Bloggers, welcome aboard

Our Open Sources blog is living up to its name, opening up and adding a few new “sources.” For nearly two years, readers have come to rely on the informed, entertaining, and highly opinionated musings of prolific blogoholics Dave Rosenberg and Matt Asay. Matt has decided to move on, but Dave will be sticking around and welcoming three “new members of the Open Sources team of masked banditos”: Zack Urlocker from MySQL, Savio Rodrigues from IBM, and Dave Dargo, described simply as a “man of mystery and intrigue.”

The most surprising name here is probably Savio’s because he works for a company not generally associated with the open-source movement. He is an open-source believer, however, and his “traditional software” perspective (his Open Sources colleagues are more likely to go with the label “proprietary software”) should spark lively discussion. As for Dave Dargo, perhaps I shouldn’t blow his carefully cultivated anonymity. Let’s just say that when I met him a year ago, he was the CTO of Ingres (he has since moved on), a less mysterious occupation than “man about town” — the description he submitted for the blog’s “About the Author” section. Although the three new Open Sourcers don’t begin blogging in earnest until July, they’ve already weighed in with a few posts in advance of the official start date. Welcome aboard, gentlemen.

Speaking of CTOs who blog, Jon Williams — the CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and a member of InfoWorld‘s CTO Advisory Council — has moved his New York CTO blog to InfoWorld.com. According to Jon, most CTOs start out as engineers with great tech chops. Management, however, is another story. They usually learn that through trial and error, but only after getting promoted to CTO. New York CTO should help IT pros make that transformation from techie to manager. As for Jon’s view of the CTO’s role: “CTOs make technology human.” That shorthand definition brings me back to a CTO Advisory Council dinner meeting from several years back. Someone there (not a CTO) asked, “What’s the difference between a CTO and a CIO?” Everyone in attendance took a shot, but InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson had the last word. “CTOs,” he announced authoritatively, “are cool.” No one could top that. New York CTO should help IT pros make that transformation from techie to manager — and maybe boost their coolness quotient a little.

“Cool” is also a term that many people (probably even a few CTOs) have bandied about in reference to the upcoming iPhone from Apple. We’ll be maintaining our cool quotient with our iPhone countdown, featuring ongoing coverage leading up to device’s June 29 debut and beyond. Amidst all the i-hyperbole, we’re hearing grumbling from developers who are ticked about the iPhone’s lack of native support for Flash and Java — a serious problem for business users. Even so, according to senior writer Matt Hines, developers are unlikely to develop hacks to get Flash and Java to run on the iPhone because most of them believe Apple will solve the problem before many enterprise users have gotten their hands on the devices. We’ll see … and we’ll keep you in the loop.

Matt Hines is also keeping us in the loop on enterprise data protection, which is top of mind this week because InfoWorld is hosting its first Enterprise Data Protection Executive Forum this Tuesday. If you can’t make it to the event in New York but want to get the lowdown on this emerging discipline, take a look at Matt’s analysis. Keep checking in at InfoWorld.com for the latest news from the EDP show floor as it unfolds, and be sure to look for our Test Center reviews of data protection solutions from BeyondTrust, PGP, and Tablus.