Preface
Over the past five years or so, we have seen an explosion in the use of open source software in commercial environments. Linux has almost completely displaced various flavors of Unix as the dominant non-Windows operating system; Apache is by far the most significant web server; Perl and PHP form the foundation for millions of commercial web sites; while JBoss, Hibernate, Spring, and Eclipse are making strong inroads into the Java? and J2EE development and application server markets. Although the world of relational databases continues to be dominated by the commercial players (Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft), the commercial use of open source databases is growing exponentially. MySQL is the dominant open source database management system: it is being used increasingly to build very significant applications based on the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python) and LAMJ (Linux-Apache-MySQL-JBoss) open source stacks, and it is, more and more, being deployed wherever a high-performance, reliable, relational database is required.
In the landmark book The Innovators Dilemma,[*] Clayton Christensen provided the first widely accepted model of how open source and other "disruptive" technologies displace more traditional "sustaining" technologies.
When a disruptive technology—Linux for example—first appears, its capabilities and performance are typically way below what would be acceptable in the mainstream or high-end market. However, the new technology is highly attractive to those whose ...