I grew up in Ireland, a land of saints and scholars, where we’re uniquely blessed with an expansive and colorful vocabulary. My father banned only one word from the family home, that word was “cheap”. We learned an understanding and appreciation for ”value” from an early age, and in fact we conducted “TCO” studies long before we understood that term. “Cheap”, we learned, was a waste of hard earned money, “inexpensive”, on the other hand, could often be a part of a good value proposition.

This year I’ve resolved to get fit and decided to buy a treadmill so that I could combine my love of junk TV with exercise.

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Regular readers of my blog will recall that late last year I described France as a hot-bed of open source activity. Today you may have seen the announcement from the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), of which Ingres is a member, announcing the formation of OSA Europe. The European Chapter of the OSA shares the goal of building compelling open solutions, based upon the integration and interoperability of best of breed open source solutions, and promoting best practices and frameworks around these solutions.

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I hopped on a plane in New York this morning and planned on writing a blog about new year’s resolutions. Resolution one is to “Stop Procrastinating” which might explain why that particular blog is three weeks behind schedule. When I landed in SFO, my blackberry almost melted under the strain of all the email traffic around the MySQL and BEA acquisitions. Read the rest of this entry »

 

One of my many vices is that I’m a junk TV addict; I live alone in a house with six TVs, three DVRs, a blue-ray disc player, and a Slingbox so that I can feed my addiction while I’m on the road. I’ll waste as much as three hours a day catching up on the latest junk TV, and just like junk food it’s compulsive but completely unmemorable. I read with great interest in Monday’s New York Times about a device that will allow users to convert pretty much any video source into an MP4 on either a memory card or USB storage device, and the most amazing thing about the device is that it’s an open source hardware platform. Read the rest of this entry »

 

I was amused to learn that Sun has announced a million dollar awards program targeted at fostering innovation around Sun’s open source development project. Those of you who have been following Ingres for a while will remember that when we first contributed Ingres to the open source community we too set up a million dollar prize fund to foster innovation in the open source development community. In hindsight it was a rookie mistake; money won’t buy you the love or respect of the open source community; many open source developers have full-time jobs as professional developers and participate in open source for fun, not profit. Read the rest of this entry »

 

“The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”; depending upon your perspective the author of this quote is either incredibly clever, or incredibly naive, but either way I think he’d be very much in awe of the French Revolution that’s underway today. The government in France has woken up to the fact that to retain their position as a force majeure that they need to reinvent themselves and to that end they are funding entrepreneurs and innovative endeavors. Read the rest of this entry »

 

I’m in Europe this week meeting with customers, partners and open source project teams. The biggest news story of the week spans the popular business and technology press and relates to the loss of two CDs containing personal information for 25 million UK citizens. Having been the victim of identity fraud in the past I know exactly what’s ahead of these folks to ensure that this event doesn’t affect their ability to buy a house or a car in the future. It took me 18 months to undo the damage done to my own credit rating and now I take a belt and braces approach to protecting my personal data: I have put an alert on my credit record with all of the major credit reporting agencies, check my credit record on a monthly basis and shred all correspondence.

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