For the longest time, I was strongly against showing any form of advertising on this site. Partly because I just don’t like it, and partly because the site doesn’t really look that big. Looks can be deceiving however, and the reality is that I get close to 1000 unique hits per month because of other projects that I am involved with. Still not a lot, but bandwidth adds up.

Am I selling out? No. To help myself justify the presence of advertising, I’ve committed to only showing products and services that I regularly use and recommend to my friends.

As a strong believer in Open Source, I also plan to show some unpaid advertisements to help play my part in the process. Again, only for those projects that I regularly use and recommend.

Will it make me rich? Not at all, but hopefully it will cover the cost of my web hosting and maybe the occasional caffeinated beverage.

Thanks for your understanding.

I’ve given it some thought, and I don’t think there is anything to worry about. Here’s why.

• Over the last few years, Oracle has invested a lot of time and money in adding to their open source credentials. To damage MySQL in any way would also damage the reputation they have worked so hard to foster within the Open Source community.
• The key word among Oracle and their competitors is marketshare. When was the last time you saw an advertisement for Oracle that wasn’t related to the number of customers they have in a given market? By acquiring MySQL, Oracle effectively becomes the dominant player in the online market – a market they had virtually no presence in last week.
• Oracle can now start pursuing MySQL users in an effort to convince them to upgrade to one of the revenue generating products in their database lineup. In fact, they already have. Here’s an excerpt from an email I received from Oracle last night advertising a seminar comparing Oracle to MySQL.
  

  Learn why choosing an Oracle technology platform lowers the total cost of ownership for your company during this live, interactive one hour program. Tony Tarone, the Director of Operations at Cedar Document Technologies, will discuss how he gained a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost effective platform by moving from MySQL to Oracle.

I believe MySQL will be safe under the Oracle umbrella. It may or may not get a new name, but that will be the extent of it. The potential losses in terms of reputation, marketshare and upgrade revenue is far too important for Oracle to start messing with something so loved by millions and millions of users.

The main benefits of this are

• Convenience. It’s much easier to turn on the television and scan through a list of titles than standing in front of a shelf with your head turned sideways trying to find that elusive cover.
• Smaller Footprint. CD and DVD covers take up a lot of space when they’re organised on a bookshelf so people can scan through them. They take up a lot less space when they’re stacked in a big box in the spare room.
• Cool Factor. Enough said!

There are several products on the market that make this possible. The more technical among us do it with desktop computers and linux, while some others seem to purchase whatever is on the store shelf at the time.

I was never a fan of using a desktop computer, reasoning that it would look too out of place in the living room. Besides, I had to remember that I wouldn’t be the only person in the house using it, so it had to follow the KISS principal – Keep It Simple Stupid.

For many years, I used an original xbox that had been modified to run XBMC, an open source operating system written specifically for serving digital entertainment to the television. Being a games system, it looked like it belonged in the living room, and navigating the menu system was a breeze for even the most technically inept. The xbox solution worked flawlessly when it was properly set up, but upgrading to the latest version of the software was often “interesting”.

When the time came to move to a new country with different electricity standards, I decided to leave the xbox behind and loaded the movie collection onto an external hard drive. I’d worry about how to watch them after we settled in, and in the meantime I’d think about what I really wanted.

I performed a lot of research over the following weeks to try and find the best solution for our needs. I wanted something that was easy for my family to use, and didn’t require me to manipulate code when an update was released. I wanted something that looked like it was meant to be in the living room with the television.

When the decision was finally made, the winner was an Apple TV with 40 GB hard drive. It allows me to keep our entire entertainment collection in another room and stream it over the home network as we watch movies and television shows or listen to music.

The user interface is clean and simple, and the Apple TV looks just like a small white box; so small and inconspicuous that most of our visitors don’t even realise it’s there.

When linked to an iTunes store account, we can rent and buy movies straight over the internet, removing the need to store bulky cases at all. It also has a nifty screensaver function, turning our television into a massive digital photo frame when we aren’t watching a movie or television show.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series. In part 2, I’ll be looking at ways to store the growing collection of movies, music and television shows that we accumulate.

At a pre-conference activity last night he encouraged the various open source vendors to make the most of the current economic climate and get out there and start knocking on doors, referring to his own recent experience as an example.

There are companies we’ve been trying to set up meetings with for years that are all of a sudden calling us up and saying ‘We need to talk.’ The more desperate the industry, the more interested people are.

I have to say that I agree. While writing a paper on the topic a couple of years ago, I discovered that one of the biggest struggles potential customers have with the whole concept of open source is actually one of the biggest selling points the movement has – the cost (or lack thereof). Customers believe that the lack of fees is related to a lack of quality in the product, meaning a lot more effort to maintain.

Now that the shrinking IT budget is more important than ever, it’s time for open source vendors to show just how capable their products are compared to those expensive, off-the-shelf solutions that are costing more in annual maintenance fees than the original price of the license.

If the vendors can clearly demonstrate the business value of using their products, they stand a greater chance of getting inside for the long term. This could be a real turning point for the open source movement, but we need to act now – the opportunity won’t be there forever.