On The Margins

Friday March 27, 2009

[ Business ] Microsoft Takes Note of MySQL

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure that open-source programs already in use can work in conjunction with Microsoft software.

That way, just because a company is using the MySQL open-source database, it will not feel compelled to put it on top of the Linux operating system. By some measures, that defence is working well – Mr Ramji said 56 per cent of MySQL instances were running on Windows.

Then again, the easier Mr Ramji makes it for IT buyers to economise by putting open-source in more places, the more they will do just that and undermine his business in the longer-term.

2009-03-27 11:04:15.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008

[ Web ] Software Freedom Day!

Sun celebrated Software Freedom Day in various locations on the globe, including in Riga, Latvia, where the database engineering team is having its annual developer meeting. MySQL community team and Michael Dexter, who works with the Linux Fund, helped put the Riga SFD meeting together. (Lenz Grimmer and Colin Charles have written about the meeting. It was held at the University of Latvia.)

2008-09-23 00:06:18.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Friday July 11, 2008

[ Technology ] DTrace Envy

A colleague in our PostgreSQL team just pointed me to a "little" note on DTrace, which seems to be ignited by the work that Robert Lor and Jignesh Shah have been doing. (The PG presentation involving the Mac OS and DTrace is Robert's)

2008-07-11 00:03:02.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Sunday February 24, 2008

[ Economics ] Microsoft and Open Source Software

As the news of Microsoft's moves last week unfolds, strategists might find it useful to review "Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows," by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School.

Working Knowledge carries an interview with the authors.

2008-02-24 15:46:41.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday September 25, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Live Webcast on Intel and Sun

If you catch this before 12:30 PM, PST, on Tuesday September 25, you can still watch a live web cast announcing "Sun Fire systems based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor."

2007-09-25 10:07:51.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday August 02, 2007

[ Technology ] Underground Notes and Voices from OSCon and Ubuntu Live

Some say Sun is as cool as OSCon (if not cooler) because, among most companies that support OSCon, only Sun can produce truly underground notes on OSCon.

David Van Couvering reviews Mike Olson's comments about his keynote at OSCon and pontificates about whether the value of Open Source could be limited to the collaboration it fosters. David aptly notes that

Open source and an open community gives you the assurance that the technology you are depending on is not going to be discontinued or put into "maintenance mode," it won't be acquired by someone who you would rather not do business with, and it won't be used as leverage against you to extract money or modify your behavior.

By way of further review, David contrasts MySQL as an Open Source project to PostgreSQL as an Open Source project.

In a separate underground note from OSCon, Barton George has posted his interview with Free Software Foundation lawyer Eben Moglen.

Barton has also produced a series of interviews with some six dignitaries during Ubuntu Live: Mark Shuttleworth. Tim Gardner, Jane Silber, Daniel Holbach, Stephen O'Grady, Jono Bacon.

2007-08-02 10:42:13.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday April 19, 2007

[ Technology ] Java Stack in Ubuntu

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, you get the full Java stack for Linux gathered in one place. I remember learning about Java first on both Solaris (the Sparc stations sitting in the math department at Berkeley) and on Linux (the PCs in a basement office in the industrial engineering department). The tradition continues into "sudo apt-get"! While I'm writing about Java, I should probably remind you about CommunityOne, the free event during this year's JavaOne.
 

2007-04-19 11:50:58.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday February 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Ubuntu Laptop

Last year Ubuntu made some moves. This year, the Linux I run on my multi-OS Toshiba Tecra M5 laptop is Ubuntu. My first reaction to Ubuntu on the laptop was that it reminded my of my Mac OS-X machine at home. My second reaction was "let me try this some more" but how surprising can that be? Both have their foundation on Unix and its basic concepts, i.e. the bedrock of of operating systems such as Solaris.

2007-02-03 00:19:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday January 09, 2007

[ Work ] Partitioning a Disk

Warning: This entry is the story of partitioning a disk.

I've recently moved offices within Sun and just got a new laptop. With a back-up work system, I figured it was a perfect time to go back to the Gateway desktop I've had in my office for some time and try to install Solaris on it.

As would be expected, we have weekly builds of Solaris here, and right across from my office, I can pick up the latest weekly build on a DVD. This seemed like a good place to start.

As a first step, I wondered if I should partition the hard disk on my Gateway machine which currently runs Windows. I didn't really need the Windows operating system any more. I don't use it for any application that would require it and all applications I run are either Java-based or available on Solaris, and I have used Open Office very successfully since 2003 to deal with MS Office based documents.

Nevertheless, I decided that the partitioning exercise was to be had not so much because I was interested in preserving my Windows files but because I wanted to see how easy it was to perform the task without paying for any software. James Liu had earlier mentioned QtParted tool available on Knoppix, which is a Linux OS possible to run from a CD. I had always wanted to use an open source partitioning facility, and this seemed like a good working choice. The alternative, of course, was just not to partition and install using the Solaris installation DVD.

When I was unable to produce my own working Knoppix CD, James kindly came to the rescue and gave me a working CD of Knoppix 5.1.1. James had burned this CD on Solaris. (The CD I had produced kept relegating me to a useless shell of Knoppix perhaps because I was producing it on a Windows XP system with a freeware CD image burner, probably not adequate for my purposes even at low burn speeds. There are commercial tools for burning CDs from CD images on Windows XP but I didn't want to use any of these.) 

The Knoppix OS on the CD works really well. I was now able to load the OS and then run QtParted to resize the existing partition and "create" new ones, and then run QtParted to "commit" these changes. I used suggestions from Richard Friedman which worked really well.

It turns out that the Ferrari laptop on which Richard installed Solaris Express has a similar size of disk to the Gateway machine in my office. The only difference is that QtParted performed the job of disk partitioning in less than 20 minutes on my Gateway machine which compares very well with the 2 hours in the Ferrari experience. As always, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The higher speed for partitioning has to do with the two CPUs and the large RAM available on the Gateway box in my office.

More later ...

2007-01-09 18:31:26.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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