Blog: Pete Loshin

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October 23, 2007

New Open Source Business Model using Eclipse

It's starting. The new wave of new businesses, built on new models for making money while using and supporting free/open source software.

Eclipse is "an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle."

Even with massive improvements since I first wrote about it in The Value of Eclipse for the Open Source Community almost two years ago, Eclipse can still be confusing and complicated to get up and running.

Some see that as an obstacle to an otherwise useful tool, but others, like the people at Genuitec saw an opportunity for a cool service, MyEclipse, a subscription based toolbox for enterprise Eclipse development.

MyEclipse subscriptions start at $31.75/year, but according to this article at eWeek, Eclipse Gains a Pulse, Genuitec next month plans to announce "PoweredByPulse, a free service that company executives said could become the de facto mechanism for provisioning software, whether commercial, free or mixed."

This is most encouraging: it means the long-anticipated model of providing services around open source software is getting real.

If you want to use Eclipse, it's free. You can figure it out on your own, spending your time; or you can purchase access to infrastructures for using and distributing software using Eclipse.

Genuitec is doing the heavy lifting to build the infrastructure, but they're keeping the costs down because the services are automated. So you get the best of both worlds, and if someone comes along and offers a better set of Eclipse-related services, you're free to jump ship.

What a concept: vendors compete based on the value proposition they offer, while not imposing proprietary software with its attendant vendor lock-in. Enterprise software consumers can decide on which vendor based on performance and quality, not whether or not they support some proprietary standards.

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October 17, 2007

Cloud Computing with Amazon

I just mentioned Amazon EC2 the other day, as being in limited beta--now Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is open to the masses in an unlimited beta. EC2 "is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

From the EC2 page:

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

So now you can create your own virtualized data center, optimized for the web, and it'll cost you next to nothing, at least to start. Amazon's AWS calculator lets you estimate your usage of the Amazon Web Services, which include EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (that's middleware, and worthy of a separate discussion here, soon) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). If you think you know what you need, you can figure out about how much it'll cost you, monthly.

You get the use of Amazon's infrastructure, worth who knows how many millions of dollars, but you pay for what you use. Kind of like having a limo/private aviation service available on-demand, where you pay only for what you use, when you use it--but you get instant transport in state-of-the-art cars/planes/helicopters.

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October 12, 2007

Amazon S3, Now with SLA!

Thinking about building or buying your own datacenter for a web-scale application? You probably know just how expensive it can be. Now there's an alternative: Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). (If you're an S3 subscriber and you want some compute cycles on demand instead of buying your own hardware, you can try the beta version of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), too.)

From S3 page:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

That's not news; S3 was announced back in March 2006. What's news is that now Amazon is offering an SLA . Which means that enterprises can now confidently use Amazon's big big datacenter for next to nothing to try out new web applications. Pretty cool.

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October 4, 2007

The Ultimate Guide to SQL Implementations

Ever wonder whether or not some feature you need/want in your chosen implementation of SQL can be ported to or implemented in some other vendor's SQL implementation?

Now, you can look it up here, at the Comparison of different SQL implementations page, the work of Troels Arvin, database administrator in the Danish National Board of Health.

Go check it out and you can figure out just how your SQL of choice stacks up against the SQL:2003 standard, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

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