Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

*451 CAOS Links will return on August 25*

Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …

When open source goes bad. Is open source a success or failure? 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.”

When open source goes bad
The H reported on the apparent turmoil at the CentOS project, while Jay Lyman offered the CAOS perspective. Meanwhile Slashdot reported that Alan Cox has quit as Linux TTY subsystem maintainer.

Success or failure?
Danny Windham, Digium CEO, …

Yahoo opens up Hadoop distribution. Microsoft and Novell claim customer wins. And more.

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The elephant in the room
Plenty of news emerged form the Hadoop Summit this week, including Cloudera announced support for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and introduced Sqoop, open source tool for importing databases into Hadoop, while Yahoo! Released! The! Yahoo! Distribution! Of! Hadoop! opening up its Hadoop developments to the wider community. As Savio Rodrigues noted, there has been a surge in the number of contributors for the Hadoop project in the last year.

Best of the rest
…

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

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Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

The ISV Engineering team at Sun has released 3 new documents giving important MySQL implementation and performance advice on Solaris Containers, Java technology, and SugarCRM.

The first is another great publication in the Sun BluePrint™ Series called Running MySQL Database in Solaris Containers by Ritu Kamboj and Giri Mandalika.  Solaris Containers are a Sun unique virtualization option that let applications run on the same server in isolation from each other.    This allows easier workload resource management, maintenance …

The ISV Engineering team at Sun has released 3 new documents giving important MySQL implementation and performance advice on Solaris Containers, Java technology, and SugarCRM.

The first is another great publication in the Sun BluePrint™ Series called Running MySQL Database in Solaris Containers by Ritu Kamboj and Giri Mandalika.  Solaris Containers are a Sun unique virtualization option that let applications run on the same server in isolation from each other.    This allows easier workload resource management, …

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending …

Last but not least in my series of podcasts from this year's My SQL Conference and Expo, is my conversation with Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock.  BitRock is the company behind BitNami and InstallBuilder and counts as its clients companies like MySQL, JasperSoft, KnowledgeTree, SugarCRM...

My interview with Erica (9:34)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

 
Erica, still standing and smiling at …

Since we released our first Beta, we have been working on various examples to demonstrate the capabilities and benefits of a resource oriented approach to data integration.

One of the examples we have been working on is a data mart for SugarCRM opportunity analysis. We have now published that example on our content download site, packages.snaplogic.org , where you can download it, and try it out. (You will also need a SnapLogic server installation, to run the pipelines.)

The general idea behind data marts is simple – they are subject specific alternatives to a full blown data warehouse. The primary benefits of using a separate database to analyze an operational system are the ability to look at a snapshot of the constantly changing data, and the offloading of the queries to a separate database which is optimized for analysis using a star schema instead of a normalized …