Intalio acquires Jetty. Red Hat updates JBoss platform. $12m funding for Medsphere. And more.

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# Intalio acquired Webtide, developer of Jetty application server.

# Red Hat delivered JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, as well as JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.3 and launched Catalyst partner program.

# Medsphere raised $12m to support ongoing development and expansion in open source health IT.

Spinn3r is growing fast. Time to hire another engineer. Actually, we’re hiring for like four people right now so I’ll probably be blogging more on this topic.

My older post on this subject still applies for requirements.

If you’re a Linux or MySQL geek we’d love to have your help.

Did I mention we just moved to an awesome office on 2nd and Howard in downtown SF?

…

UPDATE: The final vote is in and a winner has been declared, with Matt Asay and his arguments for the GPL taking the prize. You can see the debate or follow links to the other judges’ votes and thoughts here.

This is my assessment as a judge of the recent open source license debate held by the FOSS Learning Centre. We’ll have to begin with some qualifications and definitions, starting with the fact that there is no ‘best’ open source software license. Still, a star-studded open source software panel provided a lively, informative debate on the merits of some top open source licenses. For that, I congratulate and thank the panelists, Mike Milinkovich from the Eclipse Foundation arguing for the Eclipse Public License, Matt Asay of Alfresco arguing in favor of the GPL and David Maxwell from Coverity arguing for …

I have several side projects when time permits and one is that of benchmarking various MySQL technologies (e.g. MySQL 5.0,5.1,5.4), variants (e.g. MariaDB, Drizzle) and storage engines (e.g. Tokutek, Innodb plugin) and even other products like Tokyo Cabinet which is gaining large implementations.

You have two options with benchmarks, the brute force approach such as Sysbench, TPC, sysbench, Juice Benchmark, iibench, mysqlslap, skyload. I prefer the realistic approach however these are always on client’s private data. What is first needed is better access to public data for benchmarks. I have compiled this list to date and I am seeking additional sources for reference.

• Feebase – Data is in clean loadable format
• IMDB – Not clean, but Roland Bouman is working on …

Jay has already provided a good overview of the debate related to the apparent decline in the usage of the GPLv2. I don’t intend to cover the same ground, but I did want to quickly respond to a statement made by Matt Asay in his assessment of the reasons for and implications of reduced GPLv2 usage.

He wrote:

“as Open Core becomes the default business model for ‘pure-play’ open-source companies, we will see more software licensed under the Apache license”

I don’t doubt that we will see more software licensed under the Apache license, and also more vendors making use of permissively-licensed code, but I don’t see a correlation with the Open-Core model.

Code scanning and management vendor Black Duck reports the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) now dipping below 50% share of open source software. While we already knew that GPLv2 was somewhat in decline from its far greater share of open source code over the last 5-10 years, it is useful to know what pool of code we’re talking about. We must also remember that while GPLv2 may not be as dominant as it once was and that other licenses, particularly GPLv3, are quickly gaining share, GPLv2 is still quite relevant to enterprise open source software, is used in a variety of newer and popular applications across the enterprise stack and is likely to remain in the top 10 licenses for a long time.

Regarding GPLv2 and Black Duck’s findings, some folks are rightly asking what code and how much of it are we considering where GPLv2 accounts for half or less of the …

We reported recently on Red Hat’s revenue growth and deferred revenue. One of the things I have been looking at recently is the slowdown in Red Hat’s growth in recent years, and the opportunities that the company has to improve that growth.

For some perspective it is worth noting that while Red Hat’s revenue has been growing steadily:

The rate of growth has been in decline for some time:

We have also noted (451 Group clients only) that the company will in …

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver …

We’re proud to announce the first service release of our current GA product MySQL Workbench 5.1. This maintenance release encompasses a number of stability, performance and quality improvements.
We were able to fix 56 bugs – as always, details on latest changes can be found on our Releases Page.

Please head over to our download page and fetch this new update:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html

In addition to the improvements on the application, we also updated our packaging procedure to provide a more up to date selection of packages for recent distributions. Along with the Windows and OSX (intel) binaries we now provide binaries for the following Linux distributions:

Ubuntu 8.04  …

Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

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Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …