The response has been great and even a quick look at the results makes for interesting reading, particularly in the light of our previous findings which indicated declining MySQL usage.

I am really looking forward to having the opportunity for a deep dive into the results and break out the figures to get a better understanding of the potential impact of alternative MySQL distribution and support providers, as well as NoSQL and NewSQL, on continued usage of MySQL.

The survey results will be made freely available on our blogs, as well as being included in a long format report containing our additional analysis and research related to the MySQL ecosystem and competitive dynamic.

Right now, however, is your last chance to contribute to the survey and get your voice heard. There are just 12 questions to answer, spread over four pages, and the entire survey should take no longer than five minutes to complete. All individual responses are of course confidential.

The survey will close in 24 hours.

Back in late 2009, at the height of the concern about Oracle’s imminent acquisition of Sun Microsystems and MySQL, 451 Research conducted a survey of open source software users to assess their database usage and attitudes towards Oracle.

The results provided an interesting snapshot of the potential implications of the acquisition and the concerns of MySQL users and even, so I am told, became part of the European Commission’s hearing into the proposed acquisition (used by both sides, apparently, which says something about both our independence and the malleability of data).

One of the most interesting aspects concerned the apparently imminent decline in the usage of MySQL. Of the 285 MySQL users in our 2009 survey, only 90.2% still expected to be using it two years later, and only 81.8% in 2014.

Other non-MySQL users expected to adopt the open source database after 2009, but the overall prediction was decline. While 82.1% of our sample of 347 open source users were using MySQL in 2009, only 78.7% expected to be using it in 2011, declining to 72.3% in 2014.

This represented an interesting snapshot of sentiment towards MySQL, but the result also had to be taken with a pinch of salt given the significant level of concern regarding MySQL future at the time the survey was conducted.

The survey also showed that only 17% of MySQL users thought that Oracle should be allowed to keep MySQL, while 14% of MySQL users were less likely to use MySQL if Oracle completed the acquisition.

That is why we are asking similar questions again, in our recently launched MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey.

More than two years later Oracle has demonstrated that it did not have nefarious plans for MySQL. While its stewardship has not been without controversial moments, Oracle has also invested in the MySQL development process and improved the performance of the core product significantly. There are undoubtedly users that have turned away from MySQL because of Oracle but we also hear of others that have adopted the open source database specifically because of Oracle’s backing.

That is why we are now asking MySQL users to again tell us about their database usage, as well as attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle. Since the database landscape has changed considerably late 2009, we are now also asking about NoSQL and NewSQL adoption plans.

Is MySQL usage really in decline, or was the dip suggested by our 2009 survey the result of a frenzy of uncertainty and doubt given the imminent acquisition. Will our current survey confirm or contradict that result? If you’re a MySQL user, tell us about your adoption plans by taking our current survey.

*Hadoop v1.0 and year ahead
*Oracle-Cloudera deal for more Hadoop
*Oracle’s ‘Sun spot’ with Solaris
*Open Source M&A outlook for 2012
*Our new MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey

iTunes or direct download (28:49, 4.9MB)

The aim of the survey is threefold:

- identify trends in database usage over time
- explore changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle
- examine the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other database technologies, including NoSQL and NewSQL

There are just 12 questions to answer, spread over four pages, and the entire survey should take no longer than five minutes to complete.

All individual responses are of course confidential. The results will be published as part of a major research report due at the end of Q1. Thanks in advance for your participation.

The survey can be found at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MySQLNoSQLNewSQL

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and open source in cloud computing in 2012. The cloud continues to be the biggest disruptor and opportunity for Linux providers. 2012 got off to an interesting start with Microsoft’s efforts to support for Linux on Azure, which highlights just how pervasive Linux has become in cloud computing. As detail in our special report on The Changing Linux Landscape, we also expect Linux to continue to be the basis for most offerings in IaaS and particularly PaaS, which is burgeoning across open source languages and frameworks as well as verticals and enterprise customers. Its popularity among enterprise and other developers will also bolster Linux and open source software in 2012.

We can certainly expect to see Linux continue its domination in supercomputing and the Top 500 Supercomputer List, where Linux continues to grow its share above 90% while others, such as Microsoft, Apple and BSD, fall off of the list.

I also expect Linux will grow its presence and impact on the wider, more mainstream server market, where Red Hat and SUSE continue to benefit from Unix migration, particularly from Solaris. Our analysis with survey data from 451 Research division TheInfoPro shows server spending for databases and data warehousing favoring Red Hat with Linux over Oracle with either Linux or Solaris. Out of more than 165 server professionals interviewed by TIP, 67% are planning to spend more with Red Hat on database/data-warehousing, and only 6% plan to spend less. The positive figures for Red Hat mirror negative spending intentions for Oracle, with 55% planning to spend less and only 9% planning to spend more. Spending continues to decline strongly for all of the primary Unix providers in the study, which in addition to Oracle includes IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

We may also see further expansion for Red Hat, which may be eyeing key acquisitions, and other Linux and open source vendors as they continue building their channels and wade more into midmarket and SMB customers.

In smartphones and mobile software, I also expect Linux will do quite well in 2012 with continued Android strength, diminished FUD and possibly an open source boost from a newly-open sourced WebOS. We also see Ubuntu arriving on the mobile and converged device scene, including ‘concept’ appearance at CES.

We’re also likely to see Linux in automobiles, health care and other electronics even more in 2012, though you may never hear Linux or open source. Don’t be fooled though, Linux is expanding its already impressive, wide presence and 2012 looks to be another year of significant gains.

Though there are some signs of improvement, with apparent growth in awareness of the issue and thus a more respectful environment, there is still obviously a long way to go before open source can live up to its ideals of transparency, collaboration and openness.

There is also some belief that female participation in open source software and other development and IT work is underestimated by handles, nicknames and identities that might appear male to avoid any sexism. In addition, there is also the fact that while open source software communities are typically true meritocracies, the initial experience for the new developer can be a harsh one, regardless of gender. Still, it is somewhat shameful the representation of women in open source is typically less than what we see in proprietary software and, as alluded to earlier, the rest of IT.

Aurora wisely argues we need more women in open source so that we have more women in startups. We also see other sub-communities of IT and software, such as the new Women Innovate Mobile effort, that similarly aim to involve more women. Given the longstanding nature of this issue, it is disappointing to see open source software and its communities left behind by mobile, other parts of IT and other industries that are more effectively incorporating women and expanding their reach.

The Ada Initiative, named for the first computer programmer who was also a woman, Ada Lovelace, is a nonprofit organization formed to grow female participation in open source software, Wikipedia and open technology in general. In addition to awareness and education, consulting, workshops and other services, the initiative is primarily focused on teaching women skills to help them succeed in open technology and its culture and how men can help. The group is currently raising support as it seeks to boost awareness and help build an open source software world where women are not only more prevalent, but are also more welcome, encouraged and respected for their work, their code and their talents. In order for open source software communities, projects, products and commercial plays to succeed and reach their full potential, the greater open source community and its supporters should be finding ways to incorporate women, wherever they can contribute and improve the effort.

# Red Hat announced Q3 revenue of $290m, up 23%, and net income of $38.2m, compared with $26.0m a year ago.

# Cloudant raised $2.1m in an equity and stock funding and named Derek Schoettle as its new chief executive officer.

# The Apache Software Foundation published an open letter explaining the progress of Apache OpenOffice (Incubating) and reinforcing its position on trademarks and fundraising.

# Lucid Imagination named Paul Doscher CEO.

# The founder of the ownCloud project, Frank Karlitschek, formed a commercial entity, ownCloud Inc, with former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex.

# Adobe published the proposal for Flex to become an Apache Incubator project.

# Actuate launched BIRT Performance Analytics.

# Uhuru Software introduced Uhuru .NET Services for Cloud Foundry.

# Palantir released its first open source code with the launch of two projects: Cinch and Sysmon.

# Quest Software introduced Quest One Privilege Manager for Sudo.

# CollabNet announced that Git is now available as a hosted offering on its Codesion cloud development platform.

# The Outercurve Foundation published the results of a survey of software developers about their open source coding habits.

# Basho Technologies introduced an early version of Riaknostic, a diagnostic system for Riak.

We previously used the database to analyze the engagement of vendors with open source projects for our Control and Community report, plotting the strategies used by the vendors against the year in which they first began to engage with open source projects to get an approximate view of open source-related strategy changes over time.

For example, we found that the engagement of vendors with projects that used strong copyleft licenses peaked in 2006, while the engagement of vendors with projects using non-copyleft licenses had been rising steadily since 2002.

Analysis of our updated database shows that the the number of new vendors engaging with open source projects in each year has risen steadily in recent years, from 26 in 2008 to 44 in 2011. However, as noted last week, we have also seen a shift towards ‘complementary vendors’ – those that are dependent on open source software to build their products and services, even though those products and services may not themselves be open source.

2010 was the first year in which we saw more complementary vendors engage with open source projects than open source specialist, and that trend accelerated in 2011.

As previously explained, complementary vendors were responsible for over 30% of open source software-related funding raised in 2011, and we should expect that proportion to remain high given that over 57% of the vendors engaging with open source in 2011 were complementary vendors.

We have also seen that complementary vendors are more likely to engage with projects with non-copyleft licenses (38% of complementary vendors have engaged with projects with non-copyleft licenses, compared to 24% that have engaged with projects with strong copyleft licenses).

If we look at all 400+ vendors in our database in terms of open source software license preference, the trend towards new vendors engaging with non-copyleft licenses is clear.

There has been a strong shift from vendors towards non-copyleft licenses in recent years, accelerated in 2011 by the likes of Apache Hadoop and OpenStack in particular. This does not mean that the number of projects using strong copyleft licensing has decreased (although as we previously saw the proportion of projects using the GPL family of licenses has declined).

It is indicative, we believe, of the shift away from specialist open source vendors using vendor-led projects and strong copyleft licenses towards multi-vendor collaborative projects and proprietary implementations of open source code, however.

This trend should not really surprise anyone. For some time we have seen open source becoming part of the fabric of modern software development and licensing strategies, rather than a competitive differentiator. Back in 2009 we predicted the increased importance of business strategies that relied on vendor-led development communities, rather than projects dominated by a single vendor.

We called this “open source 4.0″ and later suggested that it might be considered the golden age of open source, based on our belief that vendors had learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating on open source projects and differentiating at another stage in the software stack than they do from attempting to control open source projects.

Updating the results of our analysis to the end of 2011 and 400+ vendors indicates that, from the perspective of the commercial adoption of open source business strategies at least, we were not far off.

Some might not consider the proliferation of multi-vendor open source communities and proprietary distributions of open source software as the peak of achievement for open source. Each is of course entitled to come to their own conclusions about the implications.

Our perspective, as always, is that open source methodologies present a potentially disruptive, and also valuable, asset that complements the way both vendors and enterprise IT organizations conduct their businesses.

Our analysis indicates, however, that open source methodologies are increasingly being employed by ‘complementary vendors’ with a leaning towards more permissive licensing.

*Hadoop roundup
-Cloudera Enterprise Hadoop update
-Hadapt combines Hadoop with db analytics
-Informatica grows its Hadoop work
*HP open sources WebOS
*The GPL fade
*Red Hat acquisition targets

iTunes or direct download (31:41, 5.4MB)

There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

Following the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever in Q3, Q4 was the second largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever, as $230.4m was invested in companies including Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Rapid7.

As with Q3, however, the list of vendors presents us with something of an existential dilemma, as we see an increasing amount of activity by what we have referred to as ‘complementary vendors’ – those that are dependent on open source software to build their products and services, even though those products and services may not themselves be open source – as opposed to open source specialists.

The list of complementary vendors has grown rapidly in 2011, particularly around projects such as OpenStack and Apache Hadoop. If we examine the figures in more detail we find that over 30% of the funding raised in 2011 was raised by complementary vendors, compared to just 4% in 2006.

In fact, as the chart below indicates, VC funding for specialist open source vendors in 2011 was actually less than that in 2006 and 2008, and only marginally up on 2010, when again just 4% of funding went to complementary vendors.

The low amount of funding for complementary vendors in 2010 shows that the significance of complementary vendors is not growing at a constant rate, although for reasons that will become clear when we publish a follow-up post on the latest trends regarding the engagement of vendors with open source projects, we do expect that the proportion of funding related to complementary vendors is more likely to increase in the future, rather than decline.

This has implications for the ongoing trends related to open source software licensing, as covered yesterday. Examining our database of over 400 open source-related vendors – funded and unfunded, complementary and specialist – indicates that specialist vendors are much more likely to engage with projects using strong copyleft licenses than complementary vendors.

Specifically, our data indicates that 55% of open source specialists have engaged with projects that use strong copyleft licenses, while just 20% have engaged with projects with non-copyleft licenses. In comparison, 38% of complementary vendors have engaged with projects with non-copyleft licenses, compared to 24% that have engaged with projects with strong copyleft licenses.

Will will take a more detailed look at the trends related to the engagement of vendors with open source projects in the concluding part of this series of posts.

Prompted by this post by Bruce Byfield, I thought it might be interesting to bring that post up to date with a look at the latest figures.

NB: I am relying on the current set of figures published by Black Duck Software for this post, combined with our previous posts on the topic. I am aware that some people are distrustful of Black Duck’s figures given the lack of transparency on the methodology for collecting them. Since I previously went to a lot of effort to analyze data collected and published by FLOSSmole to find that it confirmed the trend suggested by Black Duck’s figures, I am confident that the trends are an accurate reflection of the situation.

The figures indicate that not only has the usage of the GNU GPL family of licenses (GPL2+3, LGPL2+3, AGPL) continued to decline since June, but that the decline has accelerated. The GPL family now accounts for about 57% of all open source software, compared to 61% in June.

As you can see from the chart below, if the current rate of decline continues, we project that the GPL family of licenses will account for only 50% of all open source software by September 2012.

That is still a significant proportion of course, but would be down from 70% in June 2008. Our projection also suggests that permissive licenses (specifically in this case, MIT/Apache/BSD/Ms-PL) will account for close to 30% of all open source software by September 2012, up from 15% in June 2009 (we don’t have a figure for June 2008 unfortunately).

Of course, there is no guarantee that the current rate of decline will continue – as the chart indicates the rate of decline slowed between June 2009 and June 2011, and it may well do so again. Or it could accelerate further.

Interestingly, however, while the more rapid rate of decline prior to June 2009 was clearly driven by the declining use of the GPLv2 in particular, Black Duck’s data suggests that the usage of the GPL family declined at a faster rate between June 2011 and December 2011 (6.7%) than the usage of the GPLv2 specifically (6.2%).

UPDATE – It is has been rightfully noted that this decline relates to the proportion of all open source software, while the number of projects using the GPL family has increased in real terms. Using Black Duck’s figures we can calculate that in fact the number of projects using the GPL family of licenses grew 15% between June 2009 and December 2011, from 105,822 to 121,928. However, in the same time period the total number of open source projects grew 31% in real terms, while the number of projects using permissive licenses grew 117%. – UPDATE

As indicated in June, we believe there are some wider trends that need to be discussed in relation to license usage, particularly with regards to vendor engagement with open source projects and a decline in the number of vendors engaging with strong copyleft licensed software.

The analysis indicated that the previous dominance of strong copyleft licenses was achieved and maintained to a significant degree due to vendor-led open source projects, and that the ongoing shift away from projects controlled by a single vendor toward community projects was in part driving a shift towards more permissive non-copyleft licenses.

We will update this analysis over the next few days with a look at the latest trends regarding the engagement of vendors with open source projects, and venture funding for open source-related vendors, providing some additional context for the trends related to licensing.

# Jive Software started IPO at $12 a share, closing the day up nearly 30%.

# HP announced that it plans to release webOS under an open source license. Details are thin on the ground, although Fedora is reportedly an inspiration. Joel West’s post pretty much summed up my thoughts.

# Tier 3 announced that it has created Iron Foundry, and open source .NET Framework implementation of Cloud Foundry.

# Xeround raised $9m funding for its MySQL-as-a-service cloud database.

# Microsoft released the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source and made available a preview of the Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure, amongst a slew of other open source-related announcements.

# Red Hat, Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, and SUSE created the oVirt project, based around Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization technology for managing KVM environments.

# Nuxeo announced the availability of Nuxeo Platform 5.5.

# Joyent launched its SmartMachine Appliance for MongoDB.

Red Hat announced JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.2 and JBoss Operations Network 3.0.

# Novell announced the availability of Novell Open Enterprise Server 11.

# Couchbase claimed thousands of open source deployments and 150 commercial deployments, but has rethought its product line-up for 2012, having “confused the heck” out of potential users in 2011.

# Univention released Univention Corporate Server 3.0.

# SuccessBricks announced that its ClearDB distributed MySQL-based database service is now available through Heroku.

# Ember.js is the new name for the SproutCore 2.0 JavaScript framework.

# HEnrik Ingo examined the recent spate of MySQL authentication plug-ins.

*What’s it mean for WebOS?
Moving WebOS to open source was best option for HP. It retains some value in the software depending on its involvement. It is also the best fate for the code, rather then being sold or simmered to its IP and patent value or even used as another weapon in the ongoing mobile software patent wars. Still, the move comes amid huge developer and consumer uncertainty for WebOS. Nevertheless, at least WebOS was already in the market with a compelling products, the Palm the Pre, in the modern smartphone market. WebOS will hopefully have a faster path to open source than Symbian since the former is based on Linux. I still think the greatest opportunity for WebOS may be in serving as an open alternative in the market, particularly after Android has proven to handset makers, wireless carriers, OEMs and others that a Linux-based, open source mobile OS can succeed in the market and provide profit for multiple parties. Furthering this opportunity, WebOS may be even more attractive to these key vendors, channel players and other stakeholders who are tired of the IP and patent stress and expense around Android. Of course, Android was not under patent or IP attack until it was successful in the market and the same may be the case for WebOS, though we think its IP roots and history in touch and smartphone technology are less complex in terms of origin and ownership.

*What’s it mean for competitors?
For Apple, an open source WebOS means more market pressure and open pressure, more competition for developers and a real danger WebOS hooks into the Android ecosystem. WebOS may also be harder to attack from a patent and IP standpoint since it is older and more singular in ownership (Palm and now HP). Other factors include HP’s own formidable patent portfolio and the perception of Apple as a patent aggressor, which would be reinforced if it attacked WebOS the way it has gone after Android.

For Android, it may finally get a dose of its own open medicine, feeling the pressure of another Linux-based, open source mobile OS that is familiar to many developers, compatible with newer smartphone technologies and appealing to handset makers and other key OEMs. However, WebOS is also a validation of Android, which paved the path for mobile Linux and open source to finally break through beyond geeks to reach a mass consumer audience.

As for other proprietary players such as Microsoft and RIM, another open source rival is bad news. It presents another open source option and potentially serious competition on developers, applications, devices, carriers and consumers. An open source WebOS may also make Android, in effect, more open with faster, easier access to code for both Android and WebOS compete. This could make it even harder for these older, proprietary players to get developer or consumer mind share that is already slipping.

*What’s it mean for open source? Really, there is no downside for open source except that it will be viewed as a form of software cemetery if WebOS is not developed or delivered to market. HP’s WebOS move does give open source greater prominence in mobile software. Again, it is a validation of Android, which is Linux-based and open source, and shows that we haven’t seen the last of mobile Linux and open source software in Android.

# BlazeMeter announced $1.2m in Series A funding and launched the a cloud service for load and performance testing.

# Digital Reasoning announced a second round of funding to help develop its Hadoop-based analytics offering.

# Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, based on its recent acquisition of Gluster.

# Red Hat also announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2.

# Jaspersoft released Jaspersoft 4.5, delivering drag-and-drop analytics and reporting on Apache Hadoop, NoSQL and analytic databases.

# Jaspersoft also delivered a second-generation native connector to MongoDB.

# CloudBees announced the availability of Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees providing support and enhanced capabilities for the Jenkins Continuous Integration platform.

# Diaspora* is back in action, and outlined its plans.

# Talend announced that Bi3 Solutions has embedded Talend Integration Suite inside its Software-as-a-Service platform.

# DataStax announced new versions of Apache Cassandra, DataStax Community, and DataStax Enterprise.

# The H reported that Microsoft’s Windows Store agreement has open source exception.

# Black Duck Software announced the release of Export 6.0.

# Antelink launched SourceSquare, a free open source scanning engine.

# The White House is set to open source Data.gov as open government data platform.

# GridGain closed $2.5m series A funding.

# Digital Reasoning raised an undisclosed series B funding round.

# Contrary to some reports, Google and Mozilla are still negotiating their search and advertising deal.

# Jedox introduced version 3.3 of its BI suite, changing the name of the premium edition from Palo to Jedox.

# MapR announced version 1.2 of the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop.

# Xamarin released Mono for Android 4.0.

# Splunk introduced Shep, an open source project that enables two-way Splunk-Hadoop integration.

# HPCC Systems is now providing its Thor Data Refinery Cluster on the Amazon Web Services platform.

# Monty Program previewed some features in forthcoming versions of MariaDB.

# AppDynamics partnered with Datastax to provide application performance management for distributed applications running on Apache Cassandra.

# Gorilla Logic announced the latest version of FoneMonkey for iOS

# Talend announced version 5 of its data integration suite, adding business process management capabilities via an OEM relationship with BonitaSoft. Yves De Montcheuil explained the name changes in version 5.

# Zentyal closed a series A venture capital funding of over $1m by Open Ocean Capital.

# The London School of Economics released a report on the total cost of ownership of open source software.

# Couchbase announced the availability of the Couchbase Hadoop Connector, developed in conjunction with Cloudera.

# Rackspace announced the private beta of Rackspace MySQL Cloud Database.

# The debate over the role of open source foundations in the Git era continued, including a follow-up by the instigator, Mikael Rogers, a rallying cry for autonomy from Ceki Gülcü, and Simon Phipps warning about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

# Marco Abis is stepping down as CEO of Sourcesense.

# NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year, according to Netcraft figures discussed by Royal Pingdom.

# The Wireless Innovation Forum announced the formation of the Open Source Framework for Commercial Baseband Software project.

First off, I must say that Ubuntu’s slip off the ‘king of the hill’ game on Distrowatch came at the expense of Linux Mint, another polished, user-friendly Linux. It wouldn’t surprise me if some Ubuntu users may be migrating to Mint or other distributions largely out of frustration or dislike of the new Unity interface over the previous primary interface, Gnome. However, I think the move will be worth it in the long run to Ubuntu, as I’ll explain further.

If considering desktop OS, the most important aspect to me as an enterprise software analyst is enterprise desktop, and Ubuntu does well there. I’m sure there are plenty of shops running other flavors of Linux, including Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian and many, many others, but for corporate desktop, the list quickly thins. Nevertheless, this is where Canonical has had some big victories, including the French police. In terms of consumer and user desktop PCs, the category itself is disappearing into converged and touch-capable devices, further distancing us from the ‘distro wars’ of the past.

Still, the server is where the real action and revenue from Linux exist. Here, Ubuntu still faces a role-reversal from most Linux distributions, using desktop and developer popularity to fuel its use as a server OS, which is also helped by free availability and cloud computing. Ubuntu continues to benefit from its early move to cloud computing and its popularity among developers, but also still faces a huge challenge in monetizing use. Significantly, the latest version, Ubuntu 11.10, incorporates support for OpenStack (or Eucalyptus) and VMware Cloud Foundry PaaS. This could be significant given what we’ve seen from this type of integration and bundling in the past. In addition, Ubuntu benefits from being among the select few Linux distribution that exist in both free, community and paid, commercial form. As reported in our special report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape,’ the existence of an unpaid community cousin can help drive commercial growth for paid, subscription Linux, as we’ve seen happen with free Ubuntu and paid Ubuntu, as well as Fedora and RHEL and OpenSUSE and SLES.

Finally, the explosion of smartphones, tablets and converged devices — many of them running embedded Linux — makes clear there is more opportunity in these newer devices than in the desktop PCs of old. Ubuntu got a good start in netbooks and continues to be among the most advanced netbook operating systems. This should help its move to smartphones, tablets, other mobile devices, TVs and more and this is where the payoff of Unity occurs. Canonical with Ubuntu may have a real advantage as a user-friendly, mobile Linux OS that can be used by OEMs and carriers without the intellectual property stress that has marked Android, which has nonetheless laid the groundwork for mobile Linux in the industry. In the end, the pain of leaving Gnome has been significant, but the promise of where Ubuntu is headed seems worth that pain.

# Mikeal Rogers’ post on the Apache Software Foundation’s slow response to the Git era prompted significant discussion, from Mike Milinkovich, Bradley M. Kuhn, Stephen Walli, Stephen O’Grady, Simon Phipps, and the ASF’s Jim Jagielski. Alternative you could just read this tweet.

# Puppet Labs raised $8.5m in series C funding from Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware as well as Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

# YaCy, a free distributed search engine was launched.

# Alex Pinchev, Red Hat’s Executive Vice President of Sales, Services & Field Marketing, will be stepping down in January to become the chief executive officer of a data protection software company.

# Tasktop Technologies announced Tasktop Sync 2.0.

# Interesting statistics on Apache Hadoop adoption based on LinkedIn data, from NC State University’s Institute for Advanced Analytics.

# Red Hat’s Ceylon programming language made its public debut. Mark Little provided some context.

# Heroku announced the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone service.

# GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner explained why you should open source (almost) everything.

# Mikeal Rogers discussed the issues behind the Apache Software Foundation’s slow response to the Git era.

# Royal Pingdom explored recent trends in Linux distribution popularity, pondering the rise of Linux Mint and the decline of Ubuntu.

# Canonical is dropping CouchDB from Ubuntu One.

# ActiveState announced that Stackato Micro Cloud will continue to be free of charge for developers to use as their own private Platform-as-a-Service.

# The European Space Agency wants to publish more of its software using open source licences.

# Sourceforge provided some interesting statistics on operating system usage.

# Rapid7 secured $50m in series C funding.

# Microsoft confirmed that it is ditching its Dryad project in favour of Apache Hadoop.

# Arun Murthy provided more details of Apache Hadop 0.23.

# The Google Plugin for Eclipse and GWT Designer projects are now fully open source.

# openSUSE released version 12.1.

# Amazon released the source code of the Kindle Fire.

# Black Duck Software joined the GENIVI Alliance.

# dotCloud announced the availability of the top three databases MySQL, MongoDB and Redis on its PaaS.

# Vyatta raised $12m in new funding from HighBAR Partners and existing investors JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems.

# Index Ventures announced that it has invested in Hortonworks, reportedly as part of a substantial B round.

# Google released the source code to Ice Cream Sandwich.

# SugarCRM announced billings growth of 69% in Q3

# Apache Hadoop 0.23 has been released.

# Revolution Analytics announced the general availability of Revolution R Enterprise 5.0.

# Adobe and the Spoon Foundation are working together to donate the Flex SDK to an established open source foundation.

# Glyn Moody explained why Barnes & Noble is an open source hero.

# Red Hat added support for Jenkins, Maven and integration with JBoss Tools to its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service.

# Zend Technologies announced the general availability of Zend Studio 9.0.

# WSO2 updated both the WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform and WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform.

# Mozilla published Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, Release Candidate 2.

# DigitalPersona open sourced its new FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.

# AquaFold launched AquaClusters.com, a new social collaboration tool for software developers that is free for open source developers.

# Xyratex joined Open Scalable File Systems (OpenSFS) as a formal member.

*Continuent extends MySQL replication to Oracle Database
*CFEngine updates server automation software
*Devops moving mainstream
*Neo Technology integrates with Spring
*451 CAOS report from Hadoop World

iTunes or direct download (26:56, 4.6MB)

# Barnes & Noble asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Microsoft’s patent-licensing tactics.

# The team behind Strobe is moving to Facebook. Sproutcore will continue as an independent project.

# The UK government’s Cabinet Office dispelled concerns about the security of open source software.

# The Fedora Project announced the availability of Fedora 16.

# Google offered support to Android firms in lawsuits.

# HStreaming updated its scalable continuous data analytics platform built on Hadoop.

# Dell is releasing its Apache Hadoop Crowbar barclamps as open source software.

# ActiveState added new management and monitoring features to ActiveState Stackato.

# Talend provided information on all contributions made by Talend to open source community projects.

# StackIQ announced the availability of Rocks+ 6.

One of the most obvious signs that devops is moving to more mainstream enterprise IT — adding users in financial services, insurance, telecom and other key verticals — is the extension of open source server configuration and automation to Windows environments, which are typical alongside Linux in most enterprises. We’ve recently covered this extension in reports on CFEngine, Opscode and Puppet Labs, all of which report demand and traction in mixed Windows-nix environments and in more mainstream enterprises.

Our coverage of CFEngine (451 subscribers) highlights the Norwegian vendor’s latest paid release, CFEngine 3 Nova, features simplified configuration and management along with scalability and the ability to continuously monitor, update and facilitate system self-repair. Other highlights of the release include simplified compliance features and a new GUI dashboard for setting policy and monitoring system health, as well as the state of IT services and systems. As for the added Windows support, the CFEngine 3 Nova update includes new native support for Windows with more fine-grained management of Windows servers and desktops via Windows Registry, Windows Services and Access Control Lists.

We covered some similar extension to management of Windows environments in our recent report on Opscode with Chef (subscribers). Reporting more demand for private Chef, rather than hosted, particularly among large enterprise users with Windows resources and systems to manage, Opscode enhanced these capabilities with new Chef software and cookbooks. Features include deployment and automation of Windows PowerShell task framework, IIS Web server, SQL Server and Windows Services.

We also covered an update from another open source server configuration and automation player: Puppet Labs (subscribers). The company’s of Puppet Enterprise 2.0 was focused less on Windows support, which is nonetheless previewed in its latest software, and more on improving usability and serving orchestration and compliance needs of large enterprises.

All three of these open source software-centered vendors report the transition of devops practices and tools being implemented (sometimes under other monikers such as continuous integration, continuous application management, cloud application management, release management or other) by more mainstream enterprises in financial services, media and others in addition to tech and web-oriented companies you’d expect to be doing devops.

Read the full article at LinuxInsider.

# Cloudera raised $40m in series D funding and announced a partnership with NetApp around its NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

# Accel Partners launched a $100m Big Data Fund to invest in Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors.

# Rackspace launched Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, based on OpenStack.

# Quest Software released Toad for Cloud Databases – Community Edition.

# Splunk launched Splunk Enterprise for Hadoop to provide integration between Splunk and Apache Hadoop.

# Continuent announced supported MySQL-To-Oracle replication with Tungsten Replicator.

# Hadapt announced early access for Hadapt 1.0, combining Hadoop with relational databases.

# StackIQ announced the immediate availability of Rocks+ 6.

# MapR Technologies and Lucid Imagination announced a strategic partnership.

# Cloudera formed a strategic partnership with Karmasphere.

# EnterpriseDB announced Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop.

# SCO Group, or what’s left of it, asked the US District Court for the District of Utah to reopen its litigation against IBM.

# Abiquo announced version 2.0 of its self-service cloud configuration and management software.

# Ian Skerrett reported on John Swainson’s key success factors for open source strategies.

# Gorilla Logic announced FoneMonkey for Android,

# Microsoft contributed code to Samba.

# Basho Technologies raised an additional $5m from existing equity holders and announced a licensing agreement with the Danish Government.

# Actuate reported BIRT license business of $3.0m among total revenue of $33.8m in Q3.

# IBM and Eurotech contributed the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to the Eclipse Foundation.

# Informatica and Hortonworks collaborated on the distribution of the Community Edition of Informatica HParser.

# SugarCRM announced the release of Sugar 6.3, a major upgrade to its Community Edition.

# The UK government’s Cabinet Office updated its Open Source Procurement Toolkit.

# Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company Apache Hadoop-based analytics company called Odiago

# The results for the JCP 2011 Executive Committee election are in.

# Linus Torvalds discussed why Linux is not successful on the desktop.

# Apache Harmony has been now been moved to the Apache Attic.

# Appcelerator raised $15m in a third round led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat.

# Modo Labs closed a $4m investment from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures.

# Hortonworks launched its Hortonworks Data Platform Apache Hadoop distribution, as well as a new partner program. Eric Baldeschwieler put the announcements into context.

# Pentaho announced the latest release of Pentaho Business Analytics.

# DataStax announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise and DataStax Community Edition.

# NYSE Technologies announced that it has open sourced its Middleware Agnostic Messaging Application Programming Interface, now called OpenMAMA.

# Bacula Systems announced the appointment of Frank Barker as its new CEO.

# Florian Effenberger provided an update on the status of the Document Foundation, while Document Foundation founder Charles H. Schultz compared LibreOffice to the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.

# Oracle proposed the contribution of JavaFX into OpenJDK as a new project called “JFX”.

# Open source graph database provider sones has entered bankruptcy administration.

*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

iTunes or direct download (27:35, 4.7MB)

# Sencha raised $15m in series B funding led by Jafco Ventures, previewed its Sencha.io MTML5 cloud platform.

# Facebook announced the formation of a foundation to lead the Open Compute Project, while Red Hat became a member.

# Digium and the Asterisk open source community released Asterisk 10.

# SUSE released an early development snapshot of its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure offering.

# Internap Network Services claimed to have launched the world’s first commercially available public cloud compute service based on the OpenStack.

# The Linux Foundation announced the consumer electronics Long Term Stable Kernel Initiative.

# Zmanda and Nexenta Systems announced availability of jointly developed and certified back-up solutions.

# BonitaSoft announced the availability of Bonita Open Solution 5.6.

# Black Duck Software announced version 2.0 of its Code Sight source code search engine.

# CFEngine unveiled CFEngine 3 Nova, a new version of its commercial configuration management software.

# The Hudson-CI team described the steps taken to prepare for membership of the Eclipse Foundation.

# Actuate announced BIRT Mobile Business Intelligence for Android devices.

# Red Hat, The Linux Foundation and Canonical published a white paper on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

# Stephen O’Grady responded to suggestions that open source doesn’t innovate.

# Microsoft claimed that more than half of the world’s ODM industry for Android and Chrome devices is now under license to Microsoft’s patent portfolio following its agreement with Compal Electronics.

# Hadapt expanded its board of directors and confirmed its $9.5m series A funding round.

# Appcelerator entered into an agreement to acquire the Particle Code mobile gaming and HTML5 development platform.

# Jaspersoft and IBM are working together to combine InfoSphere BigInsights with Jaspersoft’s full BI suite.

# Karmasphere announced its new Hadoop Virtual Appliance for IBM InfoSphere BigInsights.

# Neo Technology launched Spring Data Neo4j 2.0.

# Opscode extended Chef, Hosted Chef and Private Chef to provide infrastructure automation in Windows environments.

# Sourcefire announced plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

# Percona added support for MySQL Cluster.

# Avere Systems partnered with Nexenta Systems to combine Avere’s FXT Series of appliances and Nexenta’s NexentaStor open source ZFS technology.

# The Qt project is now up and running.

# Zed A Shaw explained why he has licensed Lamson under the GPL.

I believe Microsoft’s strategy to pursue patent licensing deals rather than sue, as we’ve seen from Apple, may prove to be a more effective strategy. Rather than limit or destroy Android, Microsoft is actually supporting its growth, meaning more Android devices and users in the market. Since it’s making so much money from Android, Microsoft may be less interested in limiting or attacking it, so that’s a benefit to Android. However, I do see some significant drawbacks to Microsoft’s Android strategy, all of which serve to limit Microsoft’s opportunity in the future.

First, Microsoft’s Android licensing is a validation of Android. Many if not most of the companies using Android that are also Microsoft licensees all seem to be doing well enough and making enough money to go ahead and pay Microsoft’s licensing fees. This highlights Android’s growth and spread, which is tied to significant market gains for companies such as HTC, Samsung and Verizon. One might argue that Microsoft’s Android licensing revenue will similarly rise with the Linux-based mobile operating system’s growth, but I don’t see that happening, and the second drawback I discuss next is the reason.

Second, we’ve already seen Samsung working to sidestep technology and patents in question that have caused courtroom fights or market bans around the world. I expect all of Microsoft’s Android licensees are working to similarly work around technology in question, so there is a shelf life on Microsoft’s IP licensing business. The details of these patent deals are not public to us, but the companies that agree to them have a much better handle on which technology is problematic since they’re the ones signing. I expect we will see these deals peak at some point and over time, they will become less relevant to Android backers and less lucrative to Microsoft. In addition, for all of the criticisms regarding its openness, Android has a global, open source development community behind it. That means it will be able to compete, innovate and work around things quickly. Those workarounds will likely make their way into the greater Android community so that supposed patent infringements will decline and eventually disappear.

The third drawback is a matter of pride. At the same time Samsung officials signaled an effort to sidestep IP-sensitive technologies and issues, a Samsung executive expressed concern that these patent suits and fights may come at the expense of pride in brand and company. I couldn’t agree more. It really does say something if Microsoft is making more money from IP licensing of non-Microsoft technology than from its own work in smartphones — perhaps the hottest technology market on the planet right now. Consumers may not be aware of or care about lawsuits, license deals or pride, but developers do.

Given some new indications there may be a change at Apple and a bridge to Samsung whereby settlement, progress and choice take priority over market bans and destruction of an ecosystem, these drawbacks for Microsoft may be even more significant going forward.

# Google and Samsung unveiled Galaxy Nexus, the first phone designed for Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

# Meanwhile Google indicated that it plans to publish the Ice Cream Sandwich source code soon after it is available on devices.

# BonitaSoft announced that it has surpassed one million downloads and now has more than 250 customers.

# Gemini Technologies joined the OpenStack community, bringing its Amazon S3 compatibility, provisioning and billing APIs to OpenStack.

# Canonical re-aligned its corporate and professional services.

# The Document Foundation announced the preliminary results of its board election.

# Cloudera released CDH3 update 2, adding Apache Mahout to its Cloudera Distribution Including Apache Hadoop.

# Cloudera also announced the new Cloudera University brand for its training and certification programs.

# Zend Technologies announced phpcloud.com and a partnership with 10gen including the integration of the MongoDB PHP driver with Zend Server

# Hadapt reportedly closed an $8m series A financing round – or is that $9.5m

# Bacula Systems announced the availability of its Linux bare metal restore feature.

# Virtustream added support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to its xStream cloud platform

# The Outercurve Foundation announced the acceptance of the .Net Bio project into the Research Accelerators Gallery.

# ForgeRock announced a partnership with Radiant Logic to join RadiantOne’s Virtual Directory Server and OpenAM.

# OStatic published an introduction to Amdatu, an open cloud platform powered by Apache.

# Talend announced an expanded OEM partner program.

# DOCOMO Innovations adopted Couchbase as DOCOMO Capital invested in the NoSQL database vendor.

# The Apache Software Foundation announced Apache Cassandra v1.0.

# Nuxeo announced the availability of Nuxeo Cloud.

# SGI formed a distribution relationship with Cloudera and announced a record-breaking performance benchmark.

# Rapid7 announced the launch of Metasploit Community Edition.

# VoltDB announced the general availability of VoltOne.

# Juniper Networks licensed OpenNMS to add fault and performance management capabilities to the Junos Space software platform.

# The Free Software Foundation warned against Microsoft’s “Secure Boot” system.

*Our latest special report on ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’
*Oracle’s Hadoop-based appliance and big-data strategy
*Rackspace’s plan for the OpenStack Foundation
*2011 Q3 funding for open source companies
*Red Hat buys open source storage player Gluster

iTunes or direct download (27:38, 4.7MB)

# Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and co-creator of Unix, died aged 70. This article from Joe Brockmeier puts his influence into perspective.

# Microsoft announced plans to team up with Hortonworks and the Apache Hadoop community to create a distribution of Hadoop for Windows Server and Windows Azure.

# Hortonworks explained why it decided to work with Microsoft to support its Hadoop plans.

# Black Duck Software closed a $12m round of financing led by new investor Split Rock Partners.

# OpenOffice.org e.V pleaded for financial support for the OpenOffice.org project, prompting a statement of clarification from the Apache Software Foundation

# Microsoft noted that The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group confirmed the availability of the AMQP 1.0 specification. Red Hat confirmed its support.

# Red Hat updated its JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform and JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System product lines.

# Cloudera announced an integration partnership with MicroStrategy.

# Monsanto is creating is data integration and visualization platform based on the Cloudant suite.

# Samba can now accept code from corporations.

# VMware Micro Cloud Factory now includes PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ.

# Univa announced StackIQ will market, sell and support Univa Grid Engine to its customer and reseller channels.

# Openwave Systems is going to integrate Open-Xchange’s email technology into the Openwave Rich Mail product.

# X.commerce, a new business at eBay combining PayPal and Magento, joined the OpenStack community.

Almost three years ago, I wrote in 451 Group’s report,’Mobility Matters,’ that in spite of previous false starts and maneuvers — similar to the ones we’re seeing right now — mobile Linux and open source software were finally poised to break out of niche use. I saw potential in the LiMO Founation, Palm’s webOS, and particularly Android.

More recently came the introduction of Tizen. Though the Tizen project is backed by the Linux Foundation, the LiMO Foundation, and industry leaders including Intel and Samsung, it is a jolt to mobile Linux and open source developers since it effectively ends the MeeGo OS and project.

Read the full article at LinuxInsider.

# NGINX raised a $3m series A funding round

# Spree Commerce raised a $1.5m seed investment round

# The Mozilla Foundation published its 2010 annual report, including details of revenue up 18% to $123m.

# Black Duck Software added 69 new customers in Q3.

# SkySQL signed more than 160 new customers in its first year in business.

# The Linux Foundation added seven Europe-based companies as new members.

# Red Hat unveiled Arquillian 1.0.

Basically, we still see commercial vendors Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) leading the market, but there are significant changes afoot, ushered in by cloud computing, wide use of other distributions such as Ubuntu, and continued use of unpaid community Linux such as CentOS and Debian. In addition, other distributions such Oracle Enterprise Linux continue to evolve and grow, as do the providers of Linux support, which now includes Microsoft. These additional competitors and choices, along with the new way of developing and deploying enterprise applications known as ‘devops,’ are all driving and disrupting the Linux server market.

This means challenges and opportunities – particularly in PaaS, which embodies devops practices – for both vendors and users. The report focuses on market dynamics with competitive analysis of leading Linux distributions, analysis of adoption drivers and hurdles, and customer case studies highlighting how Linux is put to work in today’s cloud computing environments.

# Rackspace announced its intention to form an independent OpenStack Foundation.

# HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud.

# Pentaho appointed Quentin Gallivan as its new CEO.

# Hortonworks continued the discussion about contributions to Apache Hadoop.

# Bob Bickel explained why CloudBees is not, itself, open source.

# Google announced the limited preview release of Google Cloud SQL.

# Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges joined the Linux Foundation.

# Dave Neary discussed the different types of community in relation to the Tizen project.

# Akamai joined the OpenStack community.

# Daniel Abadi provided his perspective on Oracle’s NoSQL Database.

# One more thing…
Apple’s relationship with open source may be somewhat tenuous – Paul Rooney provides some background – but given the impact Steve Jobs has made on the industry as a whole it seems wrong not to mark his passing in some way. We’ll leave the words to the company he created.

This is exactly the kind of disruption we’ve been seeing and expecting as Linux vendors compete with new rivals in virtualization, cloud computing and different layers of the stack, including storage (VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack, Oracle, Amazon and others), as covered in our recent special report, The Changing Linux Landscape.

While the deal makes perfect sense for both Red Hat and for Gluster, it also has implications for the white hot open source cloud computing project OpenStack. There was no mention of OpenStack in Red Hat’s FAQ on the deal, but there was a reference to ongoing support for Gluster partners, of which there are many fellow OpenStack members. OpenStack was also highlighted among Gluster’s key open standards participation along with the Linux Foundation and Red Hat-led Open Virtualization Alliance oriented around KVM. Sources at both Gluster and Red Hat, which point to OpenStack support being bundled into Red Hat’s coming Fedora 16, also reiterated to me Red Hat is indeed planning to continue involvement with OpenStack around the Gluster technologies. I suspect Red Hat is looking to leverage Gluster more for its own purposes than for OpenStack’s, but I must also acknowledge Red Hat’s understanding of the value of openness, community and compatibility. Taking that idea a step further, Gluster may represent a way that Red Hat can integrate with and tap into the OpenStack community by blending it with its own community around Fedora, RHEL, JBoss, RHEV and Cloud Forms and OpenShift.

The deal also leads many to wonder whether or what may be next for Red Hat in terms of acquisition. We’ve long thought database and data management technologies were areas where we might see Red Hat building out. This was also the subject of renewed rumors recently, and we believe it might still be an attractive piece for Red Hat given the open source opportunities and targets around NoSQL technologies such as Apache Hadoop distributed data management framework and Cassandra distributed database management software. We’ve also believed systems management to be a potential place for Red Hat to further expand. Given its need to largely stay within open source, we would expect targets in this area to include GroundWork Open Source, which joins Linux and Windows systmes in its monitorig and management, and Zenoss, which works with Cisco and Red Hat rival VMware in monitoring and managing systems with its open source software. Another potential target that would increase Red Hat’s depth in open source virtualization and cloud computing is Convirture, which might also be an avenue for Red Hat to reach out to midmarket and SMB customers and channel players. Red Hat was among the non-OpenStack members we listed as potential acquirers when considering the M&A possibilities (451 subscribers) out of OpenStack.

Given its recent quarterly earnings report and topping the $1 billion annual revenue mark, Red Hat seems again to be bucking the bad economy. We’ve written before in 2008 and more recently how bad economic conditions can be good for open source software. Red Hat is atop the list of open source vendors that suffer as traditional, enterprise IT customers such as banks freeze spending or worse, fail. However, the company’s deal for Gluster is yet another sign it is thriving and expanding despite economic difficulty and uncertainty.

You don’t have to just look at Red Hat’s earnings or take our word for it. On Jim Cramer’s ‘Mad Money’ this week, we heard Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst praised for Red Hat performance and traction where most companies and many economists are throwing the blame: financial services, government and Europe. Cramer credited Red Hat for a ‘spectacular quarter’ and allowed Whitehurst to tout the benefits of the Gluster technology and acquisition, particularly Gluster’s software-based storage technology that matches cloud computing. It was quite a contrast to the news out of Oracle Open World, where hardware was a focal point.

# Red Hat agreed to acquire Gluster for approximately $136m in cash. Red Hat CTO Crian Steven explained why.

# Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Nitobi, creator of PhoneGap.

# Oracle unveiled its Oracle Big Data Appliance, including Apache Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL database.

# ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard.

# Univa announced the general availability of Univa Grid Engine 8.0.1.

# MPSTOR released Orkestra, a new cloud services platform based around OpenStack.

# Nuxeo announced the availability of the Nuxeo Integrated Development Environment.

# Mike Olson blogged about the nature if the Apache Hadoop community.

# Oracle previewed multi-site clustering support in MySQL Cluster.

# Opscode released new Opscode Chef Cookbooks for deploying and automating core components of the latest version of OpenStack.

# The OpenNebula Project announced the third major release of its OpenNebula Toolkit.

# IBM donated code from its Project Blue Spruce to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb).

In calculating that percentage I had overlooked an important deal, however: one that re-writes the record books and raises existential questions about investment in ‘open source related vendors’.

There has always been a question mark over the term ‘open source vendor’. That is why I started using the term ‘open source-related vendors’ as more accurate term to describe the collective group of vendors that we see depending on open source software to drive revenue.

In particular, ‘open source-related vendors’ reflects the fact that many vendors are dependent on open source software to build their products and services, even though those products and services may not themselves be open source.

One such vendor is Opera Solutions, http://operasolutions.com/ which has based its data analytics platform on a number of open source components including Talend,. Kettle, memcached and Apache Hadoop. Opera’s software is not itself open source, however, which led by to initially omit the company’s series A funding round from my calculations for Q3.

How significant an omission was this? Pretty significant, given that Opera raised no less than $84m. Include that deal, and funding for open source-related vendors increased not by 95% to $159.2m, but by 197% to $243.2m, which is the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever.

We have previously included funding rounds for vendors that depend on open source software despite producing closed software – Karmasphere, which raised $6m in Q3 is another – but it is the size of Opera’s funding round that highlights the existential problem in defining a vendor as ‘open source related’.

Whereas it was previously pretty easy to identify open source-related vendors, as we see more and more closed source vendors and service providers building on open source foundations, it becomes increasingly clear that the bounds of ‘open source-related’ are almost limitless.

It is not so much a matter of when do you start counting, but when do you stop.

*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’

iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)

# As Microsoft announced its latest Android-related patent agreement with Samsun, Goldman Sachs estimated that the company will make $444m in revenue from Android patent deals for fiscal year 2012.

# LiMo Foundation and The Linux Foundation announced the formation of Tizen to develop a Linux-based device software platform.

# Karmasphere raised $6m in a series B round of funding, led by new investor Presidio Ventures.

# Citrix Systems announced the availability of XenServer 6.

# 10gen announced the general availability of MongoDB Monitoring Service, a free monitoring service for the MongoDB database.

# Percona announced the release of Percona Server version 5.5.15.

# Hortonworks became a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.

# The developers behind PhoneGap have applied to contribute their open source mobile development framework to the Apache Software Foundation.

# Piston Cloud Computing is set to launch its PentOS enterprise operating system for the cloud and put OpenStack on a memory stick.

# The Free Software Foundation announced the re-launch of its Free Software Directory.

# Rhomobile announced availability of RhoConnect 3.0.

# Nokia is reportedly working on a new Linux-based operating system for mass market phones called Meltemi.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders beyond software developers and IT administrators. This might be the web or mobile folks, sales and CRM people, security professionals or others, but it is typically about applying business operations methodology to applications and IT, thus bringing in more of the business minds as well. The introduction of additional stakeholders was also a theme we heard from Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies in his keynote address. Kanies then discussed how the community was working to make Puppet the ‘language of operations,’ which it basically is along with competitors Chef from Opscode and CFEngine when it comes to devops implementations.

There was another interesting point on the PuppetConf stage from DTO Solutions co-founder and President Damon Edwards, who said devops should not be sold as a way to achieve cost savings, but rather as something that will bring return on investment (ROI). This is similar to the shift of open source software drivers we’ve seen in the enterprise, which are sometimes changing from cost savings and time to factors of performance, reliability and innovation.

Later in the conference during his keynote, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos also had some interesting observations concerning devops, which he described as managing the cloud from both sides. One of his points was that developers have the most to learn about operations. While I would agree to some extent, this statement is interesting when considered alongside my contention that most of the change in devops is happening on the IT administrator and operations side. Later in an interview, Mickos elaborated on his devops thinking, indicating the experts who orchestrate applications in cloud computing — both developers and admins — must understand the entire lifecycle and environment. Continuing our comparison of devops to open source, Mickos indicated the open source MySQL database that he helped usher into the enterprise was disrupting old technology, while devops is innovating new technology.

While it remains early days for devops in the case of many enterprise organizations, we continue to see and hear signs that devops practices, technologies, ideas and culture are making their way into more and more mainstream enterprise IT shops. While we expect devops practices to be implemented by many enterprises based on utility and need to leverage cloud computing, we see a higher level of awareness and engagement from leadership and executives than we did with open source software. This means we expect uptake of devops to happen more quickly and to generate more revenue and opportunity.

# Basho Technologies announced the impending release of Riak 1.0.

# Jaspersoft focused on mobile business intelligence with the release of Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite 4.2.

# Revolution Analytics and Cloudera partnered on RevoConnectR for Apache Hadoop.

# Amazon removed the ‘beta’ tag fro Amazon Linux AMI.

# Terracotta launched version Terracotta 3.6, adding Automatic Resource Control to its in-memory cache.

# Lucid Imagination announced the launch of LucidWorks LucidWorks Platform 2.0.

# Gluster announced a partnership with services company CSS Corp.

# OSS Watch published its licence differentiator, a tool to help users select an open source software license.

# Glyn Moody described what can be learned from the Apache Way.

# PHYAURA launched the open source community edition of PHYAURA EHR electronic health record platform.

The news was both welcomed and derided. Rather than re-hashing previous arguments about open core licensing, what interests me more about the move is how it illustrates the different strategies adopted by Sun and Oracle for driving revenue from MySQL, and how a single project can be used to describe most of the major strategies from generating revenue from open source software.

Like most open source-related software vendors, MySQL started out life offering support, training and consulting around the open source database. The company also saw success in offering a closed source variant of the database for embedding in closed source systems, and it was this dual licensing strategy that drove much of the company’s early revenue. That began to change with the arrival of MySQL Enterprise (initially ‘MySQL Network’) – a subscription offering that delivered monitoring and (later) backup capabilities to paying customers only. While some people see this as an example of the open core licensing strategy, as we have previously explained, it is not. While open core is an extension of the dual licensing strategy with additional extensions, MySQL AB’s MySQL Enterprise, as the graphic above illustrates, actually paired the extensions with the open source MySQL Community – a subtle difference from the MySQL Enterprise licensing strategy adopted by Oracle (more of which later).

MySQL flirted with the open core licensing model in early 2008 with plans to introduce new features into Enterprise Edition that would not be available under an open source license. Those plans were ultimately reversed at the behest of new owner Sun Microsystems. To understand why Sun did this one must consider the company’s wider strategy for open source at the time. While a software freedom philosophy played a part, Jonathan Schwartz’s map of open source downloads, each representing ‘a potential customer that cost Sun nothing to acquire’, explains how Sun was less interested in driving direct revenue from MySQL (and other open source software) as it was in helping open source users to become customers for Sun’s commodity hardware and other products and services. (Although as Henrik notes in the comments, Sun did also increase MySQL direct revenue as well).

Sun never got the chance to prove whether this model would have worked (I’m being polite), but in any case contrast Sun’s approach with Oracle’s strategy for open source. While the majority of Oracle’s revenue clearly comes from other products, it is not looking to drive revenue for those products via open source downloads. Witness Larry Ellison’s recent proclamation that he doesn’t care if Oracle x86 server business (typically used to run MySQL) goes to zero. Instead (for better or worse) the company is focused on driving revenue directly from each individual product, whether that is a high margin server, or closed or open source software. That has resulted in an increased investment in embedded opportunities for MySQL, as well as traditional software license agreements. While customers might choose to use MySQL Community and purchase additional support subscriptions, as of November 2010 Oracle prefers that Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition customers enter into a commercial license agreement with the company. That was a strategy that was in place in advance of last week’s addition of high availability, scalability and security features, but one that clearly looks set to continue.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your perspective. Monty Widenius does a good job of outlining the down sides to an open core licensing strategy, while Giuseppe Maxia focuses on the positives. Certainly Oracle will have to be mindful to balance the control and community aspects, but as we have previously covered (451 Group clients) there are a number of new capabilities in development for the core MySQL database itself. It is also worth noting, incidentally, that MySQL Enterprise Edition remains priced at $5,000 per server per year.