software than Red Hat does over Linux. With control comes a greater ability to monetize the code. "The days of making money off the open source operating system are over," said Cameron Lester, a general partner at Azure Capital Partners LP, a venture capital firm that also has invested in several open-source startups. "These companies have definitely responded to the evolution of the industry." Over the course of the decade the open-source realm has become an incubator for innovative business models. Venture capital money will continue to fuel developments. For example, Zend Technologies Ltd. develops Web applications based on the open source hypertext preprocessor programming language known as PHP. It has received $36.7 million in venture capital, including funding from Azure and Index. Zend has adopted a hybrid business model, participating in the PHP open source community and improving the underlying code, while also offering proprietary Web applications and development tools, said Andi Gutmans, the company's co-founder and vice president of technology. "The big benefit we get from open source is, first of all, we have a huge community that helps us to develop (PHP). We have a very large R&D team, so to speak," Gutmans said. Zend's proprietary products give the company a unique value in the marketplace. For instance, Zend Studio 5.5, launched Dec. 6, offers full lifecycle management of PHP-based Web applications. Members of the PHP community also are a ripe market for Zend's commercial products, Gutmans said. By basing applications on top of open-source software, companies get a built-in adoption and distribution channel, according to Pradeep Tagare, an investment manager specializing in open source at Intel Capital, which also invested in Zend. "As the applications get more and more specialized, the community of developers who can contribute to it becomes smaller," Tagare said. "But, by using open source as a distribution channel, these application companies can really reduce their sales and marketing costs and reduce the barriers to adoption." Intel Capital has also invested in MonoSphere Inc. which uses the open source PostgreSQL database management platform to build its Storage Horizon storage-capacity planning software product. MonoSphere has raised $26 million from various venture capital sources, including $11 million in funding Oct. 25. Building the product on open source made better economic sense than to build it on a more expensive proprietary platform such as from Microsoft. "We basically made a cost decision," said Ray Villeneuve, MonoSphereâs president and chief executive officer (CEO). Open source software also helps Fonality Inc. undercut larger competitors in telecommunications, said Chris Lyman, co-founder and CEO. In January Azure invested $5 million in Fonality, a provider of IP-PBX (Internet Protocol-private branch exchange) telephone systems for small and medium-size businesses. Lyman got the idea for the business when he first launched Fonality. The company was originally intended to be a residential VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service provider. He balked at receiving a quote for $15,000 for a mere 5-phone office IP-PBX from Avaya Inc. "I said, 'That's our new business,'" said Lyman, and changed Fonality's business model to selling IP-PBX systems. Fonality's IP-PBX offering is based on the Asterisk open source program for telephony management. Developing proprietary call management products on top of Asterisk enables Fonality to offer IP-PBX systems for smaller companies at about a quarter of the cost for systems from companies like Cisco Systems Inc. and Avaya. Asked whether he's worried that they will also develop open source products, Lyman responded, "They better hurry because open source is about to eat their lunch." Red Hat sees the open source trend as not simply moving up the software stack, but growing in all directions, said Scott Crenshaw, general manager of Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. Crenshaw sees a second wave of open source innovation in 2007 as virtualization and service-oriented architecture, which enable operation of an IT infrastructure dynamically, become open sourced. "The goal isnât just to move up the stack," he said. "The real goal is to fundamentally change the economics of IT once again."
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has again argued the case that open source is not necessarily cheaper, nor more secure than its proprietary counterpart.
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Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, in a statement the company issued, said the assets have &quot;tremendous longterm strategic value for the open source industry&quot; and his company.
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2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business in the open-source community.
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Ziff Davis - Linux and open source are at the heart of today's computing technology. Deal with it.