Category Archives: open source

Xen: merged

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Via OSNews: Xen virtualization has been merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.  This is a hot topic at the moment, if you’ll pardon the pun, because of all the physical — space and energy — problems that real-world data centers are running into today.  Virtualization of computing/processing power — like the virtualization of storage and so forth — is one answer to this problem.  Virtualization, though, creates other problems, especially including the management of virtualized machines.  In some ways, managing VMs is harder than managing actual boxes; it has been a major stumbling block in the adoption of processor virtualization, one which Novell’s Orchestrator product neatly solves.

(Yes, graybeards, I know that virtualization has been around on mainframes and other platforms since time immemorial.)

Enterprise LAMP?

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Linux continues its relentless march across the enterprise IT landscape; there are now few places in the corporate data center where Linux doesn’t make sense. And Linux has been the default choice for start-ups, especially SaaS start-ups, for a while now. Zack Urlocker illustrates the point with the example of iLike, a music sharing site (the kids are all into it), which scaled from 1m to 6m users in a few weeks on the back of a LAMP stack.

So what happened to ActiveGrid, which was supposed to bring LAMP to the enterprise? Peter Yared’s gone onto other things, and has this to say about LAMP’s supposed lack of penetration into the enterprise market. Essentially, he’s arguing that it’s Java’s fault; Java’s gotten easier to use and taken the wind out of the sails of the scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python, etc.) in the LAMP stack. I don’t know that I buy that explanation — Linux and Apache seem to be doing quite well, thank you, and I haven’t heard any complaints from MySQL either — but it explains, I suppose, ActiveGrid’s shift in focus to Java.

“The Ignorance of Crowds”

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Nicholas Carr, who has a new book coming out soon (“The Big Switch”, which argues for software as a service), has a good article in Booz Allen’s Strategy + Business magazine. The article, “The Ignorance of Crowds,” does a good job of looking at where we are with open source software development ten years after Eric Raymond first published “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

Carr argues that it’s not one or the other but a combination of both; good open source projects are like cathedrals in that they have a small group of leaders but the bazaar gives them advantages in certain areas, especially bug fixes.

He extends the analogy to one of his pet peeves, Wikipedia, which is an ultimate example of a bazaar, since there’s hardly any central authority at all, at least up until recently. I’m a much bigger fan of Wikipedia than Carr is, and I think his reaction partly reflects his editorial background; he was an editor at the Harvard Business Review and I would bet that he takes affront at the idea of a publication without editors.

But that aside, “The Ignorance of Crowds” is a recommended read.