Matt Asay is excited about Red Hat’s Spacewalk project to release the code behind its Red Hat Network Satellite product under an open source license (as he should be, he’s been waiting over a year for it). As well as anticipation, Matt’s excitement can also be attributed to the potential for Spacewalk to become the default management platform for open source software.

As he writes:

“What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.

What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.

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I?ve been reading The Bee Keeper (also here in PDF), an explanation of the relationship between professional open source software (POSS) vendors and their communities, written by Pentaho?s CTO James Dixon. It is a very elegant explanation of the development/business model employed by the POSS vendors such as MySQL, Pentaho, JBoss and Alfresco.

James uses the analogy of the Bee Keeper to explain the model. It?s worth reading the paper in its entirety to understand just how appropriate this is but to put it very simply: the vendor is the bee keeper; the community is the bees; the open source project is the honey; and the customer …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Sweden crashed out of EURO 2008 last night a Russia qualified for the knockout stages with a well-deserved 2-0 win. As home to MySQL Sweden might be expected to be one of the more progressive adopters of open source but while there is significant interest, details of deployment projects are relatively hard to find.

Key policies:
The Swedish Agency for Public Management?s 2003 …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

One of the potential favourites for EURO 2008 was always going to be eliminated from the group stages given France, Italy and The Netherlands were all drawn in Group C and it was France that made an early exit following a 2-0 defeat to the Italians last night.

France must also be considered one of the favourites to be crowned EURO 2008 Open Source champion given the number of open source-related policies, projects …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

The Czech Republic team was just three minutes away from qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 on Sunday before Turkey managed to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win. Publicly available information on Czech open source deployment projects suggests that the country has had rather more luck when it comes to open source.

Key projects:
There was early success in 2001 when …

ZDNet and its sister sites ran an interesting story yesterday indicating that IBM might be preparing to release its DB2 database under an open source license. If true, it would be a fascinating turn of events that would have a significant impact on the database industry. Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was immediately suspicious when reading the initial story. For a start it quotes a UK IBM executive: IBM’s UK director of information management software, Chris Livesey. With all due respect to him, if IBM was even hinting at open sourcing DB2, it would surely be rolling out the big guns.

Additionally, I’ve had briefings in the last couple of weeks with both IBM’s data management and open source executives, neither of whom thought to mention open sourcing DB2. That didn’t rule it out entirely of course.

Then there was what …

With a few days of delay, I want to share my impressions about Red Hat's Open Source Day presented in Rome on June 10, 2008.

The Event

Event was organized really well, Red Hat took responsibility of everything and all went smoothly toward the end. There were more than 200 attendees and the hall was crowded of Open Source enthusiasts, customers and others waiting for interesting speeches and a juicy agenda. General impression was very good, a lot of attention from both community attendees and customers willing to deeper their Open Source knowledge and listening to shining or emerging stars in the field.

A rich agenda gave everyone a bunch of new ideas to think about.

MySQL/Sun

Luca Gargaglione catalyzed attendees attention by explaining How and Why MySQL is the world's most popular open …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

According to statistics presented by Roberto Galoppini, 2.4% of visitors to SourceForge are from Poland, a statistic which serves its purpose of being both interesting and pointless at the same time.

Also statistically meaningless in terms of open source adoption, but nonetheless interesting is the …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Turkey kept its hopes of qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 alive with a last-minute victory over hosts Switzerland last night and now faces a winner-takes-all final group game against the Czech Republic on Sunday.

When it comes to open source software adoption, details of public and private deployments are thin on the ground, and we are indebted to Erkan Tekman, Pardus project manager, for contributing his insight into open source adoption in Turkey (see below).

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Databases are used by many different disciplines, from your DBA to your Developer, right down to the End User. They can also be viewed from many different perspectives…

DBA’s are usually interested in the server configuration, index usage etc. Developers however are often concerned with retrieval methods, datatypes and occasionally stored procedures. One thing is for sure, your database if used effectively will be changing frequently, and with so many people accessing your database do you know what the last change was? Would you know if someone added an index to a table? (would you care… )

Revision Control is often used to track changes to source code and other documents, so why not your …