Novell has done one amazingly thoughtless, short-sighted thing related to patents. Now it's apparently trying to rectify some of the damage it has done to open source. And it's doing it with a group that has an impeccable record on patent reform: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This is a great move by Novell. I just wish that it would have done this before it sealed its deal with Microsoft. It might have thought better of that Faustian pact.... As Brian Proffitt reports:"EFF is partnering with Novell to try to get rid of software patents that are hurting innovation all... READ MORE

"That is an awfully nice bridge you got there, be a pity if something happened to it..."

So Business as Usual means protection money.

"This IP bridge enables Open Source developers to develop software free from concerns about patents."

"Our IP bridge makes lawsuits unnecessary."

Both of those statements just give me a cold feeling. Its like listening to some gangster video, where the local hood has decided to make a business of asking for protection money from the new immigrants who just opened a Kwiki Mart. Bill Hilf talks about lawsuits being unnecessary, of course they are. The local hood never wants their business practices scrutinized, they operate in a cloak of uncertainty.

When did "Business as Usual" in engineering become haggling over nickel and dime changes that came …

OSDC is a grass-roots conference providing Open Source developers with an opportunity to meet, share, learn, and of course show-off. OSDC focuses on Open Source developers building solutions directly for customers and other end users, anything goes as long as the code or the development platform is Open Source. Last year's conference attracted over 180 people, 60 talks, and 6 tutorials. Entry for delegates is kept easy by maintaining a low registration fee (approx $300), which always includes the conference dinner.

This year OSDC will be held in Brisbane from the 26th to the 29th of November, with an extra dedicated stream for presentations on Open Source business development, case studies, software process, and project management. The theme for this year's conference is "Success in Development & Business". If you are an Open Source maintainer, developer or user we would encourage you to submit a talk proposal on the open-source tools, …

We’re on the verge of releasing our code and we’ve spent a lot of time looking at other projects to see what works what doesn’t as far gaining widespread adoption and building a vibrant developer community. There were some obvious differences in the way some projects are managed: Some have paid contributors others do not. Some use OSI approved licenses, others do not. Some had rigid roadmaps set by a small group (or even a single individual) others were more consensus oriented with their planning. Outside of the obvious, it was all terribly confusing and difficult to glean any useful insight from our ad hoc analysis.

Last month when we were at the mySQL conference I was talking to Tony Wasserman of CMU West and he mentioned to me his work in this area. He sent me a draft of his paper titled: A Framework for Evaluating Managerial Styles in Open Source Projects (I don’t have a link yet). In it he analyzed 75 commercial and community …

I had dinner with Zack Urlocker (EVP of Products at MySQL) and Luis Sala (one of my very best hires, ever) last night in San Diego. We talked about a wide range of things, but spent a fair amount of time talking about the people at MySQL, and especially the management team. Zack has recently been sporting long hair (pictured at right) and was pretty open about the nature of the people with whom he works. He didn't say this, but the description I inferred from the conversation was "confident but humble." Those of you who know Zack, or Marten,... READ MORE

This is a hack I’ve heard about a couple times now:

Paul wrote a script that reads from the logfile the queries that are going to be executed moments later. He parses the queries and constructs new select queries that populate the cache with the data that speeds up the upcoming writes. He claims, if I remember correctly, a three to four times speed-increase.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. The master can write transactions in parallel but slaves can only write them in series. [1]

This means you have a lot of optimizations on the master (TCQ and NCQ being examples) that aren’t possible on the slave.

What this patch would do is precache the data so it’s already available in memory. Since you’re pre-reading the binary log you can run SELECTs in parallel on the SLAVEs so that the cache is …

Red Hat Exchange went live minutes ago. We at Zmanda are thrilled to be one of the RHX launch partners: Alfresco, CentricCRM, Compiere, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Jive, MySQL, Pentaho, Scalix, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda. Congratulations to Matt Mattox and rest of RHX team at Red Hat.

Eben talks at length of the modern Memory Palace and how on-line email and photo services have the potential to undermine our privacy and freedoms.

Here are the links….

Download and direct play

Matt’s post on managing the ‘No Open Source’ clause cites stats from the recent Forrester report that shows a perniciously high percentage of respondents are concerned with ‘legal liabilities for copyright and patent infringement” (43% if I read the data properly), and how a dual license strategy takes this issue off the table.

That all makes perfect sense.

But what if the reason dual license open source companies like mySQL are successful is because Enterprises overstate the real risk of using open source software!

Wouldn’t that be ironic: As Enterprises gain awareness and sophistication about open source licensing issues and IP, they become …

We’ve been doing a lot of performance analysis of MySQL and SATA disks over the last few days and I wanted to get some thoughts out in the open to see what you guys thought.

Now that Debian Etch is out we’re seriously looking at making the jump to a full 64bit OS with 8G of memory on each of our boxes.

This also involves benchmarking SATA and potentially migrating away from MyISAM which, while very trusty, is seriously showing its age for us.

First off is raw IO tuning.

XFS benchmarks show about a 20% performance boost from bonnie++ over ext3. This is pretty obvious. Tuning readahead with ‘blockdev’ didn’t seem to help performance much. SATA seems pretty tuned when compared to hdparm and IDE drives.

After fully tuning it seems we can get about 90MBps out or our disks. Not to shabby. The Linux md driver on RAID 0 didn’t seem to boost IO performance much (and I’m pretty disappointed). Even …