Few will have noticed, but Microsoft's Jim Kellerman just announced that he and a Microsoft colleague have "been cleared to contribute patches again" to Apache, and specifically to the Hadoop project.
This is great news for Microsoft, and I think for open source generally. It means that Microsoft just became an open-source insider and may find it more difficult to sling mud as an open-source outsider in the future.
It's also good to have Microsoft's heft behind the Hadoop project, an incredibly cool open-source project that got additional help from CloudEra, a new open-source company helmed by former Sleepycat CEO Mike Olson that promises to help companies tap into the power of Hadoop. Who cares about Hadoop? Any Web developer that wants to "write and run applications that process huge amounts of data."
Microsoft gets deep into open source and Olson comes out of retirement. This is turning out to be a Very Great Day.
Mike Olson sold his open-source database startup, Sleepycat, to Oracle and earlier this year left Oracle to spend time with family. The family, however, had other plans and has booted him out of the house. "Get a real job, Honey!" were the words his wife used to chase him from the house, eyewitness reports reveal.
Well, Mike hasn't managed to get a real job just yet, but he will be spending some time with Hyperic, a leading open-source IT management company. According to Javier Soltero, Hyperic's CEO, Mike will be "helping us develop the next generation of killer products."
I pressed Javier for more detail over IM, and he offered up this lame response:
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Episode 17 of The Register's Open Season podcast proved to be highly interesting, what with Mike Olson of Sleepycat/Oracle joining us. Mike is one of the smartest guys out there in open source, and recently available as your next CEO.
In this episode we talk through One Laptop Per Child (and come to the conclusion that it's the wrong way to help developing nations), industry consolidation (maybe not as bad as we thought), "the cloud" (huh?), and more. Worth a listen, if for no other reason than to hear Mike.
Mike Olson is on the entrepreneurial prowl again. The co-founder of Sleepycat, who sold his company to Oracle and recently left Oracle for a brief stint as a relaxed person, is back in action.
I talked a day ago with a company that has talked to Mike about an executive role, and told them what I'll tell anyone who asks:
Hire him. Immediately. He's smart, pragmatic, and a huge asset to anyone lucky enough to interest him.
Welcome back, Mike. I won't say we've missed you, because you never really left, but welcome back all the same. It will be fun to see where you land. Round II, coming up.
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 what was due, and then some.
There's no telling where Mike will turn up next, but he's someone that deserves the best. I'll hope to see you back in the open-source fray before long, Mike.
Mike Olson pointed me to this excellent Wired article on the disappearance and search for noted database researcher Jim Gray. Jim is apparently the sort of developer that every company on the planet wanted to hire. At this point, no one wants him more than his family. Yet he's still missing.
Mike has been involved in the search. Interestingly, as comes out in the article, so have many others, but in classic Silicon Valley sorts of ways (collective analysis of satellite images, etc.). It's a fascinating story, but one which would be much better if it simply came to a boring resolution: Jim comes home.
Not open source related, but have a read.
A week or so ago I mentioned that I'd be running an "Open Source @" series of posts, and try to capture the work that various large enterprises are doing with open source. Being large enterprises, it has taken a bit longer to collect these than I would have liked, but we now have a critical mass and can move forward.
Today we're profiling Oracle. I have been harshly critical of Oracle in the past, and yet I continue to hold the company in high esteem. Oracle is one of the few winners in the proprietary "battle of the ecosystems." I do business with a wide range of Global 2000 businesses, and I see Oracle all over. I can't say the same of several of Oracle's competitors.
I asked Mike Olson, formerly the CEO of Sleepycat and currently vice president of Embedded Technologies at Oracle, to comment on the state of open source at the company. How can a company so dependent on revenues from proprietary software forge ahead into open source?
Over to you, Mike....
First off, thanks to Matt for dreaming up this series of posts, and for inviting me to participate. He and I haven't always seen eye to eye, but I like him and I enjoy our arguments.
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