Articles on the software industry, offshore outsourcing, open source, ...etc.
In open source software communities, choice is often touted as a good thing.
While I agree with this in principle, I do not think that it
is always the case.
If choice results in confusing the adopters, increasing the
cost for developers, and fragmenting the market, resulting in less adoption, then it is not a good
thing.
All over news outlets over the last two days is the fact that Microsoft has bid $44.6 billion for Yahoo.
The implications of such an acquisition are far reaching.
Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, announced Maria, a replacement engine for MyISAM with many new features.
The blog post by Monty has a detailed FAQ. Briefly, Maria aims for 2.0 to have many proper database features, such as:
It also wants to be the default non-transactional as well as transactional engine of MySQL.
Today, it was announced that Sun has acquired MySQL, for $1 Billion.
Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz is an avid free software/open source. He wrote on the acquisition saying that Sun is "putting one billion dollars behind the M in LAMP".
Sun's track record in free software has been lately impressive, starting with NetBeans, OpenOffice,ZFS, and even Java itself.
Almost 2 years after RedHat bought JBoss, Oracle has snapped up BEA for a hefty $8.5 Billion.
The OLPC has started deployment to schools in some countries.
The way the students interact with it, learn how to use it, and interact to each other is already amazing. There are stories of school drop outs coming back to school for the sake of the laptop, aggressive kids who become experts in the OLPC, and help others out using it, and more.
Two recent reviews of the XO One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) are very interesting. The first is by a 12 year old, and the other is by a 9 year old.
I don't use Windows myself, let alone Vista, since I am an open source advocate, and have no need nor desire for Windows.
That being said, I had a brief encounter with Vista. I bought a laptop, which as all of today's computers, comes with Microsoft Windows Vista. As I always do, I reformatted the drive and loaded Kubuntu on it.
IDC has a report titled “The Momentum of Open Source: Adoption Plans and Challenges in Australia, Korea, India and the People’s Republic of China”.
As you can see from this blog post summary, security factors in very high on the list of criteria. "Budget constraints" and "better management tools and utilities" are next.
Drupaller Noel Hidalgo is traveling the world in seven months, on a budget of $7,777.
The purpose of the trip is documenting Drupal, Open Source, free cultures, social innovators, and global change, as well as many other aspects of his experience.
Check the web site, aptly named Luck of Seven.
Noel met Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, In Antwerp, and interviewed him.
