EC approves Oracle-Sun. Google patents MapReduce. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

EC approves Oracle-Sun
The European Commission cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Larry Ellison is set to unveil Oracle’s Sun strategy on January 27th, Monty Widenius said he will go to the Court of First Instance to appeal the decision.

# Pro-open source political party formed in Hungary.

# Google …

Monty turns his attention to the East. The value of JBoss to Red Hat. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Monty Widenius predicted that the EU will clear Oracle-Sun “any moment”, turning his attention to Russia and China.

# Meanwhile the release candidate of MariaDB 5.1 is now …

VMware confirms Zimbra buy. Facebook sponsors Apache Foundation. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# VMware confirmed its acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo.

# Facebook became a gold sponsor of the Apache Foundation and outlined its …

I may sound like a broken record, but currently we have only three MySQL University sessions scheduled for this year. In 2009, we ran more than 25 sessions, and I'd surely like to get anywhere near that figure.

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live sessions' time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and you're ready for the live session. Everything …

I may sound like a broken record, but currently we have only three MySQL University sessions scheduled for this year. In 2009, we ran more than 25 sessions, and I'd surely like to get anywhere near that figure.

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live sessions' time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and you're ready for the live session. Everything …

I may sound like a broken record, but currently we have only three MySQL University sessions scheduled for this year. In 2009, we ran more than 25 sessions, and I'd surely like to get anywhere near that figure.

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live sessions' time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and you're ready for the live session. Everything …

Around a year ago, I took on a new role at Sun as vice president of lifecycle marketing. While the title was an odd one, the charter was pretty straightforward: Bring the best practices of open source, Web 2.0, and modern online marketing to Sun's portfolio of servers, storage, software, and services in order to drive up revenues and drive down customer acquisition costs.

Open source was an incredible calling card that we could use to determine what customers were interested in. Now we just needed to figure out how to harvest that interest.  It worked for …

MySQL requires special consideration in the Oracle+Sun merger, otherwise both Oracle and MySQL users and vendors will literally pay the price. If you agree, please sign this petition now.

To be very clear, Open Query is in favour of the merger, we feel that overall it’s a good fit. We would also like to see it happen quickly, as obviously this is best for Sun employees and clients, as well as Oracle’s broad business prospects.  Read more

I've talked about this before, but I think it bears repeating as we enter a new year. Sun has still not released the MySQL documentation under the GPL license, or any other free license. It's still not legal to modify and republish the database documentation. This hurts projects like XtraDB, MariaDB, Kickfire, Infobright and other companies which either have forked the GPL licensed version of MySQL, or entered into a proprietary license agreement with Sun.

These companies can't update the documentation to reflect the changes and enhancements which they have made to MySQL. I can't take the docs and publish changes or annotations without violating the license agreement for the docs.

If Sun wants to claim that MySQL is true open source then they must open source the documentation. If Oracle wants to claim that there is plenty of competition in the database market, they should be forced to open source the documentation. …

I was happily snowboarding and skiing (the latter for the first time in two decades) last week, so here comes the year-end review a week late. Last year, I harped on Facebook's closed nature, and over the the year they've tried to open more of the users' data over to the Internet. Still, there are no decent APIs for a user to pull out everything they've posted to Facebook to have their own copy, though. That doesn't seem to stop them from dominating the Internet for the time being, though, so good for them.

I'm trying to think of what would have surprised me over the year, but given I failed to make many accurate predictions myself, things just seemed to happen in pretty natural direction. …