Posts Tagged ‘Oracle’

helping (save) mysql

The latest in the whole Save MySQL campaign: HelpMySQL.org. Monty has a really long blog post on how to help keep the Internet free. When you read that, scroll down towards “Q: How do the proposed remedies benefit your company, Monty Program Ab?” Understand that Monty is doing this for the love of the codebase and the project that is MySQL…

Totally love the copywriting here: Customers pay the bill: Oracle can have Sun but not MySQL. There’s been a lot of FUD in the last few months, but I suggest you read the issues (with an open mind), check out the FAQ, and if you’d like, sign the petition.

For me? Never again, will I recommend software for commercial use that doesn’t have a lively developer community. Sun reductions hitting open source efforts proves why – commercial (only/mostly) backed open source, just seems troublesome, when companies get merged/sold/et al.

OK, back to your regular scheduled programming. I shall enjoy my visit to a rather cold and wet London. Happy New Year!

Harish Pillay and Brian Aker debate with Richard Stallman (Part 2)

The attendees were not satisfied with the first answer RMS gave to Brian, that Harish Pillay (Chief Technical Architect, Red Hat Singapore), chose to ask RMS what more he had to say, with regards to the letter he’d written. He answered quite candidly in this video, which Brian chimed in for as well.



The back channel for all this was Twitter… Don’t hesitate to follow @harishpillay, @brianaker, @piawaugh or even @webmink (Simon Phipps, while not at the event, was available on Twitter). Some interesting reading, naturally.

Brian Aker debates with Richard Stallman

At foss.my 2009, Brian Aker asked Richard Stallman at his keynote, about the Oracle/Sun acquisition (with a focus on MySQL), with regards to the parallel licensing approach used by MySQL. Brian was referring to:

As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources to support continued development of the MySQL platform.

from Richard’s Letter to the EC opposing Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Listen to the discussion between Brian and Richard.



The future is wide open

Village MySQL

So the news is everywhere. Sun has some info, Oracle has some info. If you’re thinking MySQL, you should definitely be at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (if you’re not already registered). Find a speaker, they’ll give you a 20% discount code (heck, find me, I’ll do the same).

What does this all mean for MySQL? You bet you’ll find out a lot at the conference. I can highly recommend the keynote on Tuesday morning – you want to see Karen Padir deliver the State of the Dolphin.

What does this mean for the Linux distributions that MySQL widely supports? Does it mean more software from the Oracle stack will be open source and distributed easily? I don’t know. I find it poignant that I had this open as a tab recently though: Shuttleworth: Oracle a Litmus test for Linux, Ubuntu.

Alas, it also eludes to the band, we all received a little over a year ago. We can all wait and see what happens. The future is wide open.

Spacewalk, and what we can learn about naming

Red Hat releases Spacewalk. It is described as: “the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived“. Congratulations to all whom have worked on it, especially my friends who tired endlessly over it in the past.

Red Hat, is sticking true to its promise, of open sourcing everything they make. Best of all, they recognise Fedora (they always did, since say, Fedora Core 2 or 3), CentOS (a direct “competitor”/rebuild of RHEL), and Scientific Linux (I know of a certain university’s sysadmin who will be blessing Spacewalk, as her life will now be a lot easier).

There have been a few blogs about it… Matt Asay asks about a community (Red Hat traditionally wasn’t good at this, but with Fedora, I believe they’ve learned, and I’m happy to say I think, I helped in the education process). No one however, focused on the technical aspects around Spacewalk/RHN.

Case in point: Oracle is at the heart of it. RHN was designed almost seven years ago, and I’ve heard amazing stories from Gafton, Greg, and Peter. How Gafton found hidden “secrets” inside Oracle to boost performance, and a whole bunch of interesting things, best to talk about over a beer (the irony? When I first met these folk, I couldn’t even legally drink a beer in the US…)

Read the Developer Documentation, note that they use Perl, Python and Java in the current code base (but only Perl and Java is the way forward). There’s a DB Schema available… and I wonder when someone will port this to MySQL?

The Spacewalk FAQ mentions the lack of resources in the past to add an open source database, but would want to do so soon. There’s even help on getting Oracle XE running. The glimmer that there is to be an open source database behind Spacewalk, is what tells me that the MySQL community, that benefit from such a tool (so you’re a DBA and a sysadmin at a fairly largeish installation), should port this to run on MySQL.

What else can we take away from Spacewalk? The excellent positioning. A community project from which the RHN product is derived. This is similar to what Fedora is positioned as: Another striking difference of Fedora is our goal to empower others to pursue their vision of what a free operating system should be like. Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux , the One Laptop Per Child XO and Creative Commons’ Live Content DVDs.

Distinctive naming. Helps create a lack of confusion (at the price of an ubiquitous name? Sure, you just have two ubiquitous names now). MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community. They’re both MySQL (don’t even get started on the odd/even numbering scheme…). I dream the day, when we have MySQL Enterprise and Sakila (formerly known as MySQL Community).


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