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In the trenches with...Gary Whizin of MySQL

First off, I'm changing the title of the series to "In the trenches with..." because I'm finding that the best people are often not keen to sing praises to themselves (i.e., "Unsung heroes"). At any rate, while these people are, in fact, the heroes of open source, the series is designed to glean their expertise and provide a "trenches" view of commercial open source.

Hence, a new name.

Nowhere is super-capable humility in more abundance than MySQL. I love that company. I've yet to meet anyone there that I wouldn't enjoy sitting next to on a long plane ride. Mostly because they're somewhat quiet, and I hate talking to people on planes. But... :-)

I asked Zack Urlocker to suggest an "unsung hero" at MySQL and he suggested I chat with Gary Whizin, senior director of Engineering. (He suggested a few others, as well, which I hope will find their way to this series, as well.) Gary chafed a bit (he was insistent that his team, and not he, does all of the real work), but we eventually wrangled this response out of him:

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Gary Whizin. Officially, I'm Senior Director of Engineering for the MySQL Enterprise Tools group. In reality, I run projects and manage a team like a baseball manager: I help figure out who works on which tasks; I help define our milestones and ensure we're on time; but then I try to let everyone have as much fun as possible because life is short and that's the best way to win anyway. I also ask oodles of "dumb manager" questions to make sure we're being as smart as possible, have the right priorities and are talking to each other.

Then I try to stay out of the way and admire everyone's work.… Read more

Open source @ BMC: Will Hurley speaks

I've been talking the last few days with Oracle, Novell, and SAIC about how open source figures into their product plans and, in SAIC's case, how open source affects the company's services strategy. Each of these companies has obvious things to gain (and perhaps to lose) from open source.

Today I wanted to talk with a company that has not traditionally been known for its open source work. BMC Software. I have been talking with the open source group at BMC for over a year, but I rarely heard much open source noise emerging from the company. That is, until BMC hired Will Hurley from Qlusters, and then suddenly I heard a lot more.

I caught up with Will late last week to find out what open source secrets BMC has been hiding from the world. As it turns out, open source is alive and well at BMC, and growing. Funny that: I've yet to talk with a company for whom open source doesn't figure prominently in its strategic direction. Maybe there's a trend here...?

Will writes...… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies (Part 21)

For today's 21st installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I decided to talk with the head of Zend Technologies, Harold Goldberg. PHP adoption has exploded - how does a company build a business around that adoption? In fact, today Zend also announced the availability of Zend Framework 1.0, with a vibrant development and documentation community surrounding it.

Harold joined Zend with an enviable pedigree in enterprise software. As I've said before, that can be a blessing and a curse. In Harold's case, it seems to have been a blessing. Let's hear why.

Name, position, and company of executive Harold Goldberg, CEO, Zend Technologies.… Read more

Open source investments up in Q2, notes CBR's Matthew Aslett

Matthew Aslett has the latest numbers on open source investments in Q2 2007. The bottom line? Up 33% (over the same quarter last year) to roughly $100 million. Not too shabby.

Matthew: It would be ideal if you could also report the running tally of total open source investments. We're over $2 billion now....

Arsenal sign "Dudu" and the under-hyping of open source

Arsenal just lost Thierry Henry, the greatest striker in a generation, and replaced him with...Dudu? Eduardo da Silva (aka "Dudu" was born in Brazil, but is a Croatian national) scored 34 goals in 32 games (Don't try that at home, kids). In true Arsene Wenger (Arsenal manager) fashion, Arsenal went for the unheralded da Silva over the over-hyped Eto'o, Owen, Torres, etc.

What does this have to do with open source? Well, not much. (Let's be honest: I just needed some happy Arsenal thoughts. :-) But I do think that open source could be the da Silva of software. Both over-hyped and under-hyped at the same time. Over-hyped in some places (Croatia??? :-), and under-hyped in others (everywhere else).

I spend an inordinate amount of time talking open source with fellow open sourcerors and denizens of the Old World (i.e., proprietary software companies). We talk constantly about open source and its impact on the world of software.

But with open source taking a rounding error of a percentage of total software sales, it clearly has a lot of room to grow. The vast majority of software users still don't know much about open source, and probably won't until it's conveniently packaged and priced at $9.95 at your local Wal-Mart, Carrefour, etc. Open source, to me, is vastly under-hyped relative to its potential.… Read more

Virtualization's impact on open source business models

The Server Virtualization Blog has a useful piece on the impact virtualization can have on open source business models.

...But with virtualization as an integral component of the distro (whether Xen, KVM or one of the other open source virtualization technologies), Linux is only one (arguably the key) component of the stack, and when a different OSV?s product is virtualized on Linux (Windows, perhaps, or another open source OS), two new opportunities emerge: First, a Linux OSV can extend its value proposition to its customers by offering to Support other open source OSes virtualized; and second, by adding to their offerings the requisite closed source add-ons such as the Novell Windows Driver Pack for closed source OSes, the distros can artfully deliver high value mixed-source offerings that "price to value," and protect themselves from the kind of discounting attack that Oracle used on Red Hat.… Read more

The Unsung Heroes of Open Source: Getting started

In every company - open source or proprietary - the executives get the credit (and blame). I've always found this frustrating, and particularly now that I wear an executive hat at Alfresco. I know from working with my own team that but for the talents of my team, I'd be a complete waste. (In fact, I am aware that the best thing I can do is hire exceptional people. If I do that well, I (that is, my team) will deliver.)

All of which made me want to solicit the executives of various open source companies for the … Read more

Open source @ SAIC: Wayne Waddoups speaks

Last week The Open Road caught up with Justin Steinman @ Novell and Mike Olson @ Oracle to discover how open source factors into these companies' businesses. This time, we're switching gears a bit to talk with a company that sells services around software - both open source and proprietary - rather than a software company.

Being familiar with the interesting open source work happening at SAIC, I decided to talk with two members of its Open Source Community of Practice: Ryan Brunton, a developer within SAIC's Open Source Community of Practice, and Wayne Waddoups, vice president of Strategy, SAIC Office of Technology. SAIC has long worked with projects like Linux and MySQL, but it's the cutting edge work it's doing with open source applications and infrastructure that caught my eye. More to the point, and more to Wayne's and Ryan's response, I wanted to know how open source helps SAIC build its business.

Just as enterprise software vendors have their P&Ls tied to proprietary software (making adoption of open source more difficult than it otherwise would be), so, too, do tier-one systems integrators like SAIC, Accenture, etc. How does SAIC view open source, given revenues of $8.2 billion that might well point it back to proprietary software?

Wayne and Ryan write:… Read more

Open source's integration problem (?)

Glyn Moody has an excellent article in Redmond Magazine on open source and interoperability. As it turns out, sometimes it takes Microsoft to notify the open-source community that for all the great things we've done, we sometimes fall short. One area that open source had traditionally failed in was in stitching together an end-to-end solution, as Nick McGrath (a friend and a wonderful person) suggests:

Of all the accusations Microsoft has leveled over the years against open source, perhaps the least contentious is that it lacks the tight integration offered by Microsoft's own products. As Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the United Kingdom, puts it: "One of the problems I've seen with open-source software is it doesn't take on board some of the issues that customers have around interoperability and integration. Open-source projects tend to offer a very specific point solution."

This statement has become less true over time, though it's still the case that there is no one open-source vendor providing seamless interoperability between disparate pieces of enterprise software (in the way that Oracle and Microsoft do or attempt to do). My bet is on Red Hat to become that company over time, but in the meantime, we're not there yet.… Read more

Free Software Foundation releases GPL 3

After 18 months of revision, the Free Software Foundation has released version 3 of the General Public License (GPL).

The license is both a legal foundation and a manifesto of the free and open-source programming movement. Not all are fully happy with the new version though, including Linux leader Linus Torvalds.

The text of the new license can be read on the FSF's GNU Project Web page.

The new license is geared to adjust to changes in the software industry that have arisen in the 16 years since GPL 2 was released. One of the biggest changes: the free … Read more