Here are my new sweethearts that are going to run CentOS. I brought them home yesterday and today after some re-arrangements of the harddrives I’m ready to install them. They’re going to take care of everything my poor P3 700Mhz with 312MB ram has been doing for about 2 years, which is everything from MySQL databases to Nagios monitoring system.

A short specifications on these cuties are:

forth: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 6x 18.2 GB hdd

perl: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2,5 GB RAM, 6x 9.1 GB hdd

draco: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18,2 GB hdd

dibol: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18.2 GB hdd

pascal: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

prolog: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

This first day offered a few other interesting presentations such as Alexander Schanz from DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH who talked about their open source radar data processing system PHOENIX runing on SUSE Linux and Lennart Hagberg from TetraPak who showed us and talked about the open source software behind their communications plattform for videos and documentation, an internal “YouTube”-service together with a wiki for documentation built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and WordPress.

On day two of Open Source Forum 2008 there were two tracks, one track with presentations like the day before and one track with live demonstrations of products and services. I begun day two at the live demonstrations track listening to Urban Anjar from Ubuntu Sverige talk about Ubuntu Linux and show KVM virtualization on Ubuntu. After the coffee break I ended up talking about Nagios and Op5′s Nagios-based network monitoring system with Jonas Björk and a representative from Op5.

Next up before lunch was Erik Lönroth from Scania Infomate who talked about how the use Linux in their cluster for calculations and simulations. With open standards and open source software they reduced many performance problems, but when they got here they found a new problem, no one had solved the problems they encountered before. To my surprise it would be until this point of this conferense when someone finaly said that you can get far with open source, but when you’re there it’s time to solve the problems never solved before and share them with others. At this moment I found myself thinking that with people like Erik Lönroth out there on the IT departments of the companies there’s hope for open source to survive the step into the world of business.

A presentation that surprised me during this conference was Anders Wallenquist from Vertel/Dataföreningen who talked about the CMS Drupal. I was surprised because I’ve never understood how competent Drupal acctually is and on top of this Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, will move their webpage to Drupal instead of Escenic and Polopoly like most other newspapers in Sweden uses. To read more about di.se and Drupal IDG wrote about it at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.182311.

Back to Open Source Forum 2008, during day two there were two tracks which means a lot of presentations that you don’t have to time to see. I’ve been writing about those presentations that impressed or surprised me during these two days. For the full agenda of this conferense see http://www.opensourceforum.se/Program.htm.

So, what’s my summary of this conferense? Well, it was terribly expencive, only ~50 visitors and I had some very interesting conversations about various subjects with other visitors which would mean that since I’m not paying for it, it was totaly worth it. :)

I already have one IBM AS/400 with the 48-bits CISC-processor from 1993 running OS/400 V3R5 that was given to me in 2004 from a company where my dad was working at the time, my most greatful thanks to them. Now I look forward to combine the knowledge I’ve gathered from working with both Linux and IBM hardware to take the next step and learn how to virtualize Linux on IBM midrange and/or mainframe with the POWER processor architecture.

Open source has gone into a new phase and whether we like it or not the rules have changed. Of course this didn’t happen over night, this is the result of a series of decisions a couple of companies made. Red Hat decided to release an enterprise version of their Linux distribution and begun to compete with Microsoft, Sun, HP and others about the space in the data centers and not too long ago Red Hat also bough the popular open source application server JBoss. Novell bought SUSE and pretty much replaced NetWare with SUSE Linux and joined the party in the data centers.

A company that definitely made a difference in leading open source into the next phase is Sun Microsystems. In the past few years Sun has been changing the licensing of Java to open source and also released OpenSolaris an open source version of Solaris. As another step in Sun’s open source strategy they bought two very significant open source projects, MySQL and VirtualBox. Sun isn’t the only company to buy open source projects at the moment and not to long ago Nokia bought Trolltech and Citrix bough Xen Source.

At this new playground there’s a new set of rules to live up to that the open source-community never faced before. At this playground of companies, business agreements, economics and profitability there’s no room for decisions based on ideology. We need to help these companies find ways to make their decisions so that they do not interfere with the ideology behind open source and so that these companies can benefit from their decisions.

It’s no longer the open source-community’ believe in their ideology that brings open source further, open source has silently taken the step into the commercial world and whatever you all think about that it was all of us that brought it there. We got what we asked for and now it’s time to learn to play by the new rules.

Instead all the discussions are about that Lenovo released two of their laptop modells from the IBM ThinkPad-series with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop pre-installed on the Swedish market and that HP and other computer manufactures are planning on releasing some of their models with Linux pre-installed. Two months into 2008 two huge companies bought three important and significant open source projects. Of course am I thinking about that Sun bought MySQL and VirtualBox, and that Nokia bought Trolltech including the copyright for QT.

The fact that huge companies has begun to buy open source projects is absolutely positive in my point of view and I’m not worried that these projects will be closed source or difficult to access in other ways like many others do. The companies are not going to close the source of further releases since the open source community is the worlds greatest test department free of charges. To release a product as open source for people and small businesses to download and use free of charge results in that they report bugs and literally test your product for you. When this product is considered stable the manufacturer package the product together with administration tools, security updates and patches, documentation and support to an enterprise product for companies that need these kinds of guarantees.

The benefits of big IT companies buying and developing open source softwares is that the development becomes more stable and organized since a company has to deliver a product to survive. These big IT companies also guarantees that the product is working together with different hardware and software that a non-profit open source project got a hard time to provide to the customer. The fact that big IT companies is buying open source projects makes them competitive on the market for software which will contribute to more companies taking the step to open source solutions.

Open source is also a great marketing strategy, to give your customer access to the product before it’s all done gives the customers the possibility to have all the internal testing done when the finished enterprise version of the product hits the market and the implementation can be done instantly. For all technicians that work with these products open source gives them the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home without expensive licensing models and the fact that they’re able to influence the development of the product they use.

The companies has finally accepted the challenge of open source! 2008 will certainly be an interesting year in open source history.

For all of IBM’s customers that already invested millions of dollars into mainframe computers this is good news since they can reuse their hardware when building a more standardized server environment. For new customers this opens new possibilities to virtualize Linux servers and all the benefits that comes with using stable and redundant mainframe computers for virtualization. The different modells of IBM System z can run from eight to 1500 virtual Linux servers which means there is a size of IBM System z for everyone. Other benefits from virtualize Linux servers on your company IBM System z is that you can use all of the administration tools your staff is used to.

IBM is working together with RedHat on developing an edition for IBM System z since before.

Source: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.143428 (swedish)