Sunday, January 27, 2008

Do as I Say Not as I Do.

The Winner of the 2007 "Do as I Say Not as I Do" Award goes to Forrester Research.

Turns out that in November 2007 an employee of Forrester had their notebook stolen from their home.

Problem. The names addresses and Social Security numbers of past and present employees were on the notebook. Was the file encrypted or the notebook password protected? As yet we don't know.

Read the article for yourself at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2228887,00.asp .

If you google the terms "Forrester Research" and "Data Breach" ( http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=data+breach+Forrester+Research&btnG=Search&meta=) you find out that Forrester is one of the high tech industry's consultant companies. A Gartner competitor. They sell hi-tech consulting and research reports to large firms. They have published quite a few papers on the subject of data breaches and security and one would assume that they would have taken a little more care with their own data.

I wonder if any of the Fortune 1,000 firms who spent good money on data breach and security reports from Forrester will be asking for a refund?

James Gingerich
Sr Partner Account Manager
Sybase iAnywhere
jgingeri@ianywhere.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesg2006
http://softwaresalespersoneducation.blogspot.com/

Monday, January 21, 2008

Sun Acquires MySQL.

Why isn't the Open Source community protesting?

Where are the demonstrations?

Like the JBoss sellout almost a year ago. Nothing is said.

I wonder how much Martin Mickos made on this deal personally? The company was sold for over $1 billion. Did it make more than $60 million in revenue last year? Was it profitable? Or did the last two rounds of angel funding just manage to keep it alive?

How much of the $1 billion will go back to the Open Source Community?

Zero.

And therein lies the irony.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20080116/tc_infoworld/94628;_ylt=AuY9uRHV5FNT737oee.BhMrw7rEF

Fanatic open source proponents who enjoy condemning commercial software vendors for charging for software need to take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror. For open source vendors have been exploiting them far worse than any commercial software vendor ever could.

Commercial software vendors pay wages. Developers get paid for the work they do. The commercial software vendors own the code.

Open Source software companies don't pay wages. Developers don't get paid for the work they do. The Open Source community owns the code. But the concept of MySQL just got sold out from under them for over $1 billion dollars.

If I was a developer who contributed to the MySQL code I'd be strongly asking; "Where is my dividend cheque?"

Martin Mickos is much more of a capitalist than Bill Gates ever was. He made his first billion from a software company much faster than Bill Gates and he managed to figure out how to run a software company without paying most of his developers.

Even Bill Gates wasn't able to pull that one off.

Congratulations Martin!

Remember Icarus from Greek mythology Martin? He flew to close to the SUN, his wings melted and he fell back to the earth. Could you be a modern day Icarus? Brought back to earth by a modern day class action law suit? I can't wait to find out how this chapter of Open Source mythology ends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus