
What’s in a name in open source?
What does community mean to you?
Community is an overloaded word, it can mean anything. Community can mean just people who use your product. Or maybe it’s those who build your product, or maybe it’s the business partners who are using it. Or maybe it’s…

Keys to turn your open source project into a business
Broadly speaking, there are two types of open source software. The free software, which has a reciprocity requirement in it. Open source software which doesn’t.

Open source history, present day, and licensing
This article is part of my talk, Open-Source Business Models. You can see the full transcript and the video of my talk on Heavybit.com. My name is Marten Mickos and I’m the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. As Tom mentioned, I was the CEO of MySQL for eight years. I was de facto the only CEO […]

Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the […]

Chartio Supporting Salesforce–Pretty for the Enterprise
Two themes I often talk about are specific functionality from specialist vendors and delivering enterprise solutions in new and friendly ways. A good example of this I came across recently was from small company Chartio. Chartio, a Y Combinator company, touts itself as the best interface for data. Essentially it allows organizations to take data […]

What really is Open Source Software and what’s this community nonsense they ask…
Open Source Software (OSS), Why Some Fail At It OSS has won the war. It has been over for years now. Microsoft has ceded, Oracle, VMware and many others have stepped up and attempted to embrace the open source community. Sometimes they’ve been successful, sometimes they haven’t. They’re slowly changing their models to play well […]

Xeround Rolls out Database as a Service Further
Xeround, the database as a service offering is today announcing an integration that sees it power MySQL applications running on both AppHarbor’s .Net platform as well as AppFog’s PHP platform. As developers increasingly look to PaaS as the first choice for easing the deployment and management aspects of their task, they also look to add […]

How does open source affect company culture?
An open source company is naturally a company that produces open source code for others to consume. But how does the notion of producing software code in the open affect company culture?
Read…

Internal Email on Why a Software Company Migrates Away from MySQL
Twitter is abuzz this morning with MySQL news: What these messages refer to is that Oracle dropped InnoDB from the free Classic Edition, it is now only available starting with the $2,000 Standard Edition. A few days ago we heard support prices were increased – none of this should come as a surprise, the writing […]

Challenging Stonebraker’s Assertions On Data Warehouses – Part 1
I have tremendous respect for Michael Stonebraker. He is an apt visionary. What I like the most about him is his drive and passion to commercialize the academic concepts. ACM recently published his article “My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses….

SaaS Startups Should Check Out CouchDB First
Ever since Oracle acquired MySQL, there is a lingering question in the minds of SaaS companies that had relied heavily on MySQL and the analysts who follow the space closely. It is about the impact of this acquisition on the SaaS providers. While thinking about the impact of any adverse move by Oracle on SaaS […]

Why the “NoSQL” moniker is useful – for now
There’s been a lot of crowing as of late from folks that wish the whole NoSQL “movement” (where “NoSQL” means “not only SQL” – but gets misinterpreted a LOT) had been named something else. Since the whole movement is essentially engineers at this point, I thought I’d weigh in (I’m just a lowly marketing guy, […]

MySQL, Oracle And Cloud Computing
Image via CrunchBase Ever since Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems along with MySQL, all hell broke loose in the open source community. With EU questioning the deal, there is a war (of words) erupting inside the community with one side asking EU to block the deal or, at the very least, change the […]

Debunking the Debunkers: Open Source Myths
All societies and businesses that have survived longer than a few decades have created folklore, stories, and myths. As the culture evolves, these myths tend to get embellished and enlarged. So it is with Open Source. I read a recent New York Times article about open source to be full of errors, perpetuated myths, and […]

Joyent Ups The Ante In Enterprise Game
Joyent, the San Franscisco based company offering enterprise class cloud computing solutions, is shifting focus to completely concentrate on enterprise customers. I wrote about Joyent in the early months of Cloud Ave and Joyent has, ever since, prioritized their offerings towards enterprise customers. The tech blogosphere is always buzzing with news about various Amazon cloud […]