Regular visitors to the 451 CAOS Theory blog will be well aware of The 451 Group’s CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) research service and our CAOS long-form reports.

They are probably less aware of the open source coverage that The 451 Group provides on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, however, and I thought it would be worthwhile to provide some examples of The 451 Group’s ongoing open source coverage by highlighting a few recent reports.

The company’s core services are 451 Market Insight Service, which delivers daily insight into emerging enterprise IT markets, and 451 TechDealmaker, a forward-looking weekly …

Yahoo! Open! Sources! Traffic! Server! Funding for 10gen. And more.

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

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Yahoo! Open! Sourced! Traffic! Server!

# Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization for Servers for managing Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.

# 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, has …

Sun and Sourcefire report Q3 results. SpringSource elected to JCP executive committee. Alfresco launches Enterprise 3.0. How to go from 0 to 700 customers in one year. Open sourcing Jonathan Schwartz’s ponytail. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Reports Final Results for the First Quarter Fiscal Year 2009 Sun Microsystems

Sourcefire Announces 2008 Third Quarter Results Sourcefire

Sourcefire Adopts Stockholder Rights Plan Sourcefire

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… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

The Linux Business Campus Nuremberg (LBCN) presents annual awards for innovative ideas, well-considered concepts and promising business plans in the field of Open Source and Free Software.

The European Open Source Business Award is presented for innovative business concepts after detailed examination by an expert jury comprising LBCN campus coaches and selected figures from the venture capital scene. The annual award seeks entrepreneurs with innovative open source software business ideas which can revolutionize the markets and set new

This award was presented for the first time in January 2007 as a highlight at the Heise congress on ?Open Source Meets Business? (http://www.heise.de/open/news/meldung/84306).

The next award presentation will take place in the old city hall in Nuremberg on Wednesday, 23 January 2008.

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After almost eight months of waiting, I am finally allowed to publish my thesis paper:

Design and Implementation of a Workflow Engine
This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a software component that faciliates the specification, management, and execution of so-called workflows. The discussion of this component's design includes the semantics and syntax of the underlying workflow model as well as the actual software design. The former builds upon the Workflow Patterns [BK03] terminology, the latter on the concepts of a Workflow Virtual Machine [SF04] and the idea that a workflow system should be comprised of loosely coupled components [DAM01, DG95, PM99].

The thesis paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany license, the software that has been developed as part of this thesis has been released under the New BSD License as part of …

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

At last month’s Vancouver PHP Conference, local journalist Bruce Byfield gave me a quick interview about how I got involved in Free Software and Open Source. We chatted for a while about my time at MySQL, my bits of work in the PHP community and what I am currently up to. The interview turned into a profile for Linux.com that was published a few days ago.

I was a bit surprised to find that there have been a few anonymous trolls for the profile - I didn’t think that there would be any comments on the profile.

The Linux.com profile: …

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: …