I am glad to see that there are still efforts to make MySQL a much more competitive project. Still waiting to see what Oracle will treat it like (gift or garbage). http://intelliginix.com »

You man not want to forget to include other products live OpenVZ and Virtuozzo in your "Agnostic Virtual Management System" because these systems are widely used in internet service provider hosting solutions. http://intelliginix.com »

Guys, thanks for your comments. I haven't had a chance to play with Citrix's XenServer, however I am not that big a fan of Xen on Linux. I know it has the potential to run VMs with a little less overhead, but VMwares networking features are just far superior, and easier to set up. Virtual Box isn't to bad either, but it doesn't scale well and tends to act flaky when running a certain amount of VMs, and you have to know a bit about bridging using brctl in order to make the VMs visible from outside the host. Another bit I just read today in Information Week is that Redhat is dropping it's Xen support in favor of it's own KVM. Now they will promise to support it for aorund 7 years, but how do you like them apples? http://intelliginix.com »

I was a Network Operations Manager for Ameritech Long Distance Industry services in from 1993-1996, and just when the internet was becoming a must-have, we were training our main-framers how to get around Unix with Slackware Linux. Then Redhat came out with it's distribution's famous redhat package manager and changed the way we (at Ameritech) thought about Linux. We ended up setting up almost every Unix service we could like NIS, DNS, BOOTP, and others using linux. This gave us a an expensive option, and made more sense than using or purchasing our pricey Sun SparcStations, HPs, and RS/6000s. Since then I have been using Linux and all the softwares and servers it comes with, I have been fortunate to be exposed to probably every major distribution, and many of the smaller special distro's which makes me comfortable with Linux and open source software capabilities.. Because of this experience, I have been able to provide businesses with viable alternatives that save them money, and are just as feature rich as their proprietary counterparts. You can read more about this at http://intelliginix.com. Businesses want software that works without spending an arm and a leg. Just think if you bought server 2008 today with 25 user license, and the purpose was just to house a few databases, some file/print servers, some network services, and an application or two, right off you're spending $3000-$4000 for the OS, $6000 for the database, and just keep tacking on more, and more for the applications (let's say ERP/CRM which would be scary). When I could have a lot of the same features for free! Thatblackguy »

I believe there are more companies that people are aware of that are directly competing with their proprietary counterparts. One of the skills I see emerging now is a need for more people that can find open source alternatives to the mainstream. I will agree to a degree that some of the open source software makers really are more about the software than the problem, but there are good companies out there that provide excellent support for their software (even the community versions), and are willing to implement changes based on the requests of their customer base. http://intelliginix.com »