While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the project by a large vendor.

OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant competition for Microsoft Office for years and in many ways demonstrated the advantages of open source, helping usher in wider use of it, as well as greater usability. OO.o was in fact my reason for originally investigating and moving to open source software more than a decade ago. Regardless of past mismanagement of community and technology, that competitive factor has been diminished greatly since Oracle took ownership of OO.o. Now, after prompting a fork — as has …

Linus announces Linux 3.0. Attachmate maintains commitment to SUSE Linux. And more.

# Linus Torvalds announced the release candidate of Linux 3.0.

# Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn maintained that the company is committed to SUSE Linux.

# OpenX raised $20m series D funding.

# Cloudera proposed Flume as an Apache incubator project.

# Isidorey unveiled CloudSandra: a NoSQL database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra.

# Wayne Beaton …

One of the ‘things I wrote down during OSBC’ was this statement from Benchmark EIR, Rob Bearden:

“Misalignment between a business model and the community’s tolerance point will never be accepted. This will manifest itself in multiple distributions.”

At first glance the statement may seem obvious to anyone who has studied open source-related business strategies or communities, but I believe provides the context for further understanding the complexities of balancing the needs of a business for control and the needs of a community for openness.

As the following graphic demonstrates, the statement suggests that there is a window of opportunity within which the control point of the vendor, and the tolerance point of the community must be closely aligned:

…

Two years ago I published a post entitled “things I wrote down during OSBC”. It tuned out to be surprisingly popular, so I decided to try the same formula again.

Just as was the case two years ago these are presented chronologically. I wrote down a lot more than this, to be clear, but these were the most quote-worthy things. Also, as in 2009, some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source (or in some cases data management), others were interesting ways of expressing old ideas:

“The next generation of computing is being led by users, rather than vendors.”
Jim Whitehurst

“The value of open source has moved from commoditization to innovation.”
…

Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.

The presentation covers our recently published report of the same name, and provides some additional context on the role of open source in driving innovation in distributed data management.

Specifically, the presentation looks at the evolving influence of open source in the database market and the context for the emergence of new database alternatives.

I’ll be walking through the six core drivers that have driven the development …

EMC launches Greenplum HD. DataStax releases Brisk. And more.

# EMC launched its Greenplum HD Hadoop distribution, with the support of Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and SnapLogic, among others.

# DataStax …

Novell sold to Attachmate. Barnes & Noble throws the book at Microsoft. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell closed its acquisition by Attachmate and its patent sale to CPTN.

# Attachmate’s CEO discussed the company’s plans for SUSE Linux.

# Barnes & Noble …

DoJ/FCO says aye CPTN. Canonical readies Ubuntu 11.04. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell-CPTN patent sale agreed by DoJ/FCO, subject to the patents being licensed to OIN.

# VMware reported net income of $126m in Q1 on revenue up 33% to $844m.

# Canonical previewed Ubuntu 11.04, featuring Unity and also Ubuntu Server 11.04.

# The Open Invention Network …

Oracle announced on Friday that it is to discontinue its commercial interest in the OpenOffice.org project, prompting a barrage of criticism from the open source faithful with regards to its approach to the open source applications project, and community in general.

The company was accused of being community-hostile, for example, and comparisons were also made to Colonel Gadhafi, while a translation of the press release into “plain English” apparently shed new light on the announcement.

In truth though, the language …

The 451 Group’s new long format report on emerging database alternatives, NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond, is now available.

The report examines the changing database landscape, investigating how the failure of existing suppliers to meet the performance, scalability and flexibility needs of large-scale data processing has led to the development and adoption of alternative data management technologies.

Specifically, the report covers:

• NoSQL databases designed to meet scalability requirements of distributed architectures and/or schema-less data management requirements, including big tables, key value stores, document database and graph databases

• NewSQL databases designed to meet scalability requirements of distributed architectures or to improve performance such that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity, including new MySQL storage engines, transparent sharding technologies, …