Governments. Governance. Customers wins. And more.

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

Governments
The Examiner provided a two part interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards, open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was reported that Vienna to …

Red Hat betas Enterprise Virtualization, partners with HP for SOA. And more.

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

# Red Hat announced that its Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products is now available for beta testing.

# Red Hat collaborated with HP on SOA.

# David Megginson published mixing GPL and non-GPL: a different perspective. A new take on the MySQL/MariaDB storage engine debate.

# UK Government CIO shed some light on “G-Cloud” plans and how the new open source policy provides an opportunity.

# WAZI: …

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

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

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

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
…

Vyatta raises series C funding. Greenplum launches data cloud initiative. Fedora 11. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

# Vyatta raised $10m in series C round, led by Citrix.

# Carlo Daffara published Horses, carriages and cars an assessment of the shifting OSS business models, and a proposal of what is the optimal model.

# Greenplum delivered version 3.3 of its analytical database, launched its Enterprise Data Cloud initiative.

# Daniel Abadi asked whether betting on the MySQL mass market for data warehousing a good idea.

# Roberto Galoppini …

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

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

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 …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance a number of interesting reports were published that examined its role in establishing MariaDB as an alternative development branch for MySQL and as a vendor-neutral open source database collective.

I had a few questions myself, which Monty Widenius and Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, were good enough to answer for me via email. They also agreed for the exchange to be published here. This is what they had to say:

Q: Monty has stated that the intention is to open up the Alliance to include other open source database projects - any indication of how this would be done given the diverse …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance some people have assumed that it is only a matter of time before MariaDB becomes the de facto replacement for MySQL.

That assumes that Oracle will allow the development of MySQL to stagnate, either deliberately or through neglect - something that we have expressed our doubts about, but even if that were the case it appears that the GPL (or more to the point MySQL’s dual licensing strategy) may restrict the potential for MariaDB.

Curt Monash recently raised the question of whether closed-source storage engines can be used with MySQL (and, by …

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

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 …