Archive for January 2007

Open source tools to run a small-medium sized business

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

  • contact management – the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
  • document management – businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
  • accounting – taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every last cent.
  • collaboration/whiteboard – this is where a Wiki tends to shine (or some form of CMS).
  • weblog – these seem to be the promotional tools of the 21st century.
  • e-mail client – long gone are the days of telex, faxes, and postal services. A lot of people live life out of their e-mail clients in business, so one that makes life easier and more productive is very important.
  • office suite – just as typewriters, accounting books and transparencies (slides) go out of fashion, a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation suite are very significant in how modern business are run.
  • server software – you need a domain, email, web hosting, and possibly some of these applications should be online, in a secure location, (say https://intranet.mybusiness.com/), that requires a login.

I haven’t mentioned a database, because I presume most of the above requirements do tend to use a database of sorts (usually MySQL). I haven’t even mentioned an operating system, because without a doubt, as a small to medium sized business, you will want to be running an open source variant – BSD or Linux is a war we shall not get into, neither is a war such that we go down the road of Fedora vs. Ubuntu or something similar.

Now, dear Interweb, what else do you think a small business owner needs to have? I’m just after the software processes that make a business happen. In fact, if it currently involves something Windows, OS X or (God forbid) DOS based, I’d still like to know.

Why? Things like the NGO-in-a-box project make a lot of sense. In fact, for open source to become more mainstream, we need to provide usable, workable, and reliable systems. With the launch of Vista, and the ease-of-use for business folk, combined with Office 2007 and all the stack they have to offer (which are surprisingly becoming less costly than before), the open source world needs to have the same, if not greater strength.

Oh, and because, all the cool kids are playing with virtualization, today. Tomorrow’s cool kids will be thinking about appliances.

Getting emo over binaries?

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as Kaj has stated. Maybe we weren’t clear enough in our communication, and we’re clearly sorry. I think Kaj’s initial announcement was clear, but maybe a tabular form might be easier to understand? Keep in mind that odd numbers equate to Community releases, and even numbers equate to Enterprise releases.

5.0.27 – Community Binary & Source
5.0.28 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.30 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.32 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.33 – Community Source (sync’ed to Enterprise 5.0.32)

So while we’re not attaching a timeframe to our releases, the above might make it easier to visualize, that the next time we release a Community edition, it will contain both binaries and source. In an ideal world, you’ll see a Community release after 2 Enterprise releases (i.e. on the 3rd release), one of which will be a source release, and the other which will be a source and binary release.

This is not a roadmap, but if we see the Community Server sources show up in January, I don’t see why we won’t see the Community Server sources & binaries showing up in March. June might see another source release, while September shows up a source & binary release. And so on…

So, if you see a binary once every six months, how is that rarely released? We’re not expecting Windows users to compile away.

In fact, the reasoning behind more frequent source releases, is to help those distributing MySQL. These are the Linux, *BSD, OS X, and other distributions that many people get their MySQL fix from. We want to make sure that with varying distribution freeze dates for releases (most good ones, ala Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. work on a six-month cycle), a new source tarball is available, and that the distributions themselves can publish it. We’re saving the infliction of pain of using BitKeeper, and taking random changesets.

Back to the question of Windows users. This is a time for Windows distributors to step up. XAMPP might be a good alternative for the learning crowd (with an easy to use installer for Apache, MySQL and PHP), and if others think we should work more closely with the project, by all means, leave a comment here or write me some email.

For those still concerned, I’d like to point out to Kaj’s Community Server recap. Don’t misunderstand point #4, as that is clearly in the Enterprise context, and its something we like to use in MySQL talks to talk about differentiation. If you’ve ever been to an overview talk, there are even clever icons that basically spell out that Enterprise customers like to spend money to save time, while Community folk enjoy spending time to save money.

To cap this all off, yes, MySQL are still providing binaries. Yes, we’ll see one Community source release, and one Community source+binary release. This will follow on with just a Community source release, and yet another Community source+binary release. Repeat, rinse.

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Herding cats, influencing people, building communities

There have been a lot of good talks at linux.conf.au so far that I’ve attended (and the one’s that I’ve missed due to scheduling difficulty, I’ve already started watching some videos of). There are lots of good reports about it on Planet Linux Australia even, but one of the most useful talks in my opinion was Jono Bacon’s talk on Herding Cats and Influencing People (watch the video when its uploaded), his thoughts on running a Community.

He talked about McDonalds, and how they package things, that are consumable by all (his point was that projects generally might even need bite size tasks, not get new contributors chucked into the deep end). Which got me thinking, a little more. McDonalds are in the real estate business, and they’re one of the major players in the fast food industry. I’ve always believed that there are too many Linux distributors in the market, and market fragmentation is bad (after all, its widely believed that there is only one Windows logo, and everyone recognizes that just fine).

But maybe, Linux distributions, and open source databases, web servers, mail servers, and so on, are like fast food joints. There’s never going to be one dominant winner, but all of which take significant market share, in serving up food. Take one of my favorite streets in Melbourne for example, Swanston St – there are about 3 McDonalds in the vicinity, one KFC, one Burger King, about 3 Starbucks, a smattering of Gloria Jeans, all of which are chains. They all compete with one another, some win over others (being open for 24-hours, maybe), but they’ve all been there for ages, and in the case of McDonalds and Starbucks are clearly expanding.

Comments from Zak Greant, I believe, were most interesting too. He said, that corporate America generally has a misconception of what Community really is. Besides, what does the community at large get out of being in the community created? They’ve got to be stake-holders, not just something thats good for business or investors. So involving them in decisions for the future, are mandatory. He also mentioned that one mistake is hiring away all your community, and busy-ing them up with other company related work – a balance is clearly required.

And the age-old-adage of how you define the wheat from the chaff. I like the anecdote in where a noise-maker that did all the traditional mistakes of being an armchair pundit, was just actually lost, waiting for a task to do. I think thats something we can all learn from, as dealing with large communities is never an easy task.

Building one, is also never an easy task. Rigid rules, are a no-no (that creates a bureaucracy not a community). Realizing that its important to get past the mailing list discussions and actually just doing something (this is how Seth decided to build mock, then extend it to plague, in Fedora for example), anything even, will probably make a difference. People get attracted to things moving, not things being discussed. Jay Pipes got afoot to start Doxygen-izing of MySQL – something that was talked about on mailing lists for far too long.

Also thinking about different tasks – translations, coding, documentation, evangelism, and so on. They all have different people, working in different ways – some like to work in a group, some like to do it all alone. Identifying this in itself is an important task.

I like the “water cooler” concept that Canonical seem to push. In a totally virtual company, the water cooler will be IRC, or mailing lists. In a company where there’s an office, developers might tend to talk about something new at the water cooler, and never actually let the community know about it. Here’s something we at MySQL can also learn, as we have a WorkLog that still isn’t public (yet).

Action. Action. Action. I think thats what we need to take away for 2007. And how do we herd a community successfully? I’ll be sure to tell you when I have the answer.

MySQL MiniConf rocked!

Stewart was hoping the MySQL MiniConf (hereinafter called mysql.conf.au) would rock. In fact, it actually did.

At any one time, we had over 60-75 people in the room. It was a standing room, with full attendance at all the talks!

As soon as I get all the slides, I’ll place it up at Forge.

Here’s 10 good reasons to come to MySQL.conf.au

MySQL Staff Party 2006
Or should I say, the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au.

There are some great talks – just check out the schedule & abstracts.

MySQL Staff Party 2006

But what’s most interesting, in my opinion, is the cool Answer Guys feature. Think of it like stumping the expert, a little. The MySQL Support Team presents Arjen Lentz (MySQL trainer too!), and Morgan Tocker, for your answering pleasure, all MiniConf day.

They’ll be by the lawn (I’m not sure how UNSW is setup), thats definitely very near the room we’re having the MiniConf at (Room 6).

Turion 64 X2 or Core 2 Duo for a Linux Laptop?

Dear Interweb (really Linux on Laptop people),

Do you recommend a Turion 64 X2 or an Intel Core 2 Duo in a laptop?

My main aim is to make it run Fedora with all its bells and whistles (and hope it lasts longer than 2 years; the older IBM can’t do Xen in FC-6).

Are Dell’s a good buy? Are their three years comprehensive warranty worth buying (much like its a necessity for the Apple stuff)? Is the Inspiron or Latitude the more affordable versions of the Dell? Why can’t I see Firewire in their specs? Whatever happened to good ‘ole PCMCIA slots?

Size isn’t really a factor, I’ve become used to lugging 15″ wide screens for a while now, even during travel.

One thing I’ve found funny with the Dell website – I can’t untick MS Windows or even MS Works. I apparently need to have them. Can I return them without hassle?


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