This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to respectable elder statesman of open source. The action is among the new batch of up-and-coming open source software companies who are not yet venture backed but are developing interesting technologies and services. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, applications, Bitnami, Bitrock, Business, Conference, Enomaly, Loopfuse, MindTouch, Open Source, Red Hat, Ringside Networks, startups

I am on my way to the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco today and I am excited it’s always good to see old friends and talk about selling free software without getting the 1,000-yard stare. If you are going to be there hit me up on Twitter.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Business, Community, Conference, Open Source, OSBC

I attended the LISA 07 Birds of a Feather (BoF) on Configuration Management led by Luke Kanies of Puppet tonight. He defines Puppet as the infrastructure to manage your infrastructure.

A straw poll of about 50 attendees (who were Large Installation Systems Administrators) indicated that they used the following tools for configuration management.

• Puppet – 2
• BCfg2 – 2
• Cfengine – 15
• Homebrewed – 16
• Shared Homebrew – 2
• LCFG – 1
• Opsware – 0
• BladeLogic – 0

20 of the attendees were actively looking to replace their infrastructure for configuration management. The highest response was for home brewed tools. I think that speaks to the complexity of the issue of configuration management its hard to create a tool that meets everyone’s needs. I was also surprised at how well represented open source tools were over the commercial tools but at the end of the day there seemed to be very few tools that had universal appeal. Though after speaking with Luke and the users of his tools it seems like Puppet has a good a story as any.

Update: Luke pointed out my tagging was probably a little incomplete, updated 11/24/07 

Technorati Tags: , BCfg2, Bladelogic, Cfengine, Conference, LISA O7, Luke Kanies, Open Source, Opsware, Puppet, Usenix