Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Open Source One of the premises of open source is that with programmers around the world working on improvements products will continuously improve. Of course, the other premise is that the software is, er, cheap. The cool thing is, if you need an improvement, you can make the improvement or ask the community to help. This usually beats waiting for a vendor to get around to a fix. Here's an announcement about a SQL database upgrade from MySQL. Just curious if anyone out there is using open source software or Linux yet? In what kind of applications? Servers? Databases? Hit comment and let me know. MySQL readies beta of enterprise open source database. MySQL at the end of January is expected to release a beta version of its MySQL 5.0 open source database, which is to feature enterprise-level functionality such as stored procedures and triggers, according to a company representative. [InfoWorld: Top News] 8:32:06 PM    comment []

Compliance Help Manufacturers are facing regulatory compliance issues on many fronts. Some must meet FDA requirements, most must deal with Sarbanes-Oxley. It's only a matter of time that we see application solutions. I've written about Formation Systems, a company that helps manufacturers meet some new standards for tracking food allergens. http://www.automationworld.com/articles/Departments/1066.html?ppr_key=Formation%20Systems&sky_key=Formation%20Systems&term=Formation%20Systems Now, here is IBM releasing a suite of products to help meet standards. I expect to see many new products coming from automation software vendors as well. IBM seeks to score with new compliance suite. IBM's Solution for Compliance in a Regulated Environment is a suite of middleware tools that includes document and data management, application integration, business process management and collaboration features. [Computerworld News] 8:22:49 PM    comment []