EnterpriseDBмебеликомпютри was founded in March, 2004 to bring the benefits of open source to enterprise databases. Headquartered in New Jersey, EnterpriseDB has engineering and support centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. EnterpriseDB has received venture capital financing from Charles River Ventures, Valhalla Partners, Sony Online Entertainment and Fidelity Ventures.

Sony Online Entertainment? That part surprises me, I wonder how large that part of the investment is. Regardless, I think all of the investors will make a bundle if Oracle doesn’t pull any long, drawn-out intellectual property battles with them. This seems ripe for a legal IP battle.
This new database is basically PostgreSQL, not forked, but synced with their additions. Their additions basically emuate PL/SQL and most if not all of the commands that oracle provides with same syntax so most apps should be able to be converted from Oracle to EnterpriseDB with little or no change to the code. I’m curious to see if they can run eBusinessSuite (Oracle ERP).

This will be very good for other projects such as Compiere ERP, an open source ERP system that was built for Oracle originally, this may speed up freeing projects such as that one from requiring licensing fees to use them.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=202511
For now, I will have to trust the reports on this that I’ve seen thusfar:

http://ce.tekrati.com/research/News.asp?id=7614

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8982719739.html

The bottom line is that open source is everywhere already, and IDC makes some conclusions on how this may effect the industry in the future.

the department has given $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity’s commercial tool for source code analysis….The list of open-source projects that Stanford and Coverity plan to check for security bugs includes Apache, BIND, Ethereal, KDE, Linux, Firefox, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSSL and MySQL….

Symantec is the provider of the Norton Internet Security tools which has a lot of prior and current vulnerability data and has a good practical understanding of threats and their reach in real world scenarios. This is a more objective measure, but does not really address the issue of general quality of code and the adherence to safe and well formed code.

Coverty is a source code auditing firm, they are well positioned to review source code and find previously undiscovered vulnerabilities and/or give subjective opinions on the level of quality of the source code and how likely it is that a particular set of code may prove to have vulnerabilities in the future. Now, the money is most likely going to be spent on the subjective end of things, the finding of previously undiscovered vulnerabilities will just be a bonus. (as ethically speaking they should be bound to reporting these to the appropriate parties)

I’m not sure what this research will discover, and I’m also skeptical that 1.24 million dollars is enough to actually complete a review of even just the list provided by the media, however, I welcome my tax dollars being spent on improving the standing of open source software within the government. Even if there are a number of vulnerabilities found, it will be firmer ground to start from when government agencies begin their research into deploying some of the staple products offered under open source licenses. I believe regardless the level of increased usage of open source will eventually save tax dollars that would otherwise unneedfully go to a commercial vendor.

Fair Use is being eroded by a congress that does not seem to really know how and why CopyRight protection was created in the the first place. I can only hope that the reforms that will soon be coming forth due to the Abramoff case will stop the eroding of CopyRight, and especially the perpetual extensions of CopyRight terms that are also hurting our access to our own heritage.

Unlike libraries which carry books that are out of print, the same does not apply to video and audio content. The same large middle-section of “out of print books” applies to out of print music and films. These recordings, unlike books (if a copy still exists) are on media that are turning into dust simply because there is no public library for them, they are only digitized and kept alive if the companies that own the last copies spend money to keep them alive.

I don’t understand why so many in congress do not seem to understand the value in this set of intellectual property that is going to waste. When a company comes along to challenge an entire industry, they should not be shut out simply because they found a way to make money legally off of something that was being eroded by an entire industry.

The potential use of patent litigation in an offensive way against open source projects is something that has concerned me for a long time, and it has been getting more and more “buzz” lately, because it is seen as an area where Open Source is weak. I’m hoping efforts such as this will mitigate the risk the community has in this area. It certainly sounds like a good start.

More surprisingly, it looks like Sun Microsystems is happy about it. They have been taking a huge hit from Linux servers replacing Solaris servers. With that in mind, I think Sun is welcoming assistance in making of the test suites, compilers and other parts of the J2SE 5 system while they concentrate on the most important aspects, the core architectural changes.

This is a big boon for the Apache Jakarta set of software, which all rely on Java. When stable version of Harmony comes out, these projects will be able to run inside of an open source runtime environment and they will be able to distribute, for instance, Tomcat, completely with an Apache license.

There have been other stacks of software sold such as Red Hat’s server software, and smaller, loosely federated stacks that target developers for the most-part. However, the current stacks lean on proprietary software extensions built into the stacks (as a module on top of mostly open source cores) for revenue. The stack model companies mentioned in this article seem to be going after the enterprise systems by leaning more on packaging, service, support, and certification.

The merit based OS community fosters an environment in which software is only released when it is ready. The problem is that only that one small piece is ready, not the entire framework. Developers who review a lot of Open Source projects envision many the fragmented OS projects converging into a framework, however, they realize that a good bit of the cost is putting all these pieces together for a customer.

This is where the stack business model steps in. Configured, enterprise-ready, supportable stacks of open source with minimal proprietary tie-in, unlike the Linux distribution model that was popular from 2000-2004.

Stacks are also important for developers because it gives them a large base of OS projects on which they can now build on top of as a whole. This allows for further freedoms both in the OS realm and commercial realm of stacks without the hassle of putting all the pieces together.

These stacks are built on top of a loose framework referred to widely as LAMP, which stands for Linux Apache MySQL [PHP, Python]. Ironically these stacks are also available on Windows also. SpikeSource calls that stack the WAMP Stack.

The panel that produced the new report:

The panel was designed to analyze and discuss changing digital broadband content value chains and business models and help identify new challenges and issues facing the development and delivery of digital content.

The first part of the summary states some very basic assumptions about the fluctuations in the marketplace surrounding media distribution, whether that’s CDs and DVDs or the Sopranos on HBO through access subscriptions:

Disruptive technologies, and broadband in particular, are challenging established business models while creating important development opportunities…

The relationships between content originators and final users are changing, intermediaries are being created or replaced, and attitudes to content ownership and acquisition are changing.

The “Early Impacts” section of the document on page 4 is the most interesting for me because it hilights BitTorrent and P2P:

Users are challenging established ownership and distribution arrangements, whether through P2P networks or open access/open archive publishing conventions, or through new mass distribution and inter-community trading.

Although it doesn’t go into the details, the reason BitTorrent got such a high billing so soon after it’s technology debut is because suddenly new models based on RSS and BitTorrent can effectively produce a “Tivo Season Pass” like feature with little to no cost of distribution.

The point of the entire paper to me is that there is obviously a demand for “easy / deep access” to video content and a need to modify current business models to deal with it.

I remember turning in a Computer Science assignment in Python instead of using C++ once back in college. I discovered it after doing research for a previous or concurrent CS course which was a survey on Programming Languages. I didn’t see the logic in the syntax requirements of C++ at the time and Python offered a clean alternative and fit the requirements (mostly) for my professor. I then used it on a web search engine for a trade mag that had music concerts listings which got quite a bit of traffic just after launch. I went on to use Python many other times during my career, all the while admiring it’s readability.

My next interesting run-in with Python was discovering it inside of a very early version of Microsoft Merchant Server the predecessor to Site Server. I found out that the code was from a company that Microsoft had acquired.

This makes the recent IronPython announcement still a precedent setting event. It is the most significant involvement Microsoft has had to-date with the Open Source movement. Thus, with cautious optimism, I congradulate Guido Van Rossum for his contribution to the movement, it is obviously making an impact on the industry. Oh and thanks for the help, especially with http upload with Netscape 3. I’m very cautious about having important projects like Python forked by large companies. Microsoft is testing out it’s first major attempt at working with an existing codebase.