January 2008 Archives
And on goes my fascination with open source companies and their valuations...
I was reading Stephen O'Grady's commentary on open source companies and their valuations prompted by the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. He quotes Jeff Gould who logically questions whether Sun can make the acquisition pay-off.
Joomla! is by far my favorite content management system so I was excited to see version 1.5 was released yesterday. I have been a user of the excellent open source CMS since it was forked from the Mambo project into the Joomla project back in 2005. Since then Joomla! has grown at a breakneck pace. Looking around their site today I saw the following signs of growth.
Here's the thing. Sun buys MySQL for One. Billion. Dollars.
Now, I'm not a businessman. At all. I mean, c'mon, I write for a living, how smart of an money-maker is that?
But in all of the hooplah about Sun buying MySQL--and hey, did you hear, that Sun bought MySQL? Because I don't think there's quite enough reporting about it, do you?--I noticed one really weird thing.
Any day now, we should start seeing four more faces on the backs of milk cartons: those of the apparently vanished members of the former Gentoo Foundation who have apparently resigned from the five-member board.
This news came to me from Daniel Robbins, whom I contacted earlier today to ask him if he'd heard anything from the Gentoo Foundation about his Jan. 11 offer to resume his status as president of the Foundation.
Robbins offer came after it was learned that the Foundation members had apparently let the Foundation charter expire, thus revoking the Foundation's status as a legal entity. Hence my use of the word "former" to describe the Foundation.
Fortune Magazine has published a list of hot IPOs for 2008. What's notable about the list is that four out of five of the highlighted companies have a significant investment in or are driven by open source related-products and services.
The folks at Projity sent me a note on Friday about reaching the 200,000 download mark for their open source project management software, OpenProj. OpenProj is released under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X and it opens Microsoft Project and Primavera files.
I used a previous version and thought it worked rather well though I am not that well-versed in project management software. If you are in need of project management software it's definitely worth a look.
We have the venue for BarCamp Enterprise Systems Management
The sign-up sheet shows representatives from OpenNMS, Zenoss, Nagios, Alterpoint, BMC, Sun, IBM, Puppet. It should be a good opportunity to come speak with people who develop the software you might already use.
Big changes coming at the Mozilla Corporation...
According to a Net Applications Survey Mac adoption rose with an increase to 7.1% of the total market share for web browsers (as in clients not in actual web browsing programs, that's how MarketShare collects OS stats).
We're now seven years into the new millennium, and I am slowly becoming resolved to the fact that the flying cars of the future are simply not going to spontaneously appear anytime soon.
Darn it.
On the other hand, Windows XP is almost as old as the 21 Century, and I'm still seeing how to tips for XP in major online publications. What's the deal with that?