I’m always boggled by the number of things that exist under the open source umbrella. Recently, thanks to twitter @chrisindallas, I came across an open source rocket project, YikStik.

YikStik is the labor of love of Bdale Garbee who is HP’s Linux CTO and acting secretary of the Debian project.

YikStick is licensed Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0, so get going if you have your own 3-axis CNC milling machine.

Speaking of CNC milling machines, and carrying on the rich open source tradition of bad naming, check out the open source CNC, cupcake. Cupcake is another in the line of machines that can make machines like Reprap.

Finally, if you haven’t already seen it, check out the world’s largest model rocket launched by Steve Eves. It is a 1:10 scale Saturn V – 36 foot tall model rocket. Boggles my mind what people can accomplish in their “spare” time.

About me

I’m an independent consultant who used to do a lot of work for OpenLogic. I greatly appreciate OpenLogic and the mission they are fulfilling as well as their willingness to let me contribute to this blog. Views expressed here are not necessarily those of OpenLogic and any mistakes are 100% attributable to me. You can contact me at: landon at 360vl dot com or visit http://sawdust.see-do.org Twitter @esawdust

The open source pundits are out in full force trying to anticipate what Oracle's acquisition of Sun means for MySQL. It's a fun exercise to try to predict the future — which may be why there’s no consensus. Here are some of the quotes that we found interesting.

• Larry Dignan, ZDNET: "Oracle gets to kill MySQL. There’s no way Ellison will let that open source database mess with the margins of his database. MySQL at best will wither from neglect. In any case, MySQL is MyToast."
• Larry Augustin, long time open source investor and entrepreneur, suggested on his Twitter feed "Oracle probably keeps some of the storage software assets while selling the hardware parts to EMC, Hitachi or HP. Win-win."
• Marten Mikos, former MySQL chief told Forbes: "Larry Ellison is smart. MySQL was getting around 70,000 downloads a day when I left. It's an amazing grip on young developers. Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle."

We agree with Larry and Marten – we don't think the MySQL community would let MySQL die even if Oracle wanted to kill it. Open source communities are resilient and have the ability to be self-repairing. There are plenty of people in the developer and user community who want the MySQL technology to continue to grow and evolve. If Oracle either neglected MySQL or actively tried to kill it, the community could and likely would fork the project and continue on. So, we don't think MySQL will die.

But we also think there is a valid concern that Oracle will raise the support costs of MySQL. There are a couple of reasons we think this is likely:

1. History
After Red Hat acquired JBoss, we started to get JBoss customers coming to us when their RedHat/JBoss subscriptions came up for renewal. They were reporting increases in subscription prices from RedHat/JBoss — by as much as 400%. We expect that trend to continue with Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

2. Business Models
Oracle has a typical high-cost enterprise software business model. They spend a lot of money to acquire and retain customers. And they expect and get high margins for their maintenance business. Successful open source companies need to learn how to operate with much lower expenses — in order to provide subscriptions and support to customers at much lower costs. As MySQL begins to be offered through the Oracle sales force and channels, Oracle's enterprise sales model will impact costs of selling MySQL and will likely result in higher prices for MySQL support from Oracle.

In addition, there will be pressure to avoid cannibalization of revenue on the Oracle database, which will drive Oracle to reduce the price differential between Oracle DB and MySQL.

The promise of open source companies lies in their ability to offer significantly lower cost support and solutions to customers. To deliver on this promise, a different mentality is required.

First, open source companies must foster open communities. To gain the cost savings and quality benefits that come with open source, you need communities that extend beyond the walls of one company. Only then can you break free of the high development costs that come with traditional proprietary software.

Second, open source companies must foster low cost sales models. Typical software sales approaches are simply too expensive when you are trying to deliver software at a fraction of the cost.

It's highly doubtful that Oracle will be able to change their mentality and their approach — so the result will unfortunately be higher pricing from Oracle on MySQL support and subscriptions.

Luckily, one of the other benefits of open source is that customers have choice. They are not locked-in to one vendor for support.

As InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues reported in February, one of the leading reasons that almost 100 medium-sized and Fortune 500 companies come to OpenLogic is for our low-cost MySQL, JBoss, and Tomcat support.

For cost-effective consolidated support providers such as OpenLogic, we expect this acquisition to drive more customers to compare prices on open source support and bump our sales, just as the RedHat/JBoss acquisition did a few years ago.

This morning I was browsing my twitter stream and came across one of the many “life coaches” that seem to have found twitter like stink on a skunk and saw this little jewel:

ConnectSocMediaRT @lifesuccesstv One of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone is the gift of attention. Jim Rohn

I laughed out loud and thought “That has to be one of the most ironic, moronic, hypo-critic things I’ve ever seen on twitter.” What’s even more ironic was the fact it was a retweet (and what’s more ironic is that I’m effectively retweeting it now in this blog post.) How’s that for sick?

It reminded me of the Crosby Stills and Nash song Daylight Again and their lyrics “When everyone’s talking and no one is listening…how can we decide?”

I’m sure I’m like most grizzled veterans of the net who, when we first heard the hype of twitter, rolled our eyes and thought “Here we go again.” And like most grizzled veterans of the net, we’re doing what we all do best when given a huge network to play with, try to take advantage of it.

With that reluctant intro, take a look at Spaz, an open source twitter client. It’s an Adobe Air client that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux…some might argue it can’t be open source if the tool used to build it isn’t, but there you are.

The first client that lets me do a good job of filtering X,000 followers (like I have that many), down to about 10, will get my vote. I’m realizing that as twitter supplies RSS feeds for each account, what I really need is an uber newsfeed reader for twitter. Lots and lots of twitter “productivity” tools popping up in the cesspool of social networks. How gross is that? The ultimate oxymoron: productive social networking. Seems less like evidence of a fertile and useful environment than one that’s systemically broken.

The problem with twitter is that every so often, a little jewel floats down the River Ganges like flotsam and it’s that which keeps some of us coming back for more.

About me

I’m an independent consultant who used to do a lot of work for OpenLogic. I greatly appreciate OpenLogic and the mission they are fulfilling as well as their willingness to let me contribute to this blog. Views expressed here are not necessarily those of OpenLogic and any mistakes are 100% attributable to me. You can contact me at: landon at 360vl dot com or visit http://sawdust.see-do.org

If you really want to “follow me” (cough), you can find me at http://twitter.com/esawdust ( @esawdust )

Wikipedia defines application lifecycle management (ALM) as "the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management." Source control management (SCM) tools are a key component of the ALM process, and developers today have many good open source options when it comes to selecting SCM tools.

We're hosting a webinar on April 28 in which we'll compare and contrast some of the most popular open source tools for SCM, including Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial, and Subversion. Brad Reeves, Senior Content Engineer at OpenLogic, will examine the features included with popular open source SCM tools and discuss which tools best interface with other commonly used ALM applications.

Other topics covered to be covered this webinar include:

• Which open source SCM tools are best at branching, merging, and tagging
• Client/server vs. single repository SCM tools
• Peer-to-peer vs. distributed system SCM tools
• How the leading open source SCM tools compare to commercial alternatives

Whether you're evaluating open source SCM tools for use in your software engineering process or simply want to stay abreast of new trends, please be sure to join us on Tuesday, April 28 at 11:00 Pacific / 2:00 Eastern.