Software

The web comic XKCD often has good insight into technology in a humorous and fun way. It often predicts what is going to happen too in the technology, the web, social media and other fields, sometimes unintentionally.

This time, in issue 644 it provides an argument for why open source is better: other people learn from and build upon what is already out there.

Closed source software is not conducive to this by its very nature ...

There are lots of changes at the OLPC project lately. A top executive shakeup has happened, and it seems to coincide with a ship in direction from being Open Source to allowing Windows as an alternative.

Walter Bender, President of Software and Content for the OLPC was first sidelined then resigned from the project.

A client who over grew the capacity of their Dual Opteron server planned on moving their site to a 2X Quad Xeon machine.

One of the things we use on the server is Munin for resource utilization and statistics. It is a server side tool that can monitor CPU, Memory, network, Apache, MySQL and much more. It has a web based interface that generates graphs from RRD Tool files.

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.

When choice is bad: Expense, confusion, low adoption

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:

• ACID
• Commit/Rollback
• Concurrent selects (via MVCC)
• Row locking
• Group commit

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.