With rumors of a takeover by IBM swirling around him, Sun Microsytems’ chairman Scott McNealy tried to pitch a room of customers this week on the idea that Sun is a wily innovator whose software and hardware are far less costly than proprietary solutions from Oracle and, yes, IBM. But McNealy had little to offer loyal customers with Sun’s legacy Sparc hardware.

McNealy touted Sun’s vision of cloud computing and the folly of “best of breed” to about 200 customers and partners. “Frankenstein was best of breed, and every time he keels over, IBM comes in with $100,000 shock paddles,” McNealy said. Sun’s goal “is to get you out of the kitchen. We build data centers; you do whatever you do,” adding that “building a data center out of 40 different parts is last year’s strategy.”

Sun’s McNealy touts open source, bashes Oracle and IBM

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)’s chief Linux technologist, Wim Coekaerts, said Oracle is making an important contribution to Linux reliability by extensively testing the Oracle database system on the open source operating system. And he has some free advice for competitor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT).

Oracle reports all bugs it finds and bug fixes that it makes to Red Hat’s Bugzilla database. The Red Hat Bugzilla listing is public and Oracle believes putting its findings in Red Hat’s Bugzilla “puts pressure on the company” to fix bugs in its Enterprise distribution that affect database and enterprise operations.

Oracle Urges Red Hat To Give Away Its Product — linux — InformationWeek

Reading the excellent analysis of Arjen Lentz, founder of MySQL training company Open Query, of what the open-source database leader MySQL is (and isn’t) makes me wish that Oracle would have discovered MySQL as a complement, rather than as a competitor, several years ago.

MySQL’s is the database software of choice for the Web, period. Oracle’s is the database software of choice for the enterprise, period. It’s unclear, as Lentz points out, that this means one is better than the other–and why we need to keep talking about competition between them:

MySQL doesn’t have to be suited to every possible need, and its not suiting certain needs is not a failure.

A knife and a screwdriver are both useful types of tools, but they are not interchangeable, in terms of purpose. You can cut some things with a screwdriver, and you can try to turn a screw with a knife, and sometimes, such uses even make sense–but it can also get rather awkward, break the tool, cut your hand, and so on. It’s not necessarily pretty.

MySQL has a different market from Oracle, and that is why they are not in direct competition. It’s not about low end and high end on a single scale; it’s quite different in many aspects.

Why Oracle didn’t buy MySQL | The Open Road – CNET News

Cloudera is the quintessential Silicon Valley story.

Three of the top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook have teamed up with an ex-Oracle executive to tackle the problems inherent in quickly analyzing big piles of data. On Monday, they’re revealing a commercial product based on the open source software Hadoop, which provides the analytical magic behind the world’s biggest Web sites. The team at Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., think they can extend Web smarts to the business world, aiding companies in retail, insurance, bio-tech and oil and gas.

Hadoop is the open-source version of the file system and MapReduce technology developed by Google. Google has used such software to rewire its entire search index, making it possible for the company to run ever-faster searches on cheap servers and to ask questions of its vast data stores and receive coherent answers.

Bottling the Magic Behind Google and Facebook – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

All three of the big guys (Oracle, IBM, and Sybase) follow the same basic sales model:

1. publish nominal list pricing only;

2. obfuscate package names, functionality, discounts, and prerequisites to the point that no customer can reasonably understand what’s where;

3. frown severely on anyone who even thinks about publishing pricing, performance, and/or functional information; and,

4. give the sales crew lots of leeway in dealing with customers who pass credit check.

RDBMS license costs and Open Source | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com

In an economy that is increasingly kind to open source, open-source companies are seeing revenues rise and will resist the lower valuations that plague proprietary peers.

Open-source M&A may not happen in 2009 | The Open Road – CNET News

Recently named Open Solutions Alliance president Anthony Gold told The Reg that his goal is to take the two-year-old organization to the “next level” by turning it into a destination for practical advice on interoperability between proprietary and closed-source software.

Open-source chief optimistic about proprietary support | The Register

Even Microsoft and Oracle sought accommodation with the open source imperative.

But this has also existed in the open source movement. We saw it at SugarCRM. We see it in companies with whom, on the surface, open source has no quibble.

Getting right by open source | Open Source | ZDNet.com