I’m headed to Thailand in September (along with my friend and MySQL colleague Morgan) for an extended working holiday. It’ll be my third time there, and each time I visit, I fall more in love with the place. The culture is fascinating, the food is marvelous, and the people are some of the nicest I’ve met anywhere.

Since we’re planning to be there for a while, we figure that we can take a little time out from work and play to do some Open Source evangelising and networking. We’ve already contacted Open Source Thailand about the possibility of participating in any events they’ve got planned for Software Freedom Day. (Actually, Morgan got the ball rolling on that.)

However, we’re not limited to that particular event. Either one of …

Read a NewsForge article today about how the two lead developers of the GPU Gnutella client have amended the GPL to include a provision that bans the software's use by military organizations. Specifically, provision states:

the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.

Interestingly, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, doesn't think distributors have the right to restrict the software user's activities by restricting the software's use in this way, though he said "Nonetheless, I don't think the requirement is entirely vacuous, so we cannot disregard it as legally void." It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, as it has further-ranging …

MySQL meetings
The first MySQL UG meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria is in history now. You can see some very interesting pictures by clicking here

Slides

The slides about MySQL Falcon(JSTAR) are available here (*.odp in bulgarian)

OpenSource
Let’s spread the world about Balkan’s initiatives about open source and/or Free Software. Yeah, that’s my job ;)) I already wrote couple of times about OpenFest in Bulgaria. Now it’s time for Romania.

Romanian Open Source and Free Software Initiative (ROSI) is growing up faster and faster every day. That is extremely …

Should you want to be on the bleeding edge, or in my case, don’t want to download 70MB each day in a daily snapshot (especially when I’m getting build errors), you can use Bit Keeper Free Bit Keeper Client that at least lets you download the MySQL Repository. This client doesn’t allow commits, which is a good thing for those non-gurus in mysql internals (which definitely includes me).

wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client.shar
/bin/sh bk-client.shar
cd bk_client-1.1
make

By placing sfioball in your path you can execute.

sfioball bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.1 mysql-5.1

This took me about 4 mins, which seemed much quicker then getting a snapshot!

You can then get cracking with my instructions at Compiling MySQL Tutorial 1 - The Baseline.

A good reference …

Gary Edwards (Open Document Foundation) and I were talking yesterday, and he mentioned the NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) Conference coming up. I checked out last year's conference and found an interesting set of slides from an open source session they held.

From the slides, some useful data on why state governments are buying into open source. (Note: The survey was to CIO-level IT people within state governments. Pretty credible data, especially since NASCIO gets 350-450 senior government IT folks out to its annual conference, and restricts the survey (unless I'm reading the site wrong) to the most senior IT officials).

Anyway, why are state CIOs buying into open source? Well, for one thing, because it costs less. But also because it works better:

…

Pre-requisites

This tutorial is aimed at Linux installations that has the standard development tools already installed. The INSTALL file in the source archives provides good details of the software required (e.g. gunzip, gcc 2.95.2+,make).

Create a separate user for this development work.

su -
useradd mysqldev
su - mysqldev

Get an appropiate Snapshot

You can view recent snapshots at http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots/mysql-5.1/.

The official statement on snapshots from MySQL AB.
Daily snapshot sources are only published, if they compiled successfully (using the BUILD/compile-pentium-debug-max script) and passed the test suite (using make test). If the source tree snapshot fails to compile or does not pass the test suite, the source tarball will not be published.

At the time of producing …

Marten Mickos was kind enough to ping me about my post on whether open source companies can exceed the $1 billion speed limit our (alleged) business models impose. With his permission, I've posted in some of his thoughts below, which are cogent and a bit more thoughtful than my off-the-cuff tirade. :-)

(Stephen O'Grady, btw, now has a great response to my (and others') critique of his original premise (that we're not going to see an open source company hit the $1 billion in sales mark any time soon). You should read it.)

Marten writes:

If you read " …

Stephen O'Grady apparently spent last week at the wrong conference. He came away from OSCON wondering if open source companies can ever reach the $1 billion mark in sales. He writes:

As stated at OSCON, I believe both that open source has reached and in fact passed the tipping point and is here to stay, and that it has a bright future. At this point, however, I do not expect any of the major pure open source firms to challenge the billion dollar threshold any time soon. The numbers - those that are available, at least - simply don't support such a conclusion. But neither do I consider that a metric for success.What's interesting to me is that the very same numbers - at least, I assume we have access to the same data - tell me a very different story. Red Hat will hit the $1B mark in 3-5 years, and will likely do so without seriously tapping into …

Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more …

Earlier this week I delivered a presentation at OSCON 2006 entitled "Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses." I've been involved with commercial open source since 1998, and have learned a lot over the years (including how to fail spectacularly and slightly more gracefully). I'm in the middle of a string of successes, though, and figured now was the time to pretend to know-it-all. You can view my OSCON 2006 presentation here. It was an extension of some JBoss analysis I did recently, as well as an attempt to pass on some of the lessons I've learned so that the next round of open source …