open on SWiK

Chrome's process model explained

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:04:17 -0700

Chrome's process model is extremely sophisticated. The web comic only mentions the default behavior, but you can configure Chrome to manage processes differently: one process per web site, or one process per group of connected tabs, or one process for everything.

jobberBase - The Open Source Job Board Software

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 06:03:00 -0700

Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software | Open Source Alternative - osalt.com

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 03:02:52 -0700

trovare alternative open source a programmi commerciali

Insoshi Portal

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:58:25 -0700

Insoshi is a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product!

A New Business Model for Open Source?

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:04:57 -0700

Kickfire was recently selected by Network World as one of 10 Open Source Companies to Watch. First of all, the disclaimer: we are not an open source company. As any of you reading this blog know, Kickfire is an appliance company. So, why then did we appear on the list? The link of course is MySQL.

The Kickfire appliance was built to run MySQL for high-performance business intelligence and data warehousing workloads. So, while we are not an open source company, we are very much what I would term as an “open source-based business”. Now, for those who track the data warehousing market, it might seem that a lot of vendors could claim that mantle as a large proportion have code that is derived from PostgreSQL. However, that’s not what I mean by an open source-based business. So, how would one define such a business and what is the significance? Before I get to an explanation, let me make a brief digression.

No one would dispute that the open source movement has irrevocably changed the software landscape. The days of commercial software’s monopoly are numbered. Of course Oracle and its ilk are not going anywhere anytime soon but they will die a slow death as they run out of companies to acquire and as fewer customers accept the exorbitant license and maintenance fees. The results of the Independent Oracle User’s Group 2007 open source survey are an early indication of this transformation. The survey found that over one third of Oracle shops are using open-source databases (75% of which are MySQL by the way). The primary driver? Cost. Now, the deployments today are small in size but will grow over time as the capabilities of the open-source databases increase. And as they grow in size and frequency, they will eat away at the market share of the established commercial vendors. In fact, according to Gartner, MySQL is already the third most deployed database (behind SQL Server and Oracle but ahead of DB2). I suspect, given its growth rate, It won’t be long before it reaches the #1 spot.

Given the inescapable fact that open source will eventually eat commercial software’s lunch, isn’t this a concern for the future of innovation? It is, if you care to listen to pundits such as Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, who not surprisingly don’t see open source as a viable business model. The conclusion of Mundie’s article titled Commercial Software, Sustainable Innovation sums it up:

“When comparing the commercial software model to the open-source software model, look carefully at the business plans and licensing structures that form their foundations. This comparison leads to the conclusion that the commercial software model alone has the capacity for sustaining real economic growth.”

While there is clearly an element of self interest in his article one can’t deny the fact that, from a pure revenue perspective, commercial software has vastly outperformed open source software to date. Red Hat, the largest commercial open source software company has approximately $500M in sales while Microsoft, the largest commercial software company, has about 120 times that.

So, is the dawn of open source also the dusk of innovation? If you’re Microsoft or Oracle, maybe. But that’s because they are looking at open source exclusively through the lens of revenue tied to software licenses. What’s missing from Craig’s argument and others like it is that open source DOES have massive revenue-generating capability (and hence can sustain innovation) - it’s just not related to software licenses or subscriptions. Take MySQL as an example. There are approximately 11 million active MySQL deployments worldwide but only a tiny fraction (<.01% ?) generate subscription revenue for MySQL/Sun. However, these MySQL instances require billions of dollars of hardware to run. So, whereas MySQL might look insignificant from a software revenue perspective it is a gold mine from a hardware perspective. And this is how Kickfire sees the world.

Kickfire believes MySQL will ultimately win the database war (from a deployment, not software revenue perspective) thanks to its cost advantages, its architectural flexibility and its ease of use. Starting from the premise that the preponderance of money in open source is to be made from hardware, the company built hardware customized for MySQL that significantly improves its performance. Specifically, MySQL running on the Kickfire appliance outperforms general-purpose hardware by 10-1000X for business intelligence and data warehousing workloads.

Simply put, Kickfire has built a business that complements this open source standard, without itself becoming an open source company in the traditional sense. The latter is what I define as an open source-based business. On the other hand, a significant number of Kickfire’s competitors in the data warehousing world are what I would term open source-derived businesses. Specifically, they have taken the PostgreSQL code base as a starting point to build proprietary and commercial software offerings. On the surface, the difference might seem academic but the reality is that the market approaches and business models are fundamentally different. An open source-based business builds its products to complement the open source standard. An open source-derived business takes the open source standard and makes it proprietary. An open source-based business generates its revenue from offerings that add value to the open source standard. An open source-derived business generates its revenue based on a commercial software model. The bottom line is that although open source appears somewhere in the mix, the open-source derived businesses are really no different from traditional commercial software vendors.

Kickfire believes open source-based businesses are the wave of the future and will help in continuing to fund the innovation that open source brings. Let us know your thoughts.

Google Chrome reviews

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:06:10 -0700

How is the newest browser fairing in technical reviews? READ MORE

Living inside Eclipse, embedding browsers and Google Chrome

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:05:33 -0700

In response to a Mylyn user's wishes for browsing within Eclipse, I posted a summary on how Tasktop embeds a full-featured browser into Eclipse, and how our browsing experience stacks up against Google Chrome.

The New .phar PHP Package

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:05:16 -0700

Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It’s basically PHP’s answer to Java’s .jar archive format. Don’t get excited yet, it gets better . . .

Stephen Fry — Happy birthday to GNU — The GNU Operating System

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:59:03 -0700

20 Real-Life Challenges of Cloud Computing

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:06:19 -0700

We’ve done some extensive work on cloud computing (i.e., deploying Java grid applications on cloud environment) here at GridGain and there is a distinct set of problems and challenges associated with that work whether it is related to the cloud computing in general or to grid middleware you are using on it.

Code Reuse in Google Chrome Browser

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:05:28 -0700

Google Chrome browser shows an excellent example of code reuse. I found that they use at least 25 different software libraries! Here is the full list of libraries, along with relative paths to source code and short library descriptions.

Matthias Wimmer - Smart Environments - EyeFinder

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:58:45 -0700

Scrum Cheat Sheet

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:05:09 -0700

The Scrum Cheat Sheet gives a quick reference to - the Roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team, - the Artefacts: Sprint/Product Backlog and Burndown Chart, - the Ceremonies: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum and Retrospective, and explains briefly how these three main aspects of Scrum are related. The PDF download is for free :-) Have fun agila

Who are the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008?

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:05:09 -0700

If we are not web experts, we usually just use software tools to develop websites. We may not even know what it is that powers the websites—what is actually doing the back-end work. Now it’s time to discover Content Management Systems (or CMS systems), and which ones are used most frequently.

Kephra - News

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:59:01 -0700

This Editor wants to provide a free, easy and comfortable writing experience. Therefore we chose Perl, Scintilla and wxPerl, our binding to wxWidgets, to realize it. Our goal is to make this software crossplatform, nonintrusive and interoperable.

MySQL founder Michael Widenius quits Sun

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:06:05 -0700

The main author and co-founder has given his resignation today ...

Chromium - Google Code

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:58:37 -0700

ShutterSpeed: A Simple Android application

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:04:56 -0700

ShutterSpeed is a simple Android application I wrote this weekend. The application itself is not terribly useful nor interesting, but it shows how to create an Android application that uses a few advanced features like orientation-based layouts, styles, themes, etc.

Google Chrome: Firefox, Chrome already fighting over who's faster

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:04:55 -0700

The real browser war isn't between Microsoft and anyone. It's between Firefox and Google Chrome, jostling to become the aftermarket browser of choice. Yesterday, a Google engineer assured News.com that the company's new open-source browser processes webpages much faster than Mozilla Firefox — "Many times faster. I guarantee you." Mozilla engineers released their own test results that show Firefox with a slight performance edge. But the latest test, run independently by News.com, skews the other way.

Access to source code doesn't trump vendor control

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:06:13 -0700

As open-source vendors grow in strength, the value of source code diminishes as a guard against vendor lock-in. READ MORE

Type Hints for scalar values in PHP

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:04:50 -0700

Today Max Horvath released the first public version of his new library PHPTypeSafe. It provides the ability to use PHPs Type Hinting feature for scalar values.

wxCode - Homepage

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:03:38 -0700

wxCode is a place where anyone can submit his code snippets for wxWidgets. It's also a place where code may be maintained by anyone interested. Maintainer ship is always decided by the current maintainer or by the project manager. A maintainer may resign anytime so any code snippet will be marked as maintained or not.

Patch3 for NetBeans IDE 6.1 Now Available

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:42:21 -0700

I would like to inform you that a new patch for NetBeans IDE 6.1 is now available on the Update Center.

Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) in Java

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:59:30 -0700

20 Real-Life Challenges in Cloud Computing

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:59:07 -0700

We’ve done some extensive work on cloud computing (i.e. deploying Java grid application on cloud environment) here at GridGain and there is a distinct set of problems and challenges associated with that work whether it is related to the cloud computing in general or to grid middleware you are using on it.

open source platform

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:58:52 -0700

everything in open source

Commons Logging may be harmful to your health

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:58:52 -0700

All of us know that decoupling your code from the frameworks you use is a really great thing. Just imagine how much code you will be changing if you are using log4j APIs in all of you application classes, and then a decision was made to start using the java APIs instead. Think of how much code would be changed. But with commons logging, the code changes would be minimal. This must mean that commons logging is a good thing, right? WRONG!

Java ClassBuilder: bringing Java data binding into the 21st century

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:58:47 -0700

A new project from the JavaBuilders.org family. Focuses on bytecode instrumentation of existing Java classes to enable databinding with no more than 1-2 lines of code. Uses the Javassist bytecode library and the standard Beans Binding library under the hood.

everything open source | open-source software, evolved

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:58:10 -0700

OpenMicroBlogging specification

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:59:13 -0700