While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).

IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given how rare it is for the company to make venture capital-style investments and also given the dynamic between IBM, Sun and Oracle. IBM usually chooses to support startups indirectly through its …

Matthew Aslett and I are in San Francisco for the next few days at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). We will be moderating a total of three panels this year. Matthew’s panel on the the state of the open source database market is especially interesting, given that we are days away from publishing a report on the same topic (more details on that in a day or two). For those of you reading this blog entry from OSBC, I am hoping you’ll attend the panels listed below…

Tuesday, March 25, 11:30am - 12:20pm
The Future of the Operating System
Raven Zachary, Research Director, Open Source, The 451 Group (Moderator)
Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, Intel
James Hughes, Sun Fellow & VP, Sun Microsystems
Roger …

I’ve been making preparations this week for the panel I’m moderating at this year’s OSBC conference in San Francisco. The title is The State of the Open Source Database Market, and we’re lucky enough to have a great panel, featuring: Andy Astor, CEO, EnterpriseDB; Roger Burkhardt, President & CEO, Ingres; Ken Jacobs, VP Product Strategy, Server Technologies Division, Oracle; and Zack Urlocker, EVP of Products, MySQL.

Everyone’s open to answering whatever questions the audience throws at them (within reason) so with the combined knowledge and expertise on offer it should be an interesting and entertaining session. I’ll try not to get in the way!

I’m also looking forward to putting some names to faces as this will be my first OSBC event. I’m here all …

I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.

If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based on either the L/GPL or the MPL. Certainly, taking Tim’s central point about M&A valuations for open source vendors as the yard stick, then the largest open source M&As have all involved copyleft licenses (although Ian Skerrett …

OpenOffice.org has announced that the project will be moving from its current LGPLv2 licensing to the LGPLv3 with a coming version 3.0 of the open source office software suite. Sun’s Simon Phipps says the move will give OpenOffice developers greater protection from software patent enforcement and threats because the LGPLv3 allows creation of mutual patent grants between developers. Also among the biggest changes is a move from the Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) to the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), effective immediately. OpenOffice.org Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts says this change, plus an addendum specifically for OO.o core and plugin developers, enabling OO.o to more easily host the source code of extensions (without shared copyright), promoting potential …

Matt Asay has the news that IBM has taken the decision to discontinue the development of the solidDB for MySQL database engine following its acquisition of in-memory database specialist Solid Information Technology. The official announcement is here on SourceForge.

As Dhiren Patel, community relations manager writes: “This in-memory technology, and not Solid?s open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM?s acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effective immediately, we will not be continuing further development on solidDB for MySQL.”

Given the commercial drivers it is not …

It’s not open source, but those involved with data management might be interested in my first post over at the 451’s new Too Much Information blog as it tracks the progress of H-Store, the new OLTP database project from Michael Stonebraker, who you may remember from such database projects as Ingres and PostgreSQL.

Given Jonathan Schwartz’s proclamation that Sun will make further open source acquisitions, I’ve been putting some thought into likely targets and/or new directions opened up by the MySQL acquisitions. One likely target sector is the ecosystem of vendors that surround the MySQL database - such as clustering and HA software providers - as well as complementary technologies.

With that is mind it is interesting to see that the company has hired two key Python developers, Frank Wierzbicki and Ted Leung. As the Infoworld report states, this is similar to the way Sun …

Recently we noticed a strange locking problem within our application. While the previous release worked flawlessly the current version produced a number of Lock Wait Timeouts. The code itself did not change in the area we experienced the problems, however our persistence framework had been updated to a new release in conjunction with our app. One notable difference was the schema generation

Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:

“When it comes to takeovers and valuations, I think the role of GPL as a strategic weapon is often under appreciated. If you?re top vendor dog in a GPL project, other players have a very hard time unseating you. That may sound counter-intuitive given world + dog has the code, but I don?t believe it?s such an advantage for competitors as most assume. Your lesser competitors in the same space have to share their plum developments with you. Sure, the top dog has to share his plums too, but when you?ve got the top plum growers in your own yard (to push a metaphor too far), you get to go to market …