Oracle raised the prices for a number of its products this week, by as much as twenty percent in many cases. While on the surface this seems silly in a down economy the truth is that it's actually a very smart move.
First of all, Oracle sets the pricing for the database market (and now possibly the app server market too) and therefore should always be looking for ways to increase their prices. The other important aspect is the fact that Oracle discounts heavily off list price. With a large increase (say 20%) they stand to even their loss on the list vs. actual price. It's deviously ingenious.
Do I think this is good for Oracle customers? No. But, once again I have to marvel at the economic prowess that Oracle continues to display. Meanwhile, just go get some MySQL.
If you own a Jura F90 Coffee Maker, you can also buy a Jura Internet Connection Kit, which lets you program and set your coffee prefs via the network: however, its got a bunch of vulnerabilities that allow for remote denial-of-coffee attacks
According to Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle we should all be drinking more:
Coffee drinking was on the rise during the mid 1600s, coffee houses spread through England filling an important niche--public meeting place which did not serve alcohol. Originally coffee was sold as a medicine, "the first steps it made from the cabinets of the curious as an exotick seed, having been into the apothecaries' shops as a drug." Coffee became increasingly popular during the plague of 1664 when it was believed to be therapeutic and protective against the "Contagion," as it was called.
Via Boing Boing
Reddit launched itself as an open source project today and chose the occasionally controversial CPAL license for the release.
There doesn't appear to be a goal of monetization as much as there is a goal of ubiquity through proliferation. If that were reversed there is no question that the GPL is a better choice.
I happen to think CPAL is exactly the right choice and here's why:
1. It's one of only 3 OSS licenses that take the "network" into account (CPAL, OSL, AGPL) whereby usage can be considered distribution.
2. It doesn't require that code be given back
3. It enforces the brand of the developer (in this case Reddit) which actually has some benefits.
Matt has been mostly against CPAL (see this post about Facebook) but I have been trying to sway him into realizing that the license doesn't dissuade developers. His argument (which makes sense to a point) is that they should put code out under Apache or something completely permissive. That however, limits what the code developer themselves might want to do in the future.
Just when you thought that your ADD couldn't get any worse, the guys at MyHome 2.0 have built a Twittering Teddy Bear. Considering that Twitter has been historically unreliable you should be guaranteed at least a bit of quiet now and then.
I pretty much gave up on Twitter after the IM shut down and the spotty SMS...maybe if I build one of these my baby will feel a deeper link to my inner-most tweets?
Via Gizmodo
Besides the fun of ruining Microsoft's day, the Mozilla team is going for a world record. You can learn more about it here.
Considering that Microsoft has yet to be a real friend to open source I have to be at least a bit suspect of the intentions behind the sponsorship of the ongoing open source census.
My guess? I think Microsoft wants access to the results both so it can understand open source but also so it can start to consider legal actions against the most popular products and the companies that develop them.
I'll apologize in advance if the motives are completely altruistic but if the past is any evidence, we should really avoid giving this kind of information to Microsoft with no benefits attached to open source.
The company's "customers, partners and developers are working in increasingly heterogeneous environments," so participation in projects such as the census is relevant to the "ecosystem" in which Microsoft operates, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, in a prepared statement.
I, along with many others in the open source vendor and developer community have met with Sam and I think we all believe he has good intentions, but it's still Microsoft and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Replay Solutions today announced it's new tool for Enterprise Java. Replay's tools are often described as Tivo for the Java applications, which I think is an accurate description.
Basically you can run your Java apps, stop, pause, rewind etc. all in one fell swoop. With the launch of ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE, users can now drill down into source code during replay to quickly identify the root cause of an issue.
You can see a demo video here.
From the product description:
ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE allows companies, teams, or individuals to make deep recordings of their software applications and servers at any stage of the application life cycle. ReplayDIRECTOR virtualizes and re-executes applications, so that when errors occur, users can fast-forward directly to the root cause. ReplayDIRECTOR will reproduce any application errors and can be coupled with any standard debugger, profiler or diagnostic tool to quickly correct errors in the code.
Phil Wainewright writes astutely today on the many degrees of multi-tenant SaaS architecture, highlighting "true" vs. "everything else." Considering that customers and end-users have little to no idea what's running at SaaS companies it's a bit ironic that the technology powering these companies is interesting--I suppose it's only so to technical people and other vendors.
Salesforce.com: First-degree multi-tenancy. In this model, all customers are served from a single infrastructure in which every component is shared, all the way down to the tables in the database.
Intacct: Second-degree multi-tenancy. Like many SaaS pureplays, Intacct uses replication much more broadly than Salesforce.com to distribute its shared-schema instances across large numbers of server clusters.
Oracle and others: Lesser-degree multi-tenancy. There are a lot of terms floating around for these lower levels of multi-tenancy, including isolated tenancy, mega-tenancy or hybrid tenancy.
Link: Many degrees of multi-tenancyMatt Lawton, director of Open Source Software Business Strategies at IDC, sent me over some details from its latest report on Open Source. I have a few of the details below, and Matt really wanted me to remind everyone that open-source software is being used in so many more ways than straight standalone commercial product deployments and that the standalone $1.73 billion for 2007 is just one component.
The market for standalone open-source software (OSS) continues to be in a significant growth stage. This IDC study outlines the evolution of worldwide revenue from standalone OSS and presents IDC's preliminary 2008--2012 forecast. Some of the highlights from this study are as follows:
--IDC expects worldwide revenue from standalone OSS to grow at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $4.83 billion by 2012.
--Worldwide revenue from standalone OSS in 2007 was $1.73 billion.
This forecast is characterized by two different components: revenue from new OSS projects growing at 32 percent CAGR over the forecast period, and revenue associated with a single OSS project (OpenSolaris) that is based on a formerly proprietary software product with a substantial revenue stream but lower growth profile.
Revenue from standalone OSS is an important but small indicator of the commercial impact of OSS. Large vendors are realizing significant revenues indirectly from their activities with and support of OSS. In addition, as unpaid OSS adoption extends from a development environment to production deployments, vendors of competitive proprietary software will feel the impact on their revenues.
I just took the SOA IQ test over at ebizQ and scored my way into the SOA boardroom.
I'm trying to think of another area of technology that has more acronyms than SOA (service-oriented architecture) does...maybe networking? It's amazing how many acronyms you can put into 10 questions.
Nice job by the ebizQ team in putting the quiz together. Anything that makes technology fun or interesting is a win in my book.
