Google to buy Plaxo? $200 million worth of data

Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.

I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.

Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can … Read more

Mike Olson, co-founder of Sleepycat, leaves Oracle

Mike Olson, Sleepycat CEO and co-founder, has left Oracle. Mike quietly left Oracle in mid-January on amicable terms and indicates that he's going to spend the next while looking around the industry to see what problems he can help fix. (Plus I think he's going to ski a bit. :-)

Mike sold Sleepyat, an open-source embedded database company, to Oracle back in February 2006. Much to my aggravation, I've never heard a negative word out of his mouth about his two-year stay with Oracle, either in public or private. Mike is class and gave to his employer … Read more

Retraction: Oracle + MySQL = Bad information

One of the problems with relying on sources unaffiliated with a company is that no matter how trustworthy, they can still be wrong. Such is the case with my post on MySQL and Oracle. The information contained in it turns out to be inaccurate as I've just found out. I apologize for my original post, especially to those at Oracle, MySQL, and Sun who may be affected by it. My source was not a member of the current or past MySQL team or board.

This is not the first nor the last example of my gross incompetence.

Yahoo! mulling over layoffs of up to 20% of its workforce

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Yahoo! is set to cut 1,500 to 2,500 jobs (up to 20% of its 12,500-strong workforce). A list of those to go has allegedly been compiled and turned into management:

The "list" is reportedly the product of a Q4 project in which all group heads were asked to look at redundancies and create their own lists of potential cuts. All the group-level lists have now been turned in to corporate.

Some are suggesting that the cuts will primarily hit Yahoo!'s European operations (arguably the most expensive place on the planet to cut jobs due to severance packages). … Read more

A new startup to rise from the JBoss ranks

A new startup is set to spin from the ranks of JBoss. I'd give you the URL but then you could track down the host and spoil their plans. I'll post it later, closer to the official launch.

For now I'll just say that the JBoss crew is truly entrepreneurial. We need more open sourcerors building great companies...and then more great companies. Marc Fleury clearly hired the right sort of people, as they've been very fecund (starting or joining Loopfuse, Buni, Appcelerator, Alfresco, SpringSource, MuleSource, Xaware, and others).

Red Hat and Novell have built great … Read more

Intel manipulates the news for One Laptop Per Child

Intel, fine, upstanding corporate citizen that it is, decided the world needed an "independent" news source to cover One Laptop Per Child. So it did. Or, rather, one of its employees did and called it something innocuous like "One Laptop Per Child News."

The hitch? That same employee works on an Intel-sponsored project that competes with OLPC:… Read more

Linux and the Mac set to announce wedding vows on the server?

The Var Guy must have friends at Parallels. He's reporting on his blog that Parallels and Apple are shortly to announce that Parallels is set to announce Parallels Server for Mac, Windows, and Linux:

The current Parallels software has been a wildly popular option for running Mac OS X and Windows on Apple desktops and laptops. In fact, Parallels for the Mac surpassed 650,000 licenses sold in September.

Now Parallels is setting its sights on the server. Sources close to the company say Parallels Server for Mac, Windows and Linux will initially target departmental systems. That could be … Read more

Open Season 8: Red Hat, Yahoo!, and creepy Google

The eighth installment of The Register's Open Season is now live and worth a listen. From Ashlee Vance's show notes:

...[W]e...look[ed] at things such as Yahoo!'s sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation, Red Hat's woes (we recorded this before the new CEO splash) and Google's bid for brain domination.

Part of the Red Hat discussion included speculation about IBM going whole hog with Ubuntu on the server. Dave and Matt say this will happen sooner than we think. I'm skeptical.

As always, it was fun to record. Hopefully it's mildly … Read more

A quasi-comprehensive look at open source in 2007: Part 2

2007 was such a massive year for open source that I've had to divide it up into two posts. 2006 was relatively easy to encapsulate in one post. Not so 2007. Enterprise adoption of open source was in full bloom. The analysts were all over open source in 2007. And then there was Microsoft....

I covered January through June in my last post. This one covers July through December. It's surprising just how much happened this past year:

July

Open-source investments were up 33% over Q2 2006. Interestingly, open-source startup opportunities branched out beyond CRM, ERP, and other mainstream enterprise software to things like advertising, telephony, and other disparate things. Windows development declined by 12% while developers targeting the Linux platform(s) was up 34.8%. Microsoft is hardly going away anytime soon, but third-party developers...maybe so. Of course, later numbers showed Linux server growth slowing compared to Windows, while both grow their data center market shares. Lies, damned lies, and statistics...but whose?… Read more