People

Executive moves: Sonatype and Novell upgrade their open-source execs

Sometimes social networks are the first to know. In this case, LinkedIn had a big batch of people-related news stories to offer, one of which - Mark de Visser's move to Sonatype to become its new CEO - is out in front of the press release.

Mark is still listed as Zend's chief marketing officer as of 7:16 AM Pacific Time, but LinkedIn knows the truth: de Visser has accepted the role of CEO at Sonatype, the company helping to drive the Apache Maven project. The formal announcement is expected shortly.

Other news that LinkedIn's update … Read more

Executive moves: Rob Bearden heads to SpringSource

Rob Bearden, erstwhile COO of JBoss, has just landed at SpringSource as its president and COO. Rod Johnson, founder of SpringSource, will remain as CEO.

Bearden has been working with SpringSource for months as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, so perhaps this was just a matter of time.

It's good to see Bearden settling down. He had gone to OpenSpan from JBoss/Red Hat, and then left soon after. Along the way he has been advising open-source companies like Appcelerator and Loopfuse, in addition to SpringSource.

Despite a long and successful career with i2 and other companies, … Read more

Encouraging family time within a company's culture

My company, Alfresco, has a pretty laidback company culture. We work hard and pretty much all the time, as near as I can tell, but it's also a culture that is friendly to families.

How friendly? This morning, Jessica Sant, one of our key developers, and I wanted to meet up because she was in town. However, we both had encumbrances, also known as "kids."

No problem! Along came Amiya, Greta, and Lily.

Over breakfast we talked through the work that Jessica is doing on Alfresco's Network offering, as well as ways to improve processes and … Read more

The U.S. federal government buys into open source

Bill Vass, formerly Sun Microsystems' CIO and now president and COO of Sun Federal, has a bird's eye view of open-source adoption within the U.S. federal government. So when I read Bill waxing rhapsodic about the rapid rise of open source within the Beltway, I've got to cheer:

More and more we are seeing the federal government move towards open source due to its increased security, reduced procurement times, large scalability...reduced cost to the taxpayers, and escape from vendor lock-in.

Open source will just continue to grow as the world moves to open storage (low-cost hardware … Read more

Open-source founders doubling up on startups

I was confused when Dave Rosenberg told me that he was leaving MuleSource to pursue a game startup. "But you are already the CEO of a startup," I remonstrated. Given his longstanding interest in video games, however, it was probably just a matter of time.

Of course, that was nothing next to my confusion when I kept reading about Digium-founder Mark Spencer hanging out with Marc Fleury, working on an open-source home automation project called OpenRemote. The OpenRemote blog suggests that Digium remains Spencer's primary home, but that he moonlights as the principal hardware designer for OpenRemote.

This morning Dries Buytaert of Drupal/Acquia fame confused me further by announcing Mollom, a "startup Benjamin Schrauwen and [Buytaert] began to help keep your website free of spam."

I asked Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing for Acquia, the company that Dries co-founded, whether Dries was still fully engaged with Acquia, and he told me,… Read more

Self-promotion via out-of-office autoreply

I emailed a media friend today to ask if he'd have time to meet when I'm in New York next month. The reply? Classic.

Mindless sheep that I am, I'm now on his blog. :-)

What's up at booming SpringSource?

Last week SpringSource announced that it grew 250 percent year-over-year in quarterly bookings while doubling sales each of the last three years. SpringSource currently boasts 450 customers and is, in my mind, one of the bright lights within the commercial open-source ecosystem.

For this reason I'm a bit baffled by Neelan Choksi's departure from SpringSource. Choksi, the company's former COO, left the company in July as his LinkedIn shows. While Neelan remains a board member at SpringSource, I'm troubled that he has left. Attempts to reach Neelan by phone have not proved successful.

It's very … Read more

Microsoft pulls community manager from press corps

When eWeek's Peter Galli wrote last year about Microsoft fracturing the open-source community, who could have known that he would become the very person chosen to strengthen the software giant's role in it?

This past week, Galli accepted a job as the newest member of Microsoft's open-source team, focused on community relations. According to an internal e-mail sent out by Robert Duffner, Microsoft's senior director of Platform Strategy:

It is my great pleasure in welcoming Peter Galli who is joining Microsoft as Senior Communications Manager on the Platform Strategy team. This is a unique opportunity for … Read more

Monty Widenius invests in Act II: IT Mill

Well, that didn't take long. Monty Widenius, one of the founders of MySQL, resigned from Sun Microsystems last week but has already invested some of his hard-earned MySQL dollars in IT Mill, a Finland-based open-source start-up focused on the development of Rich Internet Applications.

While no mention is made of anything other than a financial investment and advisory role for Monty, it's good to see him sticking close to open source and to business. Monty notes that he sees 10 to 15 Finnish companies worthy of investment. It's safe to assume he'll have some money left … Read more