Steve Hamm over at BusinessWeek has an interesting take on the launch of MySQL 5.0 and the impact that open source is causing to the large closed source database companies.  He cites Evans Data recent survey results that show open source database deployments up by 20% in the last six months and use of MySQL up by 25% during this time.  Given the size of the MySQL installed base (over 6 million active installations) this is very significant growth.  Forty-four percent of corporate developers surveyed indicate that they use MySQL.  That's something we're very proud of at MySQL, and Hamm also makes the point that it's a trend that could have serious implications for old school database vendors who make a lot of their revenue on licenses and …

It's been quite an honor that the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign manager, Florian Müller, was nominated as one of the Europeans of the year by European Voice in their EV50 poll.  He's in good company along with Bob Geldof (Live8) and Bono (U2).  I always thought Florian had "rock star" status in the open source world, and now it's been confirmed!

Florian was the key guy to help fight the battle, getting the support of MySQL, Red Hat, the FFII and other groups to campaign against software patents in Europe and securing a defensive victory in the European Pariament. 

The voting is open until November November 11, 2005.  The only thing …

There's a good article in InformationWeek this week that picks up on the idea of how new companies are looking at open source.  It's not that proprietary technologies don't scale technically.  It's just that they don't scale economically.  The cost of using closed source software in a scale-out scenario with dozens or hundreds of servers is just too cost prohibitive.  Especially when you consider that the cost may be $15,000 or even $50,000 per CPU.  No wonder companies are going open source.  And this isn't just the Silicon Valley crowd.  It's mainstream companies in the media industry, travel, publishing etc.

• InformationWeek: …

There's a good interview with OSBC Director and open oource maven Matt Asay at the searchopensource.com site.  In it Asay explains how open source companies are starting to have serious impact.  He gives examples of the dramatic revenue growth that has occurred at Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss and how that's causing not only investors but also CIOs to take open source more seriously.

Read the full interview.  If you like Matt's analysis, then you should definitely read his blog and attend the upcoming OSBC conference in Boston, November 1-2.  He's put together an excellent program and it promises to be a "who's who" of open source companies, investors and users.

• SearchOpenSource.com: …

Last week I attended the Web 2.0 conference put on by O'Reilly and LiveMedia in San Francisco.  I must admit, it felt a bit like 1999 again.  I don't mean that in a bad way, but rather from the perspective that there is innovation and excitement once again.  Lets face it, there were a few pretty slow years in the IT industry when the bubble burst. When spending stalls and jobs get cut, no one wants to hear about anything new. 

The Web 2.0 conference played to a packed house of entrepreneurs, VCs, media gurus, programmers, linux heads, bloggers and others.  If there were a couple of interesting themes, that I observed it would be that AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is the next hot development approach and Open Source (and the LAMP stack in particular) is the default platform for Web 2.0.  If you need a …

A few weeks back I mentioned the Linux Outlook Research Brief published by InformationWeek.  I had glanced through the report quickly with the idea of coming back to it in more detail.  Now that I have read it in more detail, I really encourage people to take a look at this report.  It's from earlier in 2005, but it's free, so what the heck!  The information is excellent for anyone who wants to know how and why Linux is being deployed in corporate environments, or anyone who is trying to understand the broader trend of open source adoption.  A couple of interesting points:

"Red Hat is the most widely adopted Linux variant .  Nearly 90% of sites surveyed report its use.  SuSE Linux is also popular but it is a distant second at 46% of sites.  Debian Linux is the next closest rival -- at a quarter of sites.  …

I was at the Web 2.0 conference a few days ago and spoke to Dan Farber of ZDNet, whom I run into routinely at open source conferences.  Dan mentioned that he thought a lot of the companies that are promoting open source really have more of a hybrid model.  For example companies like SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Al Fresco, Pentaho all have a very capable open source offering as well as additional commercial offerings which are closed source.  The open source products are hugely popular and fully functional.  There's no crippleware or limited demo; it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get fully open source software under an OSI compliant license.  And all of these companies have significant communities and a growing business that enables them to continue to invest in open source. So the products, both open source and commercial, continue to get better and better with each release.

In my view there's nothing wrong with the hybrid …

Oracle's acquisition of InnoBase, the guys who developed the InnoDB storage engine, is interesting because it shows how significant open source database technology has become in the industry.  Oracle, along with IBM, helped legitimize Linux in the enterprise, and are now endorsing open source database technology.  Previously Oracle has said "Open source is great... for your operating system, but not your database."  Last year I predicted that sooner or later all of the database companies would go open source.  Since then we saw IBM open source Cloudscape as Apache Derby.  Then CA open sourced Ingres.  Now finally …

BusinessWeek has published two interesting articles on open source.  In the first, Open Source: Now it's an Ecosystem, they look at the growing momentum that companies such as SugarCRM, JasperSoft, MySQL and JBoss are acheving in the market place.  We've always thought of MySQL as being a database platform and so it is very encouraging to see open source application companies become part of the overall ecosystem. 

In the second article, Rimer's Rules for Open Source, BusinessWeek interviews Danny Rimer a VC investor from Index Ventures and he discusses a set of rules for evaluating open source companies …

The strength of the MySQL Community has always been a key reason for the success of MySQL as a product.  We've been very fortunate to have a very large and vibrant Community of users, testers, developers, writers and fans of MySQL worldwide.  While there are many people within the MySQL organization who interact and communicate with the Community often there were more ideas than we had staff to focus on and sometimes things fell through the cracks.  However, as MySQL AB has continued to grow we want to make sure that we increase our investment in the Community and stay true to the overall open source philosophy.  (And if we don't always get it right, you can let us know.) 

So to that end, Kaj Arno, who has been …