Daryl Taft, star reporter over at eWeek, has written a series of excellent articles in their latest Open Source report.  Daryl managed to round up a very broad cross section of open source ISVs in order to show that the business model has to be sustainable for open source to work.  No arguments there.  What CIO wants to be their career on an unsupported open source project?  There's got to be a company to provide ongoing support, maintenance, indemnification etc. 

So no surprise that the more successful open source companies have a business model that generates revenues.  Some offer subscription services, like Red Hat Network or MySQL Network, others sell support and services, like JBoss, and there's a newer breed of companies that have open source products that deliver 90% of the solution but also sell closed source add-ons upon which they build their business.  A few years ago, I think these hybrid …

InformationWeek's cover story this week is "Open Source Goes Corporate" describing in depth 10 large corporate users of Open Source software.  Although there are quotes from MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo, the real story is about how mainstream corporate users like ABN Amro, Sabre, Fidelity, Disney, Continental Airlines and others are now adopting open source software.  For anyone who needs evidence to show their managers that open source is good enough for Enterprise use, this is a great article.  These are big applications in billion dollar companies.  They may not be "betting the farm" on a completely open source environment, but they are using it for business critical applications that have dozens or even hundreds of servers.  …

I've intended to write about this a few times, but the overall GPL process seems to be so, ah, methodical, that a week here or there probably doesn't matter one way or the other.  At any rate, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been working on updating the GPL license in order to take into account just how software is used and deployed in the 21st century.  Much of the GPL license (and some of the confusion around it) is based around the notion of distribution, which was apppropriate back when the GPL was created, but now more and more software is never distributed it's just hosted at companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon and others. Technically the GPL license is known as a "reciprocal" license meaning that if you distribute GPL licensed software with your own software that must also …

OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) has been a great conference that brings the technology and business side of open source technology.  The conference was the brain child of Matt Asay from Novell and the conference gets better and better each year.  If you're on the east coast, this is a great conference to get up close to open source business issues, licensing, community building and a host of other topics.  The conference program includes a who's who of open source execs including Marten Mickos of MySQL, Eben Moglen of the FSF, Scott Dietzen from Zimbra, Marc Fleury of JBoss, John Roberts of SugarCRM as well as a host of other open source CEOs, VCs, and others. 

Earlier this week in New York, Sun launched a new line of Opteron powered machines designed by co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim who returned to the company about 18 months ago.  Great performance, great price and they run cooler on less power than competitor's Intel based boxes.  Plus they actually got Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and MySQL to support them!  What's not to like?  They're perfect for scaling out large applications using MySQL 5.0.  And there's more horsepower to come from what the Sun folks tell me.  Sun is certainly keeping everyone on their toes these days!

• TechWorld: New Servers Critical to Company says McNealy
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Bernard Golden, CEO of the open source consultancy firm Navica (not sure what that word means!), writes a regular newsletter on open source as well as a bi-monthly column in CIO magazine.  I don't always agree with everything Bernard writes, but he's got a good perspective.  He's been around the software industry long enough to understand the difference between a trend and a fad and knows how to help companies navigate the waters (could that be it?) of open source.  Definitely worth subscribing to. 

Bernard's also written an excellent book "Succeeding with Open Source" and has made Chapter 1 available …

I've spent the last few days in a series of meetings as part of the MySQL Management Team (MT) and also with our Board of Directors.  One of the topics we've talked about extensively is how we can continue to expand our community worldwide.  Many people know that MySQL gets over 40,000 downloads per day.  (No, not per month, per day!)  And with MySQL 5.0 release candidate expected shortly, that number will likely increase over the coming months as many people check out the latest features including stored procedures, triggers, views, etc. 

The interesting thing is that while two thirds of MySQL revenue is generated in North America, we have huge download volumes in countries where we have no business efforts.  For example, Brazil is our number one download country after the US, generating more …

Congrats to Simon Phipps who has been promoted to Sun's Chief Open Source Officer.  I don't know if Simon's the first open source guy with such a fancy title, but it is obviously a significant endorsement both of Sun's open source strategy and their confidence in Simon to lead the charge. 

As Sun frequently points out, they've long been a supporter of open source technology and they made a major commitment earlier this year by open sourcing Solaris, their flagship operating system.  OpenSolaris appears to be gathering steam, particularly on high performance Opteron systems.  Sun has had a long history of …

Interesting article by David Rosenberg on the fact that there appears to be a shortage of open source marketers.  When I joined MySQL, I had a lot of discussions with the founders about how to build a strong team and what type of background would be appropriate for open source marketing.  Unfortunately, it was clear that there simply weren't a lot of open source marketers out there.  There were only one or two successful open source companies and there was no "deep bench" to draw from.  So instead, I recruited from the commercial software industry, drawing from people who had experience marketing to developers and DBAs.  From what David reports, and from the number of recruiters who call me looking for contacts, it sounds like there are a lot of openings out there in open source startups.  My recommendation to the recruiters is to hire folks who have …

The web team posted a new home page design for MySQL last week.  The site had gotten a bit confusing as we added a lot of new sections in the past year, and I think the team did a great job with it. We wanted to make it easier to guide people to find the right information, whether they were DBAs, developers, OEMs, corporate users etc.   Initial feedback has been very positive. I think the new look rocks, but maybe I'm biased.  Let us know what you think!