More proof that people dont understand OSS licensing

It is incredible to me that despite all the publicity and sexiness of open source, the majority of people still dont understand how open source licenses work. Despite the good work of most folks in attempting to explain the key differences between Apache/BSD-style licenses, GPL licenses, and others, I get the impression that a lot of developers out there treat open source as some sort of no-strings-attached code resource. Want to use GPL library in your code? Easy… abide by the license, or find another alternative.

2 comments November 28th, 2007 javier

Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta Now Available

The first release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta is now available for download. This exciting new release is designed to provide a more powerful “single pane of glass” to monitor, diagnose and manage today’s complex, custom, web-based IT environments. In addition, significant infrastructure enhancements to the core Hyperic HQ platform were added to deliver the most scalable and manageable enterprise monitoring software available in open source.

New Diagnostics and Visibility
Today’s IT administrators deal with an increasing burden of disparate technologies, and changing resources to monitor and maintain. Typically, they rely on a variety of utilities and diagnostic tools to ensure and restore availability to their systems. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces three new capabilities that provide both new and existing users of HQ a single console to manage all layers of their infrastructure:

3 comments November 27th, 2007 Hyperic Press Desk

“Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” vs. Freedom of choice in IT

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

Add comment November 19th, 2007 javier

Elvis is in the Building: thoughts from LISA 07

Once again, it was an interesting time at USENIX LISA. It never fails - whenever I come to this conference, I’m always humbled by the brainpower of those hobnobbing around. The intellectual density is quite high. This year’s version of LISA was held at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas.

Add comment November 16th, 2007 John Mark

Hyperic Hint #1: Fixing Transaction ID Wraparound Failures in built-in HQDB

The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.

If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

2 comments November 15th, 2007 John Sachs

Hyperic First Enterprise Systems Management Vendor to Support Apple’s Leopard

Apple announced its latest version of its popular Mac OS X distribution, code named Leopard, on Friday, October 26. Today, November 12, Hyperic announced that Hyperic HQ now includes support for Leopard, giving Mac developers and administrators alike access to fully supported, enterprise-ready systems management for the new OS.

Businesses, particularly in the technology sector, are increasingly gravitating toward development and operations on Mac OS X run machines. In fact, development at Hyperic itself is done largely on MacBook Pros. Better usability factors for multi-tasking and a robust architecture that appeals to developers drew Hyperic towards the Mac OS X early on in the company’s development.

Add comment November 12th, 2007 Hyperic Press Desk

Thanks, Oracle

Normally I don’t make a point of calling out other vendors by name, but this time I can’t resist. See, Oracle’s big party-turned-conference is this week. “Larry-fest” — I’ve heard it called by some cynics. I believe the tagline is something to the effect of “100,000 reasons to say thank you.” Thank you indeed, Oracle. Thanks for closing down a whole frickin street 3 WHOLE DAYS BEFORE your database love fest and creating 4 more extra days of traffic. Lucky for us, Hyperic is a few blocks away and gets to enjoy the fruits of Oracle’s closure of Howard St. between 3rd & 4th here in San Francisco. Why did they close it? Well, to say THANK YOU to all the people who pay them tons of money… none of which apparently plan on driving in SOMA for a few days!

3 comments November 11th, 2007 javier

Keeping an Eye on Leopard

It has been a couple of years since the Hyperic development team decided to adopt Macs and OS X as our standard development environment, probably around the time when my Toshiba Windows XP laptop was threatening to spiral itself into oblivion for the second time in as many years. Eventually, I paid a second $600+ repair bill to get it rescued, but knew its days were numbered. We already had a couple of developers who worked on their Powerbooks without issues for a good number of problem free years, and the release of Intel based Macbook Pros was just the impetus we needed for the whole team to move to the Mac platform for our development.

2 comments November 9th, 2007 Charles Lee

It’s Official: Hyperic = Open Source World Domination

Almost a week late but for those of you who were curious about our Wii challenge…

Last week, some of the best and brightest open source companies in the bay area congregated at Hyperic Headquarters, and played a spirited game of Wii Tennis to vie for the title of Open Source Champion and its prize: The Golden Racket.

The title gives it away, Hyperic won. Specifically, Scott Feldstein (aka scottmf) rose to the occasion and took the prize:

Add comment November 7th, 2007 javier

Virtualization in Production: Flexibility the Driver, Not Cost

Yesterday, Hyperic published a case study about Mosso, a division of Rackspace. Co-founder Jonathan Bryce tells a great story. They manage 30,000 websites and applications using a sophisticated architecture that is 100% clustered and 100% virtualized using VMware.

Of course, the case study talks all about how Hyperic HQ is the software that made this setup manageable. It’s the whole point of the case study and the press release.

Add comment November 6th, 2007 javier