Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .

Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT discussed ao the decisions they had to make, the varialbes they took in to account when starting
to use Open Source , discussions such as the reputation of the project, the internal skill zet, the ease of importing and exporting data in and
out of the project, and the different license terms were covered.

Andrew Katz , legal guy , who's also working on the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review gave an overview of the legal impact of Opensource . We learned that his customers have similar questions as ours, such as when to publish the code, what code to publish, when to look for alternative licenses etc

There was avid discussion regarding the Affero GPL license and using Open Source as a key component to build your killar webinfrastructure while not contributing back etc.

During the pannel discussion questions like Software Patents, and the fact that Ubuntu One won't be fully Open Source were tackled For us , most of the event was confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do, And that is worth a lot !

James Dixon has some polls on his blog, they let you choose between being a free software junkie, an open source hacker or what I'd call a an incompetent moron ;)

I had mostly 2's , no 3 in case you'd wonder.

I`m gonna have to quote Tarus once again :

For years now I’ve been struggling to educate the market on the fact that the business around open source software is not about software. It’s about solutions.

Let me repeat that .. it's not about selling software ...

It's about solutions

And obviously FLOSS is the Ideal platform to build value for your customers

There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don't seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can't sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way they used to.

So that's not the one that eventually makes the authors happy,

Then there is the RedHat model, which tends to please a lot of people, which tends to be something traditional IT resellers can take in their portofolio, but partnering with a RedHat style company as an open source expert consultancy company isn't easy , as the expert consultancy companies have the knowledge themselves and won't push reselling subscriptions.

So that doesn't make the Distribution Vendors happy

Back when XenSource came on the market we asked them if they could help us supporting some of our customers with Xen deployments, they didn't care they wanted to build a product and a fast exit ..

That didn't make us as an integrator nor the customer happy.

You'd think us opensource folks are really unhappy wouldn't you ?
Wrong.. as we are all in it .. Just for Fun

and the money!

About 2.5 months ago while I was on a highspeed Belnet connection at UZA after Amber got born I ran in to some annoyancies with my fresh Fedora 11 and multiple batteries, upon replacing the CD drive with an empty battery (to be charged) while I was on AC power the machine shut down.

I filed a bug , while going trough my post holliday inbox backlog I noticed it got fixed . Thnx Richard !

This is how open source works ..

Somehow this year my schedule really isn't going to get filled with conferences,unlike my 13 speaking engagements last year this year I decided to go for a lot less :)

Froscon together with OpenSQLCamp is convienently scheduled during an already long planned family weekend .. but I really hope to go there nex year

I've been wanting to go south for conferences for ages, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy , Greece are all places I'd love to go and see how the different Open Sourcen conferences play out there. This summer there actually were some different conferences tha took place in Spain, Gran Canaria etc . but I coouldn't make it there for the obvious reasons..

The October conference schedule has another but similar problem , apart from T-Dose which I plan on going to again, I`m doomed to miss LinuxKongress 2009 and the Open Source monitoring conference as they both collide with DevOpsDays

LinuxKongress was initially scheduled for late september which meant it was on my planning but as they rescheduled because of a conflict with the Linux Plumbers Conference at the other side of the ocean , it means that for the 2nd year in row I`ll miss LinuxKongress (last year was on purpose as I had already been to OLS) ,

So I`m on the lookout for some new and exiting conferences to go to :)

There was an OpenSourceWorldConference in Malaga last couple of years , but their site hasn't been updated anymore for 2009 .. anyone knows what's going on there ?

Dear MySQL and Drupal , Plone and other Open Source folks, you might want to be interrested in giving a talk at T-Dose 2009 ,

Jean Paul pinged me with the following mail :

Maybe it escaped your attention that the Call For Papers for T-DOSE 2009 is already out. It has been announced on 12th of June 2009. Below you will find the original announcement.

Call for Papers and Projects
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 13:57 — jpsaman

T­-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. It is held at the Fontys University of Applied Science on 3 and 4 October 2009.

Speakers can send ideas and abstracts to the organisation at abstracts _AT_ t-dose.org. The e­mail should contain a short biography of the speaker and description of the talk. All talks will be held in English and last ~50 minutes. The deadline for abstracts ends on 31st of August 2009.

At the event location there is room for Open Source market. Stands and rooms are free of charge. Applications for stands are handled in order.
More information is here; http://www.t-dose.org/t-dose/files/t-dose-2009.pdf

I hope to see you all at this years T-DOSE.

Kind greetings,

Jean-Paul Saman

T-DOSE Foundation
www.t-dose.org

Rivermuse is the new Fault Management platform tool on the market, their initial relase was lurking around the corner for a while now but since earlier this week it finally arrived

Eager to see what all the fuzz was about I jumped to their dowload page to find an yum repository for Fedora Core 9, that's right .. it's july 2009 and RiverMuse released their platform for a Linux distribution that got it's End Of Life notice last month.

On a fresh Fedora 11 box off course you get a zillion dependency mismatches.
So over to the source code. After installing some build dependencies I managed to build desktop-trunk-8.fc11.noarch.rpm rivermusece-trunk-8.fc11.noarch.rpm
rpms

However these depend on extremely fresh versions of rsyslog >= 4.1.6 where as Fedora 11 is only on 3.21 and RHEL is even only on 2.0.6.

The initial checkout I had had no README file yet .. so creating a build wasn't really easy ..

In the meanwhile they have promised builds for other versions.

So the battle is between me getting time to setup an FC9 box somehwere and they releasing fresher RPM's .. I hope they win :)

By now everybody and their neigbour has realized that indeed Everything is a funky dns problem, Frank is giving talks about it at ZooCamp, and Serge figured out the hard way the downtime of planet.geekdinner.be was due to a dns problem :)

But I told you different things before ... and some of you listened others are still reinventing the wheel as we go ...

Matt A. points out that the OpenBravo folks realized that one should try to build on top of Open Source projects rather than modify core code ..

Wonder where he read that before :
Some projects are prepared for local contributions, they have a modular framework that allows you to build on top of the project while not having to touch the core of a project, Drupal and openQRM are great examples of those, but not all projects are that smart. Needless to say that when you have such a modular framework you really shouldn't be modifying the core part of the platform, unless you are fixing a real bug.

Over at the MySQLPerformance blog, Peter points out that Open source projects don't do big fat marketing campaigns and the community doesn't appreciate features being developed in a corner then being released with a big bang ... we prefer our releases Early and Often...

On Automating Software installations, a Tom Limoncelli about how we install software and debug setups, with a nice quote "Oh my god. Is that why nobody uses the GUI we spend millions to develop?".
Well Luke said it before .. If my computer can't install it .. the installer is broken

Stephen Walli has some good toughts on how Open Source vendors should setup their partner programs, indeed with their eyes wide open ..

I ranted on Open Source Vendors thinking they should still work with partners models and the channel the traditional way before

However I have to admit that over the last month I did talk to people that do understand our Love / Hate relation ship with the Open Source Vendors that want to partner with us .. and that some of the newer Open Source Vendors are actually attracted by our different way of tackling partnerships.

Oh well.. as Tarus says .. my 3 readers understand..

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. "Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress" or "No Eclipse for IBM", etc ...

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it'ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that different prominent MySQL folks have left Sun will only push the MySQL development model towards more openness.
And towards an even more Redder RedHat alike model, we already have the first CentOS alike rebuilds of MySQL , so a distribution model based on the same kernel with different feature sets or focus indeed might be the future.

Further there's what Monty Said ... hang on ... nobody mentions the fact that some core PostgreSQL people are on Sun's payroll how's that going to turn out ?

A more interresting discussion is the future of Solaris one.. Oracle has always had an eye for Solaris.. one day it is their most important platform, the other day they tell the world Linux is their prime development platform, it often was a matter of who was quoted.

As for Unbreakable Oracle did a smart thing.. they learned that they should build a full operating system themselves but , so why should they want to do that with Solaris ?

LinuxWorld has an article where oracle states their idea about Linux :
"
What we are working to do in the data center ... is to make Linux the default for the data center OS," Screven said in a speech at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. "We want there to be no question"

They suggest a merger between Solaris and Linux is a potential alternative .. so what do we need to merge .. you'd say ZFS and DTrace ..,but do we really need ZFS ?
There has been a lot of writing already about BTRFS being the next big filesystem, maybe it could make ZFS obsolete, maybe it couldn't ..

I got no clue on what's going to happen with OO.org .. so I`m really going to keep an eye on that one ..

In my opinion the real loser in this deal .. HP .. they don't have a full stack to play with .. They have the hardware, some management and monitoring software soon to be obsolete but no Operating System, no Database, no Appserver, no Apps. So what's their next move going to be ?

Oh and if you really want to talk figures Larry Augustin has a good take on it ... the idea that Oracle could sell off some parts to Hitachi EMC etc, get MySQL and Sun for Free ... then quietly wait for RedHat .. to get Jboss who knows :)

PS. I already blogged about the impact of the acquistion on the Virtualization area over at Virtualization.com