Pythian Group

Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been a busy week in the IT world. Here are some of the most interesting highlights.

Security

Without a doubt, the topic of the week is security. The revelation that China has been hacking into Google and over 30 other US companies sent shock waves through the IT World and beyond. There were a huge number of articles generated about this in the last week. Ironically, the best source for articles on this issue turned out to be Google’s own news aggregator: see China Google hack.

In another China-related security issue, The Money Times reports that Iranians hack China’s Baidu; Chinese hack back.

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Is it Friday already? Where has the week gone? Whatever, we’ve got lots of good news tidbits for you this week, including several follow-ups to previous stories. Enough jaw-jacking, let’s get to the news.

Operating Systems

This week we got an early alpha of Google Chrome OS, which is slated for full release sometime in Q4 of 2010. ZDNet blogs and Ars technica have three good first looks at Chrome. First up is Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article Chrome OS – The good, the bad and the ugly, and how it fits in with Windows, Mac and Linux.

For a more security related view, Ryan Naraine has an early look into Chrome OS security with Inside the Google Chrome OS security model.

Lastly, Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has his own first look with screenshots in Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet.
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As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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The only criticism of the deal I could possibly give is that MySQL is still on the early phase of an exponential adoption curve and I think they’ve got lots of growth yet to come.

But really, a billion dollars has a lot if not most of that growth factored into the price already.

Think of what they get: huge mindshare in a 30,000 person company with an established presence and sales channel throughout the world. They get that mindshare because that same company is one that has struggled to find the next big thing, the next huge thing that is going to change the landscape of enterprise IT. Well they’ve found it. And they’re going to get to work on making it happen.

Not to mention that while Sun has not always open-sourced as early as they should have, once they do open-source software they’re pretty much always done the right thing by the community of users.

Not to mention that the nice thing about open-source is that we don’t really have to worry too much about it; it’s Sun’s problem to get ROI on a billion buckaroonees but if they give up at any point, we can fork it and take back over. We can actually do that now if we need to. I remember when Oracle bought RDB and then proceeded to kill it gently with neglect. The only way they could get away with that is because they owned the source. MySQL is not vulnerable to that kind of strategy.

And if I were a founder, I’d much rather go to Sun than to Google or to Yahoo, the other likely targets (mostly because of their vast adoption of MySQL coupled with deep pockets). Sun is a product company, a software company, and a support company, that actually sells these things, knows how to sell them successfully and take them to market long-term. And it’s filled with geniuses who are dying to hook to the next big thing.

In my opinion, a great move by MySQL.

P.S. I have started to reflect on how this changes the challenge posed by MySQL to Oracle. I think it changes it a lot, and in fact makes it a much more difficult challenge. I may post on that subject too if I can scrounge the time.