Open Source > Linux > LQ
February 18, 2008 Leave a comment
As a follow up to this post, the main LQ site is now being served off the new infrastructure. The move was relatively painless and few people should have been impacted. The site should be a bit faster now as well as quite a bit more fault tolerant. If you notice any issues, please let me know ASAP.
–jeremy
February 17, 2008 Leave a comment
An interesting inside look on what went into the MySQL end of the acquisition decision from Mårten Mickos has recently been posted.
At MySQL there were few things we loved as much as the thought of being our own masters. We had always been contrarians and we prided ourselves with not following what we saw as outdated ideas from big companies. We made the dolphin on our logo jump surprisingly from right to left (as opposed to the typical left to right) – because we wanted it to be clear: we were not afraid to be different. We decided that people can work from home so we can hire the best and brightest anywhere in the world – not just Stockholm, Seattle or Silicon Valley. We cherished heated debates in the company – and there were many. When other companies dictated alignment, we celebrated dissonance and accepted that there could be multiple viewpoints. When others gathered their staff at a prestigious hotel somewhere in the USA, we summoned our engineers to a primitive sanatorium outside St. Petersburg, Russia. We did it our way. At times it was difficult –even chaotic, but we loved it even more for that reason. It created a passion and strength inside the company.
So why did we change our minds in a few short weeks? What made us think that Sun Microsystems would be a good home for us? What made this better than an IPO? Why did we abandon our revolution for a stable nation? What was it in Sun Microsystems that attracted us? And, most importantly, will we be able to maintain the passion that has driven us to where we are today?
Let me start in a typical Scandinavian contrarian way: Perhaps we will be unable to maintain our passion within Sun. And at the most extreme, perhaps we should not have done this deal. The reality is it will take many years before we can judge this decision to know if it was the right course.
But let me also state that there is probably no better place for this “dirty dozen” (or perhaps “fanatical four hundred”) of MySQL than inside Sun Microsystems.
I’ve always really liked and had a huge amount of respect for both Mårten and the MySQL founders. They built a great company and a great product, and have been open and transparent the entire time. How this acquisition pans out has huge implications for Open Source IMHO. MySQL AB was on target to become one of the largest pure play Open Source companies in the world. With more and more Open Source companies being scooped up by traditional players and consolidators, it remains unclear to me how many pure play Open Source companies we’ll see in 5+ years. I think the ramifications of that are still not well understood (or given enough attention for that matter). Only time will tell.
–jeremy
February 14, 2008 1 Comment
I have no idea how, but it looks like SCO managed to get a $100M bid that will take the company private. From the article:
Embattled Unix vendor SCO may get a new lease on life, thanks to a $100 million infusion aimed at helping it emerge from bankruptcy and pursue its controversial legal claims.
The financing comes from Stephen Norris Capital Partners (SNCP), which will take a controlling interest in SCO as part of the deal.
“Not only will this deal position us to emerge from Chapter 11, but it also marks an exciting future for our business,” said Jeff Hunsaker, the company’s president and COO of SCO Operations, in a statement.
“This significant financial backing is positive news for SCO’s customers, partners and resellers who continue to request upgrades and rely upon SCO’s UNIX services to drive their business forward,” he said.
According to a statement from the company, SNCP already has a business plan for SCO that includes pursuing its legal claims.
Unless the Norris in SNCP is Chuck, I can’t see how this will help. SCO has a dying operating system on its hands along with two lawsuits that are going absolutely nowhere. I’ve not seen too much recently about their mobile offerings either. The previous bid of $36M by York seemed high, but $100M for SCO seem ludicrous to me. One has to wonder if McBride will remain with the company if this deal closes. There is a possible silver lining here though. If Novell does win its case against SCO, now there may actually be some assets for them to take.
–jeremy
February 14, 2008 1 Comment
(photos courtesy of John Stanforth via Flickr)
I’m back from SCALE 6X and finally just about caught up. SCALE was once again an outstanding time, Ilan and the entire crew put on a great expo. The speaking lineup was interesting/informative, the networking events were good, the network was stable, the expo floor was lively and I even made it out of the hotel this year. SCALE is definitely something I plan on making a year trip. Next year I may bring a recording device that Ted introduced me to, and put the content on LQ Radio. I ended up running the Open Source Jobs BOF on Saturday and was quite surprised to see that nearly the entire room was employers looking to hire. The few people who were looking for jobs had many to choose from. While there is a job slowdown right now in many markets, it doesn’t appear that Open Source is one of them. I was also able to participate in the “Weakest Geek” competition on Saturday night, along with Jono, Ken, Ted, Anthony and Don. The really smart people were the first to go, and in the end it came down to Jono and myself ;) It was fun and hopefully the crowd enjoyed it.
Attending SCALE really makes me want to consider doing something similar here in New York, but I’m not sure that I have the time to do it right. There just aren’t enough quality shows here on the east coast. It’s an idea I’ll have to toss around a bit more.
–jeremy
February 9, 2008 Leave a comment
I’m in LA for SCALE 6X. If you’re in the SoCal area and able to attend, i recommend it. Last night was fairly tame by SCALE standards, but I’d expect things to kick into full gear tonight. As always the speaker line up looks interesting. I haven’t made it to the expo floor yet, but there are over 70 booths this year from what I understand. If you’re at SCALE and would like to chat, drop me a line. If you’re unable to attend but would like to know more about the event, we recently did an interview for LQ Radio.
–jeremy
February 7, 2008 Leave a comment
A quick update on the Microsoft – Yahoo deal. Now that people have had a chance to digest the deal a bit, I notice the sentiment is turning negative. Microsoft shareholders are walking and employees of both companies seem unhappy. The value of the offer has shrunk over $2/share already. It also seem clear that Jerry does not want the deal to happen. The only winners so far seem to be short- and mid-term YHOO shareholders. While it’s unclear if another suitor will jump in or make Microsoft up the bid, it seems unlikely. It’s still possible Yahoo could outsource its search to Google, but it’s clear that doing nothing is not an option. Since I think the deal would be bad for Open Source in a lot of ways, I was glad to see a reasonable proposal posted recently. It’s clear that Microsoft just does not do the web very well. Despite piles of money and a lot of motivation, they continue to fail miserably. The fact that they had to make this offer shows just how little faith they have in getting things done on their own. Forcing Yahoo to become part of Microsoft would almost certainly be a disaster. How this is going to play out is still up in the air, but I’ll be watching closely.
As a side note, I’ve seen a couple posts made that indicate this deal could be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I think that’s a bit dramatic, but I will say that the fact that Ballmer is still CEO does surprise me a bit.
–jeremy
February 7, 2008 Leave a comment
A quick list of the largest Open Source deals ever:
Here are the seven largest deals that we could find the numbers for:
1. Sun buys MySQL, $1 billion, 2008
Sun now has their hands on the world’s most widely used open source database.
2. Red Hat buys Cygnus Solutions, $675 million, 1999
Red Hat started the open source acquisition race early when they bought Cygnus Solutions, providers of open source software support.
3. Citrix buys XenSource, $500 million, 2007
Considering how hot virtualization is right now, we can see why Citrix bought XenSource, the company behind the Xen virtualization software.
4. Yahoo buys Zimbra, $350 million, 2007
Yahoo already have their own email services, and with Zimbra they got an integrated email, messaging and collaboration software.
5. Red Hat buys JBoss, $350 million, 2006
Red Hat strengthened their SOA offerings by buying the JBoss Java application server.
6. Novell buys SUSE, $210 million, 2003
Novell got their own Linux distribution by buying SUSE.
7. Nokia buys Trolltech, $153 million, 2008
Trolltech is the company behind the Qt GUI framework which is used by the popular Linux desktop environment KDE.
It’s clear that Open Source acquisitions are accelerating, but it’s interesting to see that #2 happened all the way back in the bubble days of 1999, when Cygnus Solutions went for almost as much as JBoss and Zimbra combined. Suse on the other hand went during the trough of the crash, which comes out in the valuation.
–jeremy
February 4, 2008 2 Comments
As I previously mentioned, I’ve been working on moving LQ to an entirely new and updated infrastructure. Everything was going smooth and the project was actually ahead of schedule. The LQ Wiki, LQ ISO and LQ Radio are already being served by the new machines. I decided to implement Munin for performance monitoring. Like many related tools, it uses rrdtool for graphing. After a bit of debugging, it turns out that OCFS2 doesn’t support mmap yet, so all RRD writes are failing. In this particular case I can get around the problem easy enough, but I know applications (BDB comes to mind, but I am sure there are plenty of others) use mmap, so I’m wondering what else is going to fail. A post from an Oracle engineer on ocfs2-users from June 2007 said mmap support was coming soon, but I can’t find an ETA anywhere and am running the latest version. Aside from this snag, I’ve been really happy with OCFS2.
–jeremy
February 1, 2008 2 Comments
I am happy to report that LQ is getting a brand new infrastructure and moving to a new data center. This has been in the works for a while, but implementation is now well under way. The new site should be both faster and more reliable. LQ Radio has already been moved to the new platform and can be used for testing the new setup. If you have any issues with LQ Radio, please let me know ASAP.
For those interested in the technical details… We’re now using nginx to load balance multiple back end apache servers. All content is being served off of an OCFS2 iSCSI partition. We’re sticking with the same master/slave MySQL replication setup that has been in production for years, although we are moving to MySQL 5.0.x now. If there are any other specific questions people are interested in, I’d be happy to answer them.
–jeremy
February 1, 2008 Leave a comment
It’s been rumored on and off for years now, but Microsoft just made an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. The bid, which would consist of cash and Microsoft stock, values Yahoo shares at $31 a share, a 62% premium on Thursdays closing price. More analysis here. Yahoo has rebuffed Microsoft in the past, but this time the offer might be one they can’t refuse. The price of YHOO stock after the announcement indicates the market thinks there is a high probability of a deal. This deal is clearly about Microsoft not being able to compete with Google, and not being too happy about that. Ironically, I don’t think this deal will help them compete any better. On the other hand, Yahoo has been a huge friend to Open Source. In addition to things like YUI (which we use at LQ) and Hadoop, they acquired a great company in Zimbra. To me, Zimbra is one of the only real long term threats to Exchange. Unfortunately, I’m not quite as optimistic as Matt about the future of some of these Open Source initiatives if Microsoft were to take over. I’m not sure companies like Flickr, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Zimbra and others would have sold to Microsoft… and for good reason. The cultures at Yahoo! and Microsoft are just entirely different. Concerns like that sometimes go out the windows when $44B is on the table though. Long term, I think Yahoo could probably offer more shareholder value alone than as part of Microsoft. The market doesn’t really think long term anymore, however, and in the short term Yahoo is hurting.
–jeremy
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