The Real Measure of Software Success

There’s a lot of buzz around these days about what makes or breaks open source. Nat Torkington recently blogged about Is “Open Source” Completely Meaningless?. He asks a good question when asking for feedback on the future direction of OSCON. The recent Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) announcement has had a number of folks wallowing in the precise checklist of who really qualifies to use the term “Open Source” in relation to their business - “pure” open source, open source-based, and on and on.

1 comment February 26th, 2007 javier

Hyperic HQ "Premium Certified" with EnterpriseDB

We just received word from the fine folks at EnterpriseDB they they have certified their database product for use with Hyperic HQ. Previously, we certified only Oracle and PostgreSQL as database backends. This is not to be confused, by the way, with database products we enable our customers to monitor and manage. That list includes most any database, whether open source or proprietary. One of our core principles has always been to give our customers the choice of what technologies they want to use, and certifying more databases for HQ is another step in that direction.

Add comment February 21st, 2007 John Mark

LinuxWorld New York

Blogging with a loaned nokia n800. LinuxWorld NY has been a hit. Our booth has been swamped, hq’s 3.0 release has been enthusiastically received, and the OSA announcement generated plenty of interest. This conference has been a win-win-win. I’ll post a news round-up later - quite a few news outlets covered our releases.

Add comment February 15th, 2007 John Mark

InformationWeek Article in Print

If you happen to glance at a copy of InformationWeek this week, you might notice something on page 43:

Add comment February 8th, 2007 John Mark

Calling All Beta Users: Who Wants to be a Star?

Attention all 3.0 Beta Users. As you may have noticed, Hyperic has released our first Release Candidate for 3.0. That means the official release is coming very soon! We would really like to hear from you what your thoughts are on this beta product and the release process. And for any of you that would like your name quoted in tech publications and web sites, we would love to quote one of you in our product release to the media. Any volunteers?

Add comment February 7th, 2007 John Mark

InformationWeek: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

Charles Babcock has written an interesting article discussing how to project an open source project’s success or failure. There’s also a nice bit about the role of user communities, which includes a quote from Javier:

Many think of an open source “community” as a passel of unpaid developers who code because they love it, but that’s not the driving force behind most of the work. In general, only a small group is allowed to modify or submit changes to source code. Other developers submit code to these core developers. But most important for companies assessing the health of a project is the size–and motivation–of the group of users hammering away on the code and identifying what’s wrong with it, and how the project responds to that input. For example, the Hyperic development team spends a quarter of its time participating in user forums, CEO Javier Soltero says.

Add comment February 5th, 2007 John Mark