Open Source Shakeup

I sat down with long-time Samba team member and noted open-source expert John Terpstra last Sunday at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLe 4x) in Los Angeles, and created a podcast from the interview.Interesting events are happening in the open-source community.

MySQL AB secured $18.5 million in Series C funding this week. The deal was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a Menlo Park, Calif. venture capital firm. Corporate investors in the round were Intel Capital; Red Hat; SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; and Presidio STX, the U.S.-based venture investment subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation.

On Feb. 14, Oracle Corp. reported acquiring open-source database company Sleepycat for an undisclosed sum.

Sleepycat's Berkeley DB development team and other company employees are moving to Oracle, following Oracle's acquisition of the company and its open-source embeddable database earlier this week

On Tuesday, Microsoft and open-source software maker SugarCRM Inc. made an interesting announcement, agreeing to collaborate on interoperability.

SugarCRM said it will release a new Sugar Suite distribution under the Microsoft Community License with the Sugar Suite 4.5 version. The license is part of the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative. Through the program Microsoft shares source code with customers and partners.

It's not the first time Microsoft has partnered with an open source company. In late September, Microsoft and JBoss announced plans to explore enhanced interoperability between JBoss Enterprise Middleware System and Microsoft Windows Server products and deepen JBoss support for the Windows Server operating system.

At SCaLe 4x, Terpstra said collaboration between Microsoft and open-source communities is necessary.

Companies that use open source and Windows operating systems, applications and databases don't want to deal with disruption. "We need co-develop and cooperation in the market, not a knock-out war," he said.