billso.com

My website, billso.com, will be offline for approximately 8 hours while my web host does some scheduled maintenance.

TurnItIn.com will be available. They’re a different company with their own server farm.

From BusinessWeek comes a long profile of the Facebook economy. As I discussed on 10 August 2007, Facebook has become very popular as the service opened its APIs to third-party applications last 24 May. Slide recently received a US$50 million round of venture capital funding, based on that company’s suite of Facebook widgets like Top Friends, SuperPoke and FunWall. That seems like crazy money, considering that these f8 applications are little more than features in a social network. Gigaom.com points out that the recent acquisitions of MySQL, BEA and Skype don’t make much sense, either.

Security is another major risk. A cracker named DMaul recent posted a 17 gigabyte file of photos that he downloaded from thousands of private MySpace profiles, according to this report in Wired. The massive file was posted on BitTorrent, and includes photos posted by 14- and 15-year old MySpace members. MySpace makes profiles private by default for that age group.

Yesterday I mentioned Sun’s acquistion of MySQL, a leading open source database company. BusinessWeek published an article about Oracle’s acquistion of middleware vendor BEA Systems. That deal has been in the works for a year, according to IT-Director.com.

Shane Schick’s follow-up on the Oracle deal is a nice overview of why CXOs should care about middleware. Middleware is a translation layer that helps data move between different software packages and computer systems. Without middleware, e-commerce just doesn’t work very well.

Many companies have to link heterogenous information systems within their value chain. Even more companies have to link their value chains with those of their suppliers and customers, which means even more heterogeneity.

Oracle has a healthy chunk of the financial services middleware market. BEA provides access to other sectors, including telecommunications,where Oracle has not been competitive.

However, Oracle will have to spend time pruning and consolidating the combined product lines. Time may not be on their side, given the growing signs of economic recession in North America.

Amidst all of these developments, we should not forget that middleware and database software are important parts of data security. Cory Doctorow has described his radical view that data breaches are as bad as toxic waste and nuclear accidents. He has a good point – the effects might last for decades, and the companies that leaked the data might not bear the true costs.

The New York Times reported on 17 January 2008 that Sun is acquiring MySQL for US$1 billion. Sun will use MySQL’s technology and customer list to facilitate an entry into the US$15 billion database market.

I use MySQL to run billso.com. I am hoping that Sun will not change the company’s open source business model. Jeff Gould of Interop News asks an important question – did Sun pay too much? MySQL reported revenues of US$70 million last year. By Gould’s estimate, Sun needs to grow MySQL to US$500 million in sales revenue for this acquisition to work.

Regardless, Sun CEO Jon Schwartz claims his company is the largest OSS firm in the world. Sun now has an important piece of the LAMP stack – that’s the Linux kernel, the Apache web server, MySQL and the Perl, Python and PHP programming languages. This InfoWorld article has some additional background on the acquisition, and why LAMP is a very important piece of the Web, e-commerce and enterprise information systems.

See my article from 25 October 2007 for information about MySQL’s software development pact with Google.