Marten Mickos joins Eucalyptus. Novell rejects Elliot. Perspectives on OSBC. And more.

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

# Mårten Mickos was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

# Novell’s board rejected Elliot’s takeover proposal as inadequate, will review other alternatives.

# North Bridge Venture Partners published the results of its Future of Open Source survey.

# Rob Bearden was appointed executive chairman of the board of Pentaho.

# The Eclipse Foundation …

The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

1. It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
2. He starts of the series with Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on …

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting …

The aims of this kind of blog post is simple – I want to help keep the masses informed as to what’s happening with MariaDB, as a whole. There is a community growing, and MariaDB is a community project, not necessarily a Monty Program Ab baby (and we’re clear on this distinction: think of it like Canonical/Ubuntu). So, think of it as such that I’m sharing the good news, and summarising what’s been happening, to save you time.

MariaDB added to the Debian/Ubuntu wishlists
One of MariaDB’s goals is that it should be easily available for download. While we provide binaries and source at the MariaDB download page, we would love to see the binaries sitting in Linux distributions. So it is definitely good to see that it is on …

Topics for this podcast:

*Jacobsen v. Katzer and open source impact
*Intel, Nokia team up for MeeGo open source OS
*Open source continues in embedded space
*MongoDB and the advent of the NoSQL databases
*Copyrights, complexities, control and conflict

iTunes or direct download (21:48, 6.07 MB)

It is conference time for me. I just came home from FOSDEM 2010 where we had a booth and I gave a talk. At the end of the month there will be a company meeting in Iceland for Monty Program, followed by Open Source Days 2010 where I will also be speaking. And then in April there is the MySQL User Conference. With two additional talks given at local user groups end of last year, I think I've about filled my quota for now, I feel quite fortunate that it turned out that I will not also be presenting at the UC! (I do not have a natural talent for speaking, and tend to need to spend quite a lot of time in preparations.)

Having a booth at FOSDEM turned out really well I think, as I got to talk to a lot of different people that passed by the booth. I also had a very nice …

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.1.42, a new branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. We are very proud to have made our first final release, and we encourage you to test it out and use it on your systems.

For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.42, please check out the release notes.

For information on installing MariaDB 5.1.42 on new servers or upgrading to MariaDB 5.1.42 from previous releases, please check out the installation guide.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form for a variety of platforms and is available from the …

A few days back MariaDB announced their first GA release (see Released: MariaDB 5.1.42), so it is time to start testing it and there is not better way to test any MySQL version in a control environment other than MySQL Sandbox. However Sandbox relies on the fact that the tarball and tarball target directory are prefixed with mysql, which is not true with MariaDB. So here are the 2 tricks I had to use to make it work out of the box.

These steps are explained to create a single sandbox, the tips can be extrapolated to any other configuration. Also, I am trying to avoid renaming any files and/or directories as to leave the packages as close to the original as possible.
Step 1: Use A Symlink For The TarballThe make_sandbox script will then …

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS. The UK’s updated OSS strategy. And more.

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

Oracle’s plans for Sun’s OSS
# Oracle’s MySQL strategy slide.

# eWeek reported that database thought leaders are divided on Oracle MySQL.

# Savio Rodrigues and Computerworld on Oracle’s plans for MySQL, other open source assets.

# Zack Urlocker is leaving Oracle/Sun/MySQL.

At DrupalSouth 2010 (Wellington) after LCA2010, Peter and I implemented a Drupal module as a practical example of how the OQGRAPH engine can be used to enable social networking trickery in any website. The friendlist_graph module (available from GitHub) extends friendlist, which implements basic functionality of friends (2-way) and fans (1-way) for Drupal users.

The friendlist_graph module transposes the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal Views, it allows you to play Six …