Oracle is keeping MySQL. Yahoo is selling Zimbra. Linus is feeling bloated. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Larry Ellison reportedly said Oracle has no intention of spinning off MySQL.

# Yahoo is trying to sell Zimbra, according to All Things D.

# Linus Torvalds said Linux is “bloated and huge”.

# GroundWork Open Source released GroundWork Monitor 6.0.

# Zend launched Simple API for Cloud Application …

This is a “dogfood” type story (see below for explanation of the term)… Open Query has ideas on resilient architecture which it teaches (training) and recommends (consulting, support) to clients and the general public (blog, conferences, user group talks). Like many other businesses, when we first started we set up our infrastructure quickly and on the cheap, and it’s grown since. That’s how things grow naturally, and is as always a trade-off between keeping your business running and developing while also improving infrastructure (business processes and technical).

Quite a few months ago we also started investing (mostly time) in the technical infrastructure, and slowly moving the various systems across to new servers and splitting things up along the way. Around the same time, the main webserver frequently became unresponsive. I’ll spare you the details, we know what the problem was and it was predictable, but since it wasn’t …

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors - Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital - no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to acquire the other without shared investors).

When examining the open source vendor landscape it is tempting to imagine that the combined total could be bigger than the sum of its parts - that a combination of many open source product specialists could mount a challenge to Red Hat and Sun to claim the title of biggest open source software vendor.

Benchmark and Accel are among …

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 …

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder …

I took the opportunity today evening to get myself upgraded (from 4.5.3_GA_733) to the latest (5.0.0_GA_1869) open source version of Zimbra - ZCS 5.0 GA. The database migration took about the longest, mainly due to some schema changes. Lots of starts and stops to the database. Its now running MySQL 5.0.45 Community.

What prompted the upgrade? A few days ago, I got a bunch of new packages, and rebooted the server (new kernel). To my dismay, Zimbra started to have issues - amavisd wouldn’t start. This meant that there was a large amount of mail, sitting in the queue, not being delivered. Things you don’t normally check for, immediately, anyway.

Turns out Compress::Zlib was too old. Well, not the system provided Compress::Zlib, but the Zimbra provided Compress::Zlib. Kind of annoying when there …