From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, …

On Monday this week I attended the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague.  The summit which just ended today, was intended to drive plans and decisions for the next Ubuntu release "Intrepid Ibex" which is due out on October 30th.  (Check out the reports from the summit here.)

Mark welcomes the masses while Jono scans the crowd for hecklers.

Sun had about 12 folks there representing GlassFish, Open JDK, NetBeans, Hudson, …

I just got around to reading Stephen O’Grady’s post on the relative openness of open source vendors and realized I had failed to be as clear as I could have been in my original post on the subject.

Responding to my note about Milking the GNU’s suggestion that a new independent organization could be formed to judge vendors on their level of openness, Stephen wrote:

“Those in the industry that might care have, I would argue, already formed their opinions on whether or not a project such as MySQL?s is or is not open source. And those outside the industry, well, I don?t expect they?d care. At all. Most of the enterprises I speak with are …

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This variable changes the way InnoDB open files and flush data to disk and is should be considered as very important for InnoDB performance. By default, InnoDB uses …

There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

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This option, currently available only for Linux, if set enables the usage of large pages by MySQL. Many operating systems/system architectures support optional memory pages bigger than the default size (4 KB). Usually the large page size is 2 MB, this …

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

The 451 Group’s Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service now has a podcast (iTunes or RSS feed).

A month or so ago, I was having a conversation with The 451 Group’s Vice President of Research Services, Simon Carruthers, about ways to expand the offerings of the CAOS Research Service. The CAOS Research Service includes aspects that are public (such as this blog), but the majority of the work that we do is accessible only to our paying clients, namely our research articles and reports, as well as our advisory service.

We made the decision to add a biweekly conference call …

As you probably know, or at least heard, we are currently porting Workbench to Linux. Generally speaking the porting process is split in several stages. The first one is to compile non-GUI Back-End which represents about 80% of the total application code. The next stage is to ensure that unit-tests are run correctly for the ported stuff. The third is to create user interface and to bind it to the back-end/core. After that we will have alpha version of Workbench for Linux.
Regarding tests, actually a portion of unit-tests are already passed. These are 121 of 122 going well. At the moment we are working on non-GUI back-end, and core part is compiled and run, so now the modules and plugins are in progress. I must admit that process of porting is pretty smooth, most of the code has already been prepared with Linux/OS X ports in mind. I will be posting our progress on the porting efforts frequently, please keep checking our blog.

As promised, after individual presentations at last week's CommunityOne I brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel.  (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!)

Although the panel itself wasn't recorded, immediately after it concluded, the five of us headed to the make-shift podcast studio we had set up at the event …