Local venture cap/tech blogger Paul Kedrosky recent posted that:

Larry Ellison has allegedly cooked up a plan to do a wide-ranging roll-up of companies in the open-source space. Not just JBoss, but a host of others, from Spikesource to Zend, and more inbetween. About the only sizable o/s company left standing would be Red Hat.

Perhaps Oracle is planning to assimilate a chunk of the Free Software/Open Source companies? This may be an effective short term strategy to preserve Oracle's revenue - if Oracle's customers are uncertain enough, they won't risk switching away from Oracle's products. Consider Oracle's general strategy in this area in the last five years. When it comes to Free Software/Open Source products, they:

1. praise and support the FS/OS software products that give them an edge over their competitors and ...
2. spread FUD about the FS/OS products that compete with them

Anyone remember this gem from an interview with Larry Ellison in late 2002?

[Larry is speaking about Free/Open DBMS at this point in time.]

It's not just scale. There's no security. [There's no] scalability, security, or reliability. If you give up any of those, you can't do this. Another reason you'd be out of your mind to use them is because you'd have to buy twice as much hardware. We run, I don't know, ten times, a hundred times faster than they do on the same hardware. (Linux's Proprietary Booster, Linux Magazine, November 2002)

In just a few sentences, Larry runs the gamut from "possibly accurate" to "demonstrably out-to-a-ten-martini-lunch". Oracle has gotten more sophisticated in their approach in the last few years. Buying up a core part of MySQL's technology stack was a great move on their part, though MySQL did a plausible job of pointing out that Oracle tipped their hand in the purchase. In the long term, unless Oracle undergoes a miraculous change in culture, Borging up a whack of FS/OS companies will just end up removing these companies from the market and will encourage the growth of strategies that can serve customers but not get scooped by the big players. (Disclosure: I have worked for MySQL AB in the past. See http://zak.greant.com/affiliations)

Another week has passed and it's time for an update on the eZ publish development. This week we bring you news about eZ publish 3.8, the eZ components, the online documentation and an update on the current bug status in eZ publish.

Tobias Schlitt has a reminder about a talk that he's giving at the upcoming Frankfort PHP User Group meeting.

I'll be giving an overview on the eZ components at the PHP usergroup Frankfurt meeting on March 16th. If you want to get a life introduction, have questions or want to give feedback, feel invited to join this event!

The meeting will be held at their usual location and will start at 7:30pm.

On his blog today, Pierre has an interesting post that has details on some of the Oracle acquisition plans - some of which might include Zend.

There is rumours relayed by The Register about Oracle acquisitions plan, it is a quite surprising to see Zend in the list. Note that the text is not clear, but whether it is true or not, the scenario is interesting enough to think about the impacts in the PHP world.

He also comments on the "creator of PHP" tagline that Zend uses quite a bit, and how, if it were moved over to Oracle, would be "an insult".

I'll be giving an overview on the eZ components at the PHP usergroup Frankfurt meeting on March 16th. If you want to get a life introduction, have questions or want to give feedback, feel invited to join this event!

I'll be giving an overview on the eZ components at the PHP usergroup Frankfurt meeting on March 16th. If you want to get a life introduction, have questions or want to give feedback, feel invited to join this event!

I just stumbled over this rumor. The article states, that Oracle is planning to take over up to 3 open source companies, including JBoss and Zend. Let's see, where this leads...

P.S.: Reminds me again on some april fool I made almost 2 years ago...^{1 2}

Derick Rethans has a reminder about the upcoming webcast he's doing with php|architect covering the eZ Components framework.

In about a weeks time I am going to give a webcast on the eZ components.

In this one-hour event, I will introduce the components and discuss its design philosophy, its strong points, as well as show practical examples of components at work. This sponsored (by eZ) webcast is organized by php|architect and will take place on the 17th at 19:00 CET (18:00 GMT, 13:00 EST). If you're interested in this (free) webcast, sign up at the web site.

This webcast is seperate from the podcastDerick, of what the eZ components system is and how to use it.

I wonder if the following would be of any use: Right now, we can do attribute -> contentobject links (and backwards, of course). How about doing contentobject -> attribute and attribute -> attribute? All this would take is another field in the relation table (and persuasion of ez devs to integrate such in ez 3.8 which would be the hard part ;). Another idea would be to add a "boolean" (I know MySQL doesn't support it per se) field that says it is actually a bidirectional link and then have both object's see it as their "own" relation as well as reverse relation!

In about a weeks time I am going to give a webcast on the eZ components.

In this one-hour event, I will introduce the components and discuss its design philosophy, its strong points, as well as show practical examples of components at work. This sponsored (by eZ) webcast is organized by php|architect and will take place on the 17th at 19:00 CET (18:00 GMT, 13:00 EST). If you're interested in this (free) webcast, sign up at the web site.