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:

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I love STL containers in C++. They're so much better in general to work with than their C counterparts. The bit that's missing though is an instantiation-time optimized version of map.

Take, for instance, reading a set of commands at startup from a set of dynamically loaded plugins. It's not going to change, in this hypothetical case, because we neither load nor unload plugins after startup. But it's dynamic in the sense that we do not know it at compile time - so doing something like gperf to generate a perfect hash is out of the question.

But why should we pay the lookup cost on a dynamic container for every lookup if I can determine, based on program flow, that the contents of the container are not going to change once it's instantiated.

Something like:

const perfect_map(some_dynamic_map_I_built);

Where the constructor would do a perfect hash generation once, and the map itself would be const (not …

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 …

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, …

VMware launches Cloud Foundry. Red Hat heads for Ceylon. 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.”

# VMware launched Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-service and open source project.

# Red Hat’s Gavin King revealed details of the company’s Ceylon project.

# Red Hat submitted a number of specification requests for Java EE 7.

# Terracotta accused Red Hat of “trying to pull a fast …

Groklaw declares victory. Cloudera updates Hadoop distro. 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.”

# Groklaw claimed victory, will stop publishing new articles on May 16.

# Cloudera released version 3 of its Hadoop distribution.

# VoltDB released version 1.3 of its open source distributed in-memory database.

# Black Duck grew sales by 51% in Q1.

# eXo and Convertigo …

My last but not least GSoC idea. This is about actual tool that already exists but is currently a little bit broken and needs rewrite with a bigger picture in mind.

What is fillup?

As this project is named fillup-ng, it is obviously supposed to be replacement for existing utility called fillup. Let’s talk a little bit about what fillup currently does. It is used to parse sysconfig files. These files has syntax similar to shell scripts with only variables definitions. The difference is that comments in these scripts has their meaning. And fillup is used to merge them automatically somehow. Basic operation are following. You’ve got some configuration file on your system and new version cames in from package. What now? Classical solution is not to touch anything and let user resolve it manually. But fillup can do some clever things. …

Time is flying by so fast, it sure doesn’t seem like it was last year I was blogging about how Android is for real. Well, let me reiterate … Android is for real. The reason I say that and stress that is despite its success, we see a variety of legal threats, accusations and actual lawsuits to come flying at Android as fast as it is growing in the market.

Still, we seem to be able to fairly easily find agreement among vendors, developers and users that Android development is not slowing down, that legal maneuvering will not pave a path to success or that any ruling or action will take Android-based phones out of consumers’ hands. This is not to say that Android faces significant challenges: real fragmentation and version overload; a software development pace that may be too fast for handset makers or consumers; innovation from rivals …