Monthly Archives: February 2009

So How Open is your Open Source Company Anyway?


February 28, 2009 By Jason van Zyl

Luke Kanies, the creator of Puppet, commented in his last entry about Open Source business models, specifically the idea of an Open Core and what that means. As an Open Source company do you have an open version of your product that’s crippled? Or do you an open version of your product that is truly useful? This was the crux of the questions I asked all the Sonatype CEO candidates, and this turned out to be the reason it took me almost 8 months interviewing 17 candidates to ferret out the right person. It was a grueling process finding Mark de Visser but I was adamant and our VCs, Hummer Winblad & Morgenthaler, were very patient and let me take my time to find the exact right match. I got pretty ornery at one point &emdash; I thought I would never find the right person in Silly Valley. Continue reading →

Interview with Brian Fox: Part 2 of 3: Saving Central


February 27, 2009 By Tim O'Brien

In this short, two-minute excerpt from my interview with Brian Fox, he describes the steps Sonatype took to mitigate the load and bandwidth problem which were affecting the Central Maven Repository late last year. While short, this audio contains some very useful information for anyone facing similar traffic problems. You’ll hear him talk about the switch from Apache httpd to nginx.

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Full Transcript of this interview

Why Putting Repositories in your POMs is a Bad Idea


February 25, 2009 By Brian Fox

I get this question frequently so it is time to write down my thoughts on the answer so I can stop repeating myself. Here’s the question:

Should I put the urls to my repositories in my poms or in my settings?

The short answer is: settings.

The long answer is: it depends.

There are two scenarios to consider here. Enterprise software (generally not published externally) and public software. Lets take Enterprise software first. Continue reading this post for a full explanation of both scenarios. Continue reading →

Interview with Brian Fox: Part 1 of 3: Nexus 1.3 Features


By Tim O'Brien

I sat down with Brian Fox last week in advance of the Nexus 1.3 release for a long interview about Nexus, Nexus Pro, features in the 1.3 release and some of the future directions for Maven. In this part of the interview Brian discusses some of the changes introduced in the Nexus 1.3 release and about some of the work to lay the foundation for the 1.4 release.

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Full Transcript of this interview