Red Hat gets a new VP. rPath appoints former Red Hat COO as chairman. Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source. Open source Windows. SCO formally files for Chapter 11. And more.

Official announcements
Industry Veteran Greg Symon Joins Red Hat as Vice President and General Manager of North American Sales Red Hat

rPath Welcomes Ex-Red Hat COO Tim Buckley rPath

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition LifeRay

Adaptive Planning …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

Red Hat increases its service levels. Linux Foundation appoints Ted Ts’o CTO. Sun delivers VirtualBox update. Novell cancels BrainShare. BBC enables iPlayer for Linux. And more.

Note: This is the last 451 CAOS Links post of 2008. We’ll be back with a bumper holiday special on January 2. Happy holidays!

Official announcements
Red Hat Increases Service Levels and Reduces Costs for Customers with Extended Update Support Red Hat

Linux Foundation Appoints Ted Ts’o to Position of Chief Technology Officer Linux Foundation

…

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

MySQL 5.1 reaches GA. But is it ready for production deployments? SpringSource launches commercial version of Apache Tomcat. BusinessWeek focuses on open source business models and open source in the downturn. And more.

Official announcements
MySQL 5.1 Downloads — Generally Available (GA) release for production use Sun Microsystems

SpringSource Launches tc Server; Continues to Redefine Application Server Market SpringSource

Open Solutions Alliance Appoints New President, Announces New Leadership Team Open Solutions Alliance

…

I just noticed that Sun/MySQL has dropped SCO OpenServer from its list of supported operating systems for MySQL 5.1 and higher (along with Mac OS X 10.3 and QNX).

It is not a massive surprise to see MySQL doing this given SCO’s current position but MySQL teamed up with SCO in the midst of its controversial legal claims against IBM et al, so I thought the end of the deal warranted a quick mention.

At the time Marten Mickos defended the deal by claiming that he hoped working with MySQL would educate SCO’s executives:

“In a partnership you exchange thoughts,” he said. “If you exchange thoughts hopefully the other side will listen to you. We understand …

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under MySQL
When Sun announced its acquisition …

Sun updates MySQL Enterprise. The Microsoft/Novell deal is two years old. Nuxeo and Boxee get funding. Red Hat’s CEO on open source in a downturn. Steve Ballmer as a glove puppet. And more.

Press releases
Sun Enhances MySQL Enterprise With New Query Analyzer Tool to Boost Database Application Performance Sun Microsystems

Microsoft and Novell Mark Two Years of Interoperability Progress Microsoft

Nuxeo secures 2 million Euros and strengthens its board of directors and corporate governance Nuxeo

…

Sun Microsystems slashes jobs in major restructuring. SpringSource gets Groovy with G2One. Novell goes after Red Hat. Sonatype confirms Marc Visser as new CEO. Neil Young’s new car. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Aligns Business with Global Economic Climate and Amplifies Growth Opportunities Across Open Source Platforms Sun Microsystems

SpringSource Acquires G2One Inc SpringSource

Novell Announces New Program to Aid Transition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Novell

Zenoss Adds …