Tech's bottom line: Bill Snyder has some advice for Red Hat. Move over, open source ain't what it used to be. "Perhaps the most startling statistic is this: IBM's open source revenue in 2007 was equal to that of Red Hat, the largest and most influential open source company. Not only did IBM equal Red Hat's open source revenue, but the next largest revenue earners were Sun and Oracle," Snyder explains. "The days of the freewheeling open source movement are numbered. Is this bad news for open source? Not at all. Open source software is more than good enough to stand on its own merits, no matter who owns it. And it's about time that the hardworking visionaries of the open source movement were rewarded with good jobs and high returns on their money and sweat."

Storage: Even storage is going green these days, intentionally or not. Most recently, it comes in the form of 2.5-inch drives that populate Infortrend's EonStor B12, which Mario Apicella deems the first enterprise-class array based on 2.5-inch drives. Smaller drives nurture green IT. "It should be clear why the EonStor is an odds-on favorite to beat any same-class array with 3.5-inch drives: It delivers comparable performance using less energy and less space. It's that simple," Apicella writes. "So why aren't more small-drive storage arrays being offered? For the same reason SUVs still mount gas-guzzling engines: Because we didn't ask vendors to do better. Let's not make the same mistake with storage: Use the power of your budget to make those requests, and storage vendors will listen."

Careers: Uplogix, it seems, practices discriminatory hiring -- and it even puts a spin on non-diverse hiring. "Check the dictionary on this one, because it's not bad," Nick Corcodilos explains in The discriminating employer. "Who needs diversity when you can have productive uniformity? Fancy that: You hire only people you know." Corcodilos, who actually used to work for a company that had a similar practice, adds that hiring folks you already know results in people working with others they like and respect not only fuels that organization but also reduces turnover. "I have never heard anyone boast that they make hires like that through Monster.com. Yet HR spends cough a billion a year cough to hire cough who-comes-along."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on January 25, 2008 05:44 AM