People

Dries Buytaert celebrates his thirtieth birthday today. For someone that has built an open-source community that numbers in the millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of contributors, Dries is a very unassuming, interesting, and likable person.

It's even more impressive to me that Dries wrote Drupal in his spare time as a PhD student in Belgium. Bonus points for doing it in PHP, despite the fact that most of his academic work has related to Java.

Businessweek paid homage to Dries earlier this year, naming him a "2008 top innovator." It's a nice honor, one … Read more

Ernst & Young has named Matthew Szulik, chairman of Red Hat, as its 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year in the Technology category. It's a fitting honor for the man who helped put open source on the enterprise map, and helped Red Hat claim 80 percent of the enterprise Linux market in the process.

Szulik was recognized for turning Red Hat from what some called a questionable idea into a billion-dollar business. "Matthew Szulik follows a proud tradition of pioneering entrepreneurs who overcame skeptics and brought a novel, seemingly improbable business idea to market successfully," said James S. … Read more

It's easy to talk about how well your company is doing, but the proof is in the revenue (generally private) and in the people (generally public).

I know that Hyperic is doing well on the revenue side, but I'm particularly glad to see it doing so well in attracting exceptional talent to its team. This week Hyperic announced that it has hired Matt Stodolnic, former vice president, Interactive Marketing and Creative Services at Salesforce.com, as its vice president of Marketing.

With how well Salesforce.com has been doing, it's a real testament to Hyperic's opportunity … Read more

Under former Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's guidance, Red Hat assembled an interesting array of professionals on its board of directors. Last week, current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst demonstrated that this flair for assembling outside talent continues under his watch with the announcement of two new board members, Micheline Chau, President and COO of Lucasfilm Ltd., and Jeff Clarke, President and CEO of Travelport, Inc.

With Chau Red Hat gains insight into the churning entertainment industry, while Clarke gives Red Hat a glimpse into the travel industry, as well as traditional enterprise software, given his former role as … Read more

Tim O'Reilly recently defended his decision to put a political endorsement on his blog (spoiler for those who don't know how Sonoma County votes: He's for Obama), and did a reasonably good job of supporting the decision. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, however, does a much better job in a post of his own.

Mark's secret? Stick to principles, not parties.

Mark doesn't talk about politics at all, per se, though they're hiding just behind his words. Instead, he talks about the value of regulated capitalism, and gives testimony of his time living in … Read more

When you think of Apple's likely competitors, IBM isn't one of the names that would top the list. Even so, IBM is suing to block one of its employees from joining Apple, as CNET reports.

Bizarre. Yes, as CNET's Tom Krazit points out, Mark Papermaster, IBM's former vice president of microprocessor technology development, could help to revive Apple's Xserve server line, or he could work on its chip technology, or...he could do many things. But the point is that none of them is a clear and present danger to any of IBM's businesses.… Read more

You would think that it's a hard enough job taking on Microsoft's desktop dominance. Ubuntu's community lead Jono Bacon, however, may actually have an even more audacious goal in mind: completely change the economics of the music industry.

Bacon recently released his Severed Fifth project, a solo speed-metal music project aimed at discovering whether it's possible to open source the music industry:

Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead made very high profile successes when they changed how they released some of their work, but they are high profile bands, built on the coat-tails of the traditional recording … Read more

Life sounds sunny for Florida-based Pentaho, a leading open-source Business Intelligence vendor. The company just announced a string of big-name customer wins, including Delta Dental, Mozilla, and a $1 million deal with a "major European retailer."

The company also announced that Lars Nordwall, former head of Sales for SugarCRM, has joined as senior vice president of Business Development. I know and like Lars and think he'll be a great fit for Pentaho. It's also a chance for him to work on his tan this winter, since the Bay Area is so cold.... :-)

Lastly, Pentaho has … Read more

David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, has left Sun, which acquired MySQL last year for $1 billion. Axmark's departure comes close on the heels of Monty Widenius' exit, and comes in the midst of a bad week for Sun, when its Linux distribution lead Barton George also quit Sun to join Lombardi Software.

The open-source exodus from Sun sounds similar to the significant JBoss executive departures from Red Hat post-acquisition, except for one key point: at JBoss it was the business folks (primarily) that left, whereas Sun is losing MySQL's engineering executives.

Even so, let's be clear: it … Read more