Linus, Tridgell In Open Source Tiff
The Register has covered it with typical flair, one headline blaring: Linus Knifes Tridgell. Another: Linus Torvalds In Bizarre Attack On Open Source
Great headlines, but maybe a tad short of New York Post caliber. Anyone remember "Headless Man In Topless Bar"? But I digress.
Samba has been a favorite of the open source crowd. Four years ago, it even won the annual Linus Torvalds Awardand $25,000.
Apparently now Bruce Perens is weighing in on Tridgell's behalf. Hey fellas, can't we all just get along? With friends like these, who needs Microsoft?
ANALYTICS, REPORTING: THE NEXT OPEN SOURCE FRONTIER
Things were more copacetic at the start of this week's MySQL confab in Santa Clara.
The much-hyped area of analytics and business intelligence may well be the new frontier for open source.
San Francisco-based JasperSoft bills itself as the "industry's first commercial open source reporting solution provider, [with a mission is to provide] world-class embeddable reporting software that fully meets the operational data access and delivery needs of our customers - at an affordable price." The company is blazing a trail for what it calls commercial open-source analytics. (Somehow the whole commercial/open source thang still seems an oxymoronic.)
JasperSoft also claims integration with such open source/commercial trail blazers as MySQL and JBoss.
MySQL is getting busy with analytics, on Monday announcing an integration/mutual admiration pact with Business Objects, the more old-school analytics vendor. That announcement coincided with the kickoff of the annual MySQL Users Conference where several hundred users and solution providers came to hear the latest and greatest about the upcoming version 5.0. It will add support for triggers and stored procedures and is slated to ship this year.
Some of the assembled multitudes disputed claims by Oracle and Microsoft partisans that when support is factored MySQL implementations come close in cost to databases from those companies.
"I can't tell you what we paid for our MySQL, but I can tell you it was a small fraction of what we were quoted by Oracle," said one ISV attendee. He also noted that both Oracle and Microsoft are noted for jacking up and cutting prices for near-term competitive advantage, confusing the market. One year, he said his company's Oracle support costs jacked up ten fold from $3,500 annually to $35,000.
"Our sales guys still ask us to put our app on Oracle, but when we tell them what that would cost, they quickly back down," he noted.
An IT manager from a large online media company says MySQL is tough to beat in price-performance bake offs. People can't use it for everything, but they can use it for a good number of important tasks, he noted.
MySQL, with HQ in Cupertino, Calif. And Uppsala, Sweden, is also announced the second formal beta of MySQL 5. The first beta went online in late March, the company said.