OSCON 2008 Over, LinuxWorld Is Next
OSCON 2008 has come and gone. I did not get a chance to attend this year but I sure hope I can be there next time around. There were some interesting announcements coming out of OSCON-Sun’s version of LAMP, Sourceforge’s Best Project contest and Ubuntu’s Server appliance.
Open Source ERP projects were represented by xTuple, who had a booth in the conference. Openbravo’s Chief Product Officer, Paolo Juvara, also attended. You can read his views on the conference in his blog post. Expect heavier participation by Open Source ERP vendors in the upcoming LinuxWorld 2008 conference.
Sun’s SAMP
Sun’s acquisition of MySQL for 1B$ was a big question mark. Many have asked why did Sun pour buckets full of $$$ for the Swedish open source database vendor. It was only a question of time until Sun would release its own version of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, and it did.
They called it Sun Web Stack, or SAMP (=LAMP-Linux+Solaris). The business model around the stack is unsurprisingly based on paid services. There are about a billion web servers running LAMP (including the one running this blog), but official support is provided only by 3rd parties, not by the projects themselves, at least not for free. Sun will provide paid support services along with the stack itself.
Sun has a lot of work on its hand to make their shareholders happy, and offering an optimized version of LAMP for Solaris+support is their first shot at monetizing the acquisition.
Best Open Source Projects Contest
Sourceforge.com, the most popular open source development platform, held its annual best projects award. There were several categories to vote for, most interesting were Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, best new project and the hilarious “Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models” (and the Oscar goes to.. Emule!!) category.
Both Best Project and Best Project for Enterprise awards went to the MS Office killer, openoffice.org. Best new project was Magento, a very good looking E-commerce platform. E-commerce is so late-90’s, though it seems like it still has some jokers up its sleeves.
I hope that next year one of the Open Source ERP projects will win the Enterprise award.
Ubuntu’s Server Appliance
Apparently, Ubuntu was making a lot of noise on the conference floor. It’s working hard toward making Ubuntu the Desktop OS of choice. Personally, I believe too much energy (and cash) are spent on trying to make Linux a viable desktop platform. If a portion of that efforts would have gone to building both Linux servers and business applications for the Enterprise, SMEs and the Cloud, open source would have been positioned much better against proprietary software.
The VAR Guy reports that Ubuntu, which is considered the best alternative to Micsrosoft’s Windows as a desktop OS, are making a push for their server platform. Ubuntu server was used for all tutorials and installation guides found on this blog.
Ubuntu will probably try to provide their own optimized version of LAMP, just like Sun does. I hope they will go even further, offering a complete business stack, based around Open Source ERP, optimized to run on Ubuntu server, bundled with support.
You can expect some big announcements from Ubuntu coming out of the next Linux World conference.
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